Foreshortening the Lord
My middle daughter S. and I love “Draw Squad,” Mark Kistler's TV show for kids. Last Christmas, I bought two copies of his book on drawing - one for her and one for me. I keep mine at the church. Sometimes I take a break from my sermon work, pull out Mark’s book, and draw for awhile.
Now that I have a few lessons under my belt, I can draw tables, spinach cans, and a very nice cork in a bottle.
As Kistler will tell you, the secret to drawing is learning to create the illusion of depth on a two-dimensional surface. The trick is called foreshortening, which is drawing things wrong so they will look right.
To draw cubes and cylinders, you don't draw squares and circles. You draw parallelograms and ovals. If you want to draw parallel lines, you don't draw parallel lines. You draw lines converging at a vanishing point on your horizon.
Good drawing is wrestling the world down into our limited point of view, and then forcing that point of view onto a piece of paper that is one dimension shy of reality. You foreshorten; you work your vanishing point; you shade with the side of your pencil and smudge a gradient.
The first time you draw something with depth, you say to yourself, “Yes, this IS how I see the world. Circles look like ovals. Parallel lines meet on the horizon. Things are distorted, bluish in the distance and covered with dark patches of shadow.”
No wonder I've been so confused. I can't see for shit!
Interesting that I like to draw at church. Interesting that I'm learning about foreshortening in the place where I do theology. Interesting, I say.
This week I took Kistler's book and put it in the theology section of my library. There is a row of very dignified looking books, and suddenly Kistler, grinning and holding a purple crayon. It seemed right and good to me that he should be there.
Theology is wrestling God down into our limited point of view, and then forcing that point of view into a language that is lacking a handful of essential God dimensions.
What is theology if not a magnificent foreshortening? We are trying to create a depth that is utterly beyond us. Unable to see God clearly, we fumble at crude approximations. We speak in paradoxes. We say things that cannot be in an attempt to describe the One who must be, the One who IS be.
When Moses asked God what his name was, God thought for a moment and said, “I AM. Tell them I AM sent you.”
Behold the first foreshortening of God, and perhaps the first real theology. It was certainly an ontological moment for all concerned.
When you read good theology you say to yourself, “Yes, this IS how I see God. Distorted is HE and held at a distance is HE. Covered is HE, with shadowy patches of mystery.”
In the year 325, punch-drunk pilgrims in Nice, trying to describe the mystery of the Trinity, said that Jesus was “the only-begotten Son of God, begotten of the Father before all worlds; God of God, Light of Light, very God of very God; begotten, not made, being of one substance with the Father, by whom all things were made.”
I don't know what all that means, exactly, but you can tell they were pushing the envelope of language, shading and shortening and suggesting. They were writing God down to the place where mortals wait with arms stretched above their heads.
If Mark Kistler had been in Nice back then, he would have grabbed his pencil and abandoned theology in favor of theography. He would have drawn God down - the gospel according to Mark’s pencil.
Maybe Mark Kistler would have drawn God as three parallel lines. Working his flat medium, he would convince us of depth. He would use paradox to draw God down a dimension or two. This Trinity of lines that never touch would somehow touch at one glorious vanishing point on a distant horizon. Behold, the three are one and yet are not.
Very God of very God. The Trinity as Koan.
I wish Mark had been there, or someone like him. Perhaps we wouldn’t have fought as much if we had theography as well as theology. God words have too often been fighting words.
Theography might have led us to silence and humility. Lingering over our God pictures, we might have been reminded that anything we say or draw about God will always be a foreshortened distortion, a hint at best.
If we had drawn God down along with writing God down, it might have been easier to remain in a posture of worship, held rapt by the hint of a terrible, heavenly depth of being, captured in a wondrous foreshortening of the Lord.
The Preacher
7:53:07 AM 
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