By Ian Morgan Cron

The original Creative Arts Pastor was St Francis of Assisi. Historians credit this twelfth century saint with writing and directing the first Nativity play. On the day before Christmas in 1223, Francis told the citizens of a small village called Greccio that he wanted to do something special to celebrate Jesus’ birth—he would hold a Christmas Mass outdoors. Despite the fact that this was the Middle Ages and people were regularly burned at the stake for this sort of thing the townspeople jumped into high gear clearing the site, while the local candle makers started making altar candles. Then Francis got another idea: they would re-create a manger scene, complete with live oxen and donkey. Now the farmers ran off, arguing about whose livestock would star in the celebration. Then Francis walked around the village, picking a few of the locals to play the parts of Mary, Joseph, the shepherds, the angels and the Magi. That night, when everything was ready, the entire town turned out. The evening was lit with candles and torches. The people sang matins and watched as the Nativity was reenacted right before their eyes. Francis sang the gospel reading and preached with so much passion about the miracle of God’s willingness to visit us as an infant that some said they actually saw the baby doll’s eyes open. For one night, he transformed Greccio into Bethlehem.

So what inspired St Francis to stage the first recorded live crèche? He knew that people would come to church dreading the inevitable. Every year they heard the story of Jesus’ birth told in a dispassionate drone followed by an equally lifeless homily. So Francis did what any self-respecting Creative Arts Pastor would do--he snuck past the fortified front door of his congregation’s intellectual cynicism and smuggled the Christmas story in through the back door of their unsuspecting imaginations. He plunged them into an experience of the Incarnation that pulled the rug out from under their skepticism. Francis reawakened their somnolent capacity for astonishment, arresting them with the story of God invading human history in the form of a child. I have known many Creative Arts Pastors over the years and most have more than a little of St Francis’ blood coursing through their veins. They are in love with Jesus and their enthusiasm to do something beautiful and surprising for God is infectious. Like Francis they live to tell the old story in a new way.

There is, however, one thing that worries me about my friends who have given their lives to fulfilling this unique vocation, and my concern for them reaches a crescendo in the Christmas season. In the manic mayhem of their preparations for Christmas services their souls become depleted, and they forget the nobility of their call.

In 1993 Pope John Paul II wrote a sublimely inspiring letter to the artists of the world. Pope John Paul was an accomplished actor and playwright, so his words come from a deep place of solidarity with the artistic community. I think artists of faith should read this document several times a year, particularly when their stress levels are running hot. Whenever I read it I feel a renewed sense of clarity and joy about my call as an artist.

In order to communicate the message entrusted to her by Christ, the Church needs art. Art must make perceptible, and as far as possible attractive, the world of the spirit, of the invisible, of God. It must therefore translate into meaningful terms that which is in itself ineffable. Art has a unique capacity to take one or other facet of the message and translate it into colours, shapes and sounds which nourish the intuition of those who look or listen. It does so without emptying the message itself of its transcendent value and its aura of mystery.

The Church has need especially of those who can do this on the literary and figurative level, using the endless possibilities of images and their symbolic force. Christ himself made extensive use of images in his preaching, fully in keeping with his willingness to become, in the Incarnation, the icon of the unseen God.

The Church also needs musicians. How many sacred works have been composed through the centuries by people deeply imbued with the sense of the mystery…In song, faith is experienced as vibrant joy, love, and confident expectation of the saving intervention of God.

On the threshold of the Third Millennium, my hope for all of you who are artists is that you will have an especially intense experience of creative inspiration. May the beauty which you pass on to generations still to come be such that it will stir them to wonder! Faced with the sacredness of life and of the human person, and before the marvels of the universe, wonder is the only appropriate attitude….

People of today and tomorrow need this enthusiasm if they are to meet and master the crucial challenges which stand before us. Thanks to this enthusiasm, humanity, every time it loses its way, will be able to lift itself up and set out again on the right path. In this sense it has been said with profound insight that “beauty will save the world”.

Beauty is a key to the mystery and a call to transcendence. It is an invitation to savor life and to dream of the future. That is why the beauty of created things can never fully satisfy. It stirs that hidden nostalgia for God which a lover of beauty like Saint Augustine could express in incomparable terms: “Late have I loved you, beauty so old and so new: late have I loved you!”

Pope John Paul ends his letter with this magnificent postscript that I hope you hear as a blessing upon you as you set out to bring Bethlehem to your respective families of faith this year.

Artists of the world, may your many different paths all lead to that infinite Ocean of beauty where wonder becomes awe, exhilaration, unspeakable joy. May you be guided and inspired by the mystery of the Risen Christ, whom the Church in these days contemplates with joy.

An ordained Anglican priest, Ian Morgan Cron serves as senior pastor and founder of Trinity Church in Greenwich, CT, a non-denominational community committed to social justice as well as to communicating the Christian story through the arts.

To introduce others to St. Francis, whom Cron has billed the “consummate postmodern saint,” he authored Chasing Francis: A Pilgrim’s Tale (NavPress, 2007). He is currently writing a book on contemplative spirituality.

Ian lives in Old Greenwich, CT with his wife Anne and three children Cailey, Madeleine, and Aidan.