The Aroma of the New

Easter came early this year, sneaking into the calendar even ahead of April. To extend the season, and linger in its bright promise of resurrection, here is a guest blog post by the remarkable artist Makoto Fujimura, adapted from a commencement address he gave at Belhaven University in 2011. CNN selected it as one of the 16 greatest commencement speeches of all time. 

… I recently had the delight to see a production of Our Town by Thornton Wilder at the Barrow Street Theatre in New York City. David Cromer, the founder of the theatre, played the narrator role magnificently. On the spare, dark stage, the famed story of a small New England town was brought to life. One scene in particular stood out to me. It was when young Emily, who died giving birth, is caught somewhere between life and death, fighting to recover her memory. She is given the opportunity to move back in time to her twelfth birthday.

At this point, the stark colors of the small stage begin to change. And faintly, we in the audience begin to detect an aroma. At first, we think that it is a nearby restaurant cooking their dinner for customers. But the aroma of bacon and eggs continues to fill the theatre. The producers had a surprise in store for us. The entire back stage opens up to reveal yet another stage, filled with color and light. Real bacon and real eggs are being cooked by Emily’s mother. Emily’s memory, though fading away, is depicted as more real than the “reality” of the main stage, or even of the gravesite in which the other characters stoically sit. Before Emily returns from her vision to die, she is given, perhaps for the first time, a full experience of Reality—fully engaging our senses in the process.

What if there is a Reality behind the reality we know? What if there is a Stage behind the stage of our life? What if our “memory and desire” points to a greater Reality? What if Emily’s liminal state can be reversed from Death to Life, at least in the audience’s experience? The smell of the bacon is REAL, and poses powerful questions about the nature of reality, and the nature of art. …

In our liquid time, art needs to become the aroma of bacon and eggs. It is not the art of the novel, but the art of the familiar that awakens our memory of the core essence of our lives, to the morning of our twelfth birthdays. With all solid notions being washed away, as new fears of our days creep into our consciousness, we must insist on reminding people that there is a Stage behind the stage, a Reality behind the reality. But instead of reminding people of the cold earth, we need to awaken the deposit of what is to come. There is a banquet waiting for us beyond the veil. If all is in flux, our task is to touch the fragile earth with the promise of heaven. Create the “still point of the turning world” in the eye of the storm of life. The gospel of Jesus makes this possible.

Think of John 21. Here Jesus, in his post-resurrection glory, is cooking breakfast on the beach, and he invites his disciples to partake. Think of the fish he is cooking. Where did he get this fish? Did he simply create the fish at will? Or cause it to jump into his fire? And he is eating in his post-resurrection body. So was the fish resurrected as well? The aroma invites his incredulous disciples to partake, not only in a conversation with the resurrected Savior, but in a meal—a post-resurrection meal. The new Kingdom arrives with an aroma, the aroma of the New.

What the producers of Our Town touched, perhaps unconsciously, was a chord of realization, a hunger, that points to what is to come. The world may call this The World that Ought to Be; C.S. Lewis called it Sehnsucht, a German word that can be translated as “a longing.”

He stated in The Weight of Glory, “For they (art and music) are not the thing itself; they are only the scent of a flower we have not found, the echo of a tune we have not heard, news from a country we have never yet visited.”

I am going to go a bit further than Lewis here. I am convinced that art and music, while not the Thing itself, contain the aroma, the actual aroma, of the New. Artists, whether cognizant of Christ or not, detect this aroma. Bacon and eggs point to that reality. Therefore, you [graduates of Belhaven] have already tasted the aroma of the New. When you dance, when you play your violin, when you draw, what you see, and hear and smell and touch, it all invites you into the aroma of the New. The two worlds, the old and the New, are connected in the arts. Typically, we stop to think about such “idealistic” enchantment and dismiss it by saying something like, “Well that performance was glorious…but we must now return to reality and do something useful with our lives.” (Or to say, as a performer, seeking some sort of Utopia, “Oh, we could have done that better.”) Pragmatism will revert us, like Emily in Our Town, back to cold earth and deadened senses.

The World that Ought to be is that which is already imbedded in our senses. God’s hand touches us, even through the cold earth of death and despair, even though we are being washed away in the sea of liquid modernity. The Gospel is an aroma, the aroma of the New. And the aroma will reach us, even in the darkest despair.

Come and dance, play and paint upon your Ground Zero ashes. That is how we must now love the world. Step into the receding (cultural) waters filled with poison, but do it with faith. Then the stench of death will be replaced by the aroma of the New. The Stage behind the stage will open up, and instead of being forced to surrender to the cold earth, we will dance upon the waters, hear new sounds, and create new colors.

[Mako further develops these themes in the book Art + Faith: A Theology of Making.]