The words of wisdom from Robert Shaw that I want to offer today are too extended for a single post – so today I provide part 1 and tomorrow will follow with Part 2. Both are from an address that Mr. Shaw was invited to offer in March of 1994 at Westminster School in Atlanta – but – prior to the main content I offer two tidbits from the introductory portion of his remarks:

The first makes reference to the standard response that Nola Frink provided to almost any request that was made for Mr. Shaw to speak: “The Secretary to the Music Director (Conductor Laureate) of the Atlanta Symphony has a standard response she gives to any organization rash enough to request his public discourse, ‘Mr. Shaw,’ she says, ‘only opens his mouth to change his socks.'” (399)

The second makes reference to the fact that the Shaws had a son attending Westminster at the time this address was delivered: “I have had more difficulty writing this speech than any article or statement I ever have written. I suppose part of that excuse has to be attributed to the fact that Mrs. Shaw and I have a son attending school here. I suppose it is still true that one of the reasons young people (kids) study hard or try to excel in extra-curricular activities is because they want their parents to be proud of them. Well, let me just tell you that it ‘ain’t’ nearly the pressure that wanting your children to be proud of you is – in front of their peers and friends. That’s pressure.” (399-400)

Now to the main part of this first excerpted portion of Mr. Shaw’s address:

“Well, by now most of us have seen ‘Schindler’s List,’ which celebrates in a magnificent manner how one man saved 1,000 Jews from extinction in the gas chambers and ovens of Hitler’s concentration camps. But 6 million were killed by a nation of predominantly Lutheran and Catholic Christians. Undoubtedly, there were heroes among these Christians. One remembers that Pastor Niemueller spent two years at Dachau – and survivedd.

But Pastor Dietrich Bonhoffer was hanged just 30 days before the Armistice – when it was clear that the was was over – because he stood against the Nazi holocaust and was said to have heard of a plot against Hitler’s life.

What shall we say of the Christians who shell the Muslims in Sarajevo? Or the Protestants who blew up Catholic children in Ireland? Or of a Jew who machine-guns Moslems at worship in a cave in Hebron?

Were the Ancestor-Worshippers who bombed Pearl Harbor less or more humane than the Christians who ushered in atomic warfare at Hiroshima?

What about those churches in the Southern United States who started ‘Christian’ Academies when it became clear that their Sunday-School kids might have to go to Monday-School with kids whose black wouldn’t wash-off?

Historically, the Muslims had until the year 1100 a flourishing scence of mathematics and medicine far ahead of Christian Western Europe, when it was abruptly stopped by the Sunna – the ruling council – because scientific thought led to ‘loss of belief in the Origin of the World and in the Creator.’ What might our world be today had their sciences and mathematics and medicine been encouraged rather than stifled?

Aristarchus in the third century B.C. already had figured the earth was a revolving sphere around the sun. His near contemporary Eratosthenes had calculated the circumference of the earth within 240 miles – and Hipparchus had reckoned within a few miles both the circumference of the moon and its mean distance from the earth. (This was 17 centuries before Copernicus.)

Joseph Campbell asks, ‘What might have been the saving in human terms (people burned at the stake) for instance, and where might now be the exploration of space had the Christian emperor Justinian not stepped in and closed all Greek and Roman schools whose teachers were not 100% Christian and who refused to teach the Hebrew Genesis story of Creation (itself an embarrassment because it introduces in verse 8 of Chapter Two a story of Man’s Creation diametrically opposed to the narrative of Chapter One).’

Where might the position of women be had not Judaism and Christiaity made them bear the guilt of the events in the Garden of Eden? What kind of Schizophrenia is induced by holding up the Virgin Mary as (1) the model of Virtuous Womanhood, and (2) instructing girls to bear lots of children.

And, perhaps most subversive of all, what has been the frightful cost in wars and personal human misery of the Judiastic concept of the ‘Chosen People’ as it blended into Christian cocksureness and missionizing insolence?

Might not the arts, indeed, be not the luxury fo a few, but the last best hope of humanity to inhabit with joy this planet?

What is it in the nature of the arts that allows them to offer these hopes of maturity and survival?

In the first place it is clear that a commitment to the creative process starts the human animal on a thorny and lonesome road to self-discovery, away from the comforts and compromises of institutions. ‘Forty days and forty nights’ is a biblical metaphor for what is more nearly a lifetime of wilderness and solitude. But the more deeply this lonely human being seeks a self-hood, the more knowingly and tenderly she – or he – returns to – other selves.

In the second place, the arts are concerned not with the consumption or sale of earth’s material wonders – not even with their recycling – but with their reincarnation. They propose not a mounting monopoly of a monetary medium of exchange, but the sweet, quiet exchange of truth and beauty themselves.

And in the third place, in a time and a society whose values are geared to the biggest, the fastest, and the mostest, whose gaze is fixed desperately upon the future – as far at least as the next elecion or life after death or prosperity, whichever should happen to come first – the arts offer an historical perspective. For their concern is with originality – meaning that which has origins. Thus the arts lead us to consider and build upon our own beginnings – our essence and our potential.

The Arts, then, are not merely ‘handmaidens’ of worship, but, given creativity on the order of a Brahms Requiem, a Stravinsky Symphony of Psalms, or a Bach St. Matthew Passion, they are themselves unqualified and unique acts of worship.

This, of course, raises the question of ‘quality.’ It seems to me that we have to agree that in the worship of the Great Whoever or Whatever only our very best is ‘good enough’ – only because it’s our best. A God of Truth, Goodness, and Mercy is not honored by laying Saturday Night’s Disco Spin-offs on Sunday’s altar. One does not gain strength from the stress of virtue by gorging on fatty fraud.” (408-409)

My friends – that is a powerful prophetic beginning vision of the arts – and – I respectfully request that you make a point to return tomorrow for the concluding second portion of Mr. Shaw’s prophetic words.

*The Robert Shaw Reader. Edited by Robert Blocker. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004.