What is art?

Many people have asked and will continue to ask. What is art? And there are a lot of nuanced and interesting answers and ideas people have thought through. But my question at the end of these discussions has always been this. What is art? What is the thing that all art pours out from?

Art, in its complete and simple fullness, is concentrated at the cross. Where the blurry lines of symbolisms and syllogisms go to hell. The death of all things condensed and materialized into a single person, like me and like you, nailed to a tree to die for the eternal rebinding of everything with our God. Our Yeshua. This is art. The cross, probably a gnarly looking tree, revives Abel’s blood, the first blood split that soaks in the ground of the earth. It is here, through Christ’s blood being split, becomes one with Abel’s blood, it soaks the earth and her soil, and with the cross’s dead roots, takes it up to the canopies of the heavens for all. It resurrects the dead tree, the first tree, bringing life to the earth and giving context to the cosmos. Abel is reborn. Adam is brought back to the Garden. Cain is forgiven. This cross, a vertical tree, with a horizontal plank, condemns man to all corners of the cosmos. Like Jack Kerouac’s self-condemnation as he tried chipping away at the death of our reality as he clipped across hills, mountains and seas east and west to find it. How he dove to the darkest depths of hades in Mexico to only ascend into the most ethereal heights of the Rockies. People ask? What is art? It is that. It is this monastic endeavor of being laid to rest in all things. Every mountain top and river bottom. Every flat plain and death of a friendship. Every time you choose to love someone. The cross knows all sadness and all beauty because man was never designed to walk away from his creator. We did not have to hide naked. We did not have to kill out of shame. We did not have to hide our face from God. No amount of tragedy can describe the cross. The cross is where God, in his torn flesh, and fatigue comes down to us and turns our shameful heads to Him and says “My child. You are mine. Look at me. I know your suffering. Come on home.” This is art.