Art, Faith, & Image Journal
Tania Runyan
Like many of you earlier this month, I was shocked and saddened to read Image Journal’s announcement that the beloved magazine and its associated programs, including the Glen Workshop, would be shutting down after delivering decades of hope and community to readers, writers, musicians, and artists around the world.
When I came across Image’s tenth-anniversary issue in a Barnes & Noble in 1999, I’d been failing to navigate my “separate” worlds of faith and imagination in an authentic way. It’s a story I would share with a cadre of lifelong friends I’d meet at Glen Workshops throughout my forties. So many of us “Glennies” grew up feeling misunderstood or judged by church folk and similarly alienated by the creative folk who deemed any Jesus talk as irrelevant, or worse, bigoted.
The cover image on that 1999 issue, “Sacrificial Grace” by Makoto Fujimura, gripped me with its decided lack of grip. This abstract, color-streaked waterfall “counted” as religious art? I wanted to spin into that painting, and then the whole issue, with my arms open, allowing it to drench me with its mystery.
Likewise, in his essay “River Grace” in that same issue, Fujimura tells the story of his conversion. Without using words like “asking Jesus into my heart,” he writes about fighting faith until, through a Blake poem, “I found myself responding to Christ and his message. Quietly, and quite unexpectedly, my allegiance shifted from art to Christ. It took me a year to realize that what had happened that day was a conversion experience.”
That “counted” as conversion? It’s like my vision of God grew three sizes that day.
The author arrives at the Glen Workshop in Santa Fe, NM
Buoyed by the camaraderie I’d find in the pages of Image, I began to seek out a more integrated life. I started a poetry group at the megachurch I attended at the time, inviting writers and artists who hung out on the fringes of the sprawling campus. The group did not fit in with the church’s slick programming, leadership conferences, or visions for growth, which is why we needed it so desperately.
I would eventually become acquainted with Calvin’s Festival of Faith and Writing, discover life-changing books like Madeleine I’Engle’s Walking on Water, and encounter a number of other journals, including Relief, that would continue to dissolve the artificial divide between art and faith.
More importantly, these literary resources and relationships would empower me to just write as myself, not as a strategic witness with an agenda of providing answers and changing lives. I wrote my way around, into, and within Scripture, grappling with issues of faith and doubt in the most “me” way I could–through poetry.
I wrote in the voices of women in the Bible, refusing to shy away from difficult emotions and topics. I faced my issues with Paul head on, and even my apprehensions surrounding the book of Revelation, with lines that wouldn’t fit in most evangelical devotionals—or secular journals, for that matter. But I kept writing, anyway. And I relied on my growing community, the seeds of which germinated in that 1999 Image, to support me as I tried my best to support them.
Recently, I’ve started writing poems in the voice of Jesus. I know: who do I think I am? I’m not sure why I’ve gone in this direction, but I’m going with it, and I’m pretty sure Jesus is okay with this new project. After all, my writing process is causing me to read, think, write, and talk to him throughout the day.
These poems are strange and messy, but so am I. I have a feeling many of you get that, just like Image did decades ago.
What I Look Like
That British medical artist got pretty close:
Dusky skin, roadkill hair. Black eyes
plucked from the void they hovered over.
I was cragged and compact, a Galilean
arrowhead. Forget about sun-warmed
chestnuts spilling over robed shoulders:
I scuttled around in an undyed tunic—
hello, knees!—tallit fringes sucking up dust.
My grimy sinews lurched to the rhythms
of hammers and planes. All this to say,
I’ve still got a soft spot for Caravaggio.
He wanted so badly for me to be beautiful.
Even when I’m getting flagellated,
my cheeks exude a rose-petal glow.
I’m also partial to the portrait
you scrawled with crayons in 1981.
I’m balanced on a peak, stick arms outstretched,
a dozen burnt umber fish suspended
in the clouds. Stray-cat disciples gather
at my feet: a rainbow wreckage
of circles and triangles, a few whiskers
squiggling to the sky. I can tell that they love me.
I can tell that they are listening.
This is what I look like now.
Tania Runyan is an NEA fellow and author of the poetry collections What Will Soon Take Place, Second Sky, A Thousand Vessels, Simple Weight, and Delicious Air, which was awarded Book of the Year by the Conference on Christianity and Literature. Her first book-length creative nonfiction title, Making Peace With Paradise: An Autobiography of a California Girl, was released in 2022. Tania’s instructional guides, How to Read a Poem, How to Write a Poem, and How to Write a Form Poem, are used in classrooms across the country, and her poems have appeared in publications such as Poetry, Image, Harvard Divinity Bulletin, The Christian Century, Relief, and the Paraclete anthology Christian Poetry in America Since 1940. She lives with her family in Illinois, where she works in educational publishing.
Her piece “In Search of Earthquake Kate” appears in Relief’s Fall 2023 issue.