As a young person, I loved adventure stories like those of Robert Louis Stevenson, Jules Verne, Mark Twain, and Rudyard Kipling. I also reread and even memorized parts of Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. Most often, I went back to Verne, Stevenson, and Coleridge. As I think about why those were my favorites, I realize it was partly the illustrations that drew me back. Coleridge’s Mariner had wonderful engravings by Gustave Doré. Several of Verne’s and Stevenson’s books had bookplates by the gifted artist N.C. Wyeth.

What fascinated me about Wyeth’s work was the detail and care he gave to every character. You could tell he loved his subjects. In Stevenson’s Treasure Island, whether it was Jim Hawkins’s mother weeping into her apron, or a pirate with a knife in his teeth  scrambling over a wall, or blind Pew feeling his way along the lane with a stick under the moonlight, you had the sense that Wyeth gave each person equal care in his paintings. He didn’t slight any person because they were bad characters. In fact, the way Stevenson wrote Treasure Island, the key character Long John Silver carried a noteworthy moral ambiguity. Yet neither Stevenson nor Wyeth was afraid of this.

 

Growing up, I coupled the paintings of Wyeth with something my father would often say: “There is good and beauty in everyone; find the truth in each person you meet.” Decades later, I encountered this remarkable passage by Dallas Willard:

“… [E]ven in its ruined condition, a human being is regarded by God as something immensely worth saving. Sin does not make it worthless, but only lost. And in its lostness it is still capable of great strength, dignity, heartbreaking beauty, and goodness…”[1] In the words of the Teacher in Ecclesiastes: “He has made everything beautiful in its time” (3:11).

I was formed spiritually by this value, very often seeing the heartbreaking beauty and goodness in people I would meet at work, on the sidewalk, in the grocery store, in the hospital while there for one of my many surgeries, even at church! This value became immensely important as I began to do spiritual direction. My opening perspective was that every person I met with was infinitely loved by God—that the soul of every person before me was heartbreakingly beautiful.

Join the Conversation

How have you been spiritually formed by the arts?

Is there a painting or film or musical piece that has shaped your soul in the way N.C. Wyeth’s art shaped mine?

 

Don Simpson: Don Simpson is a certified spiritual director in Colorado Springs and is senior editor at NavPress. He is coauthor with Dallas Willard of Revolution of Character (NavPress, 2005). He also participated in launching Discipleship Journal and The Small Group Letter, and was cofounder of Helmers & Howard, Publishers.

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