“Do not muzzle the ox while it is treading out the grain.” (Deut. 24:4) This is an actual law from the ancient Jewish legal code prescribed in chapters 12 to 26 of the Old testament book of Deuteronomy. If God cares enough about an ox to enact a law forbidding its exploitation, then how much more diligent should we be to ensure that humans are never exploited for their work?
The preceding may call to mind the exploitation of workers, young and old, that was rampant in the wake of the industrial revolution. There is something intrinsically wrong with demanding so much from a worker and giving little or nothing in return. My heart goes out to millennials in this respect. They are being asked to provide the social security of baby-boomer retirees whom, by their sheer numbers, threaten to drain the entire system, leaving nothing for successive diminishing generations. For decades the dummy-rigged throttles of this train wreck have barreled toward completion. Once again, asking so much with the prospect of so little in return. In what they perceive as creative necessity, millennials showcase their “life hacks” as ways to beat the system by getting more for less or even nothing.
And so, the cycle repeats.
Enter the artist; that misunderstood and maligned figure, often lone figure, who paints, writes, sews, performs. Now God, in His wisdom, created some who can build municipal infrastructure, like my amazing daughter-in-law who is a civil engineer. Then also in His wisdom and, perhaps His humor, made others who write, sing, paint about those who build, heal, calculate.
Both Jesus (Mt. 10:10) and the Apostle Paul (1 Tim. 5:18) stated that a worker is worth a reasonable market compensation for their work. The connotation is not opulence but a living wage that provides the next meal, the next night’s sleep beneath a roof, and on and on, day by day. For some reason though, many have it in their heads that music, art, plays, should always be free; performed while we’re eating, drinking, walking by – for our enjoyment with the thought of compensation listed just below the proverbial request to “jump off a cliff.”
In Oklahoma City’s National Cowboy and Western Heritage Museum, there hangs a painting, well, not just a painting but a gigantic masterpiece, by the Later Hudson River School artist, Albert Bierstadt. This work, doubling as a piece of historic data entitled, “Moving West: Emigrants Crossing the Plains”, depicts prairie schooners following one another over the horizon into a dusty western sunset. If you look closely at the foreground of the painting, details start to emerge: books, paintings, ancestral portraits, decorative trinkets even an ornate cast iron stove – all abandoned on the way to a new life.
So, we come by it honestly; this chunk of our psyche that says, “jettison all adornment beyond our fingertips, noses, ears, hair.” After all, what would you do on the frontier with a rickety chair from the old country, albeit beautifully hand carved by your mother’s grandfather? And what use would there be for an exhaustive concordance of your family’s creative history imbedded in a place you chose to leave behind? Although the settlers’ era is bygone, we still operate out of an unconscious default of sacrificing the now to ransom something future. Uhm, hey – the pioneer parade is over!
Now that the frontier is settled, be that person who wanders back along the trail to recover some of what was cast aside on our quest for new horizons. We are our own “old country” now. Try creating a legacy that would be worthy of delivery to another land and even make it as far as the edge of a frontier; dumped only when it absolutely had to be left behind to leverage the prospect of a brand-new start.
“Why do we need art? Why do we need the lyric poetry and psalms? Because the only way we can approach God is, if we’re honest, through metaphor, through symbol so, art becomes essential, not decorative.”
– Bono, U2
