How does your faith shape your art, and how does your music shape your faith?

I like the contrast of that question … because people don’t often think about that. They think about how their faith shapes their music, but they don’t think about it the other way around. One of the things that happened as I began to walk as a Christian, was that I really understood the sacramental point of view of life … [but] I didn’t have the vocabulary for it at the time. I ended up in an Anglican church eventually, which did have a vocabulary for it. And I learned a lot there … The idea that the world is charged with the grandeur of God … that wherever we look, we see evidence of him. A lot of people understand how that works in nature, but don’t understand necessarily as well, how that works through the works of art that man has created, [and] how that work is charged with the glory of God as well. I see him at work in a thousand men’s faces, to use Hopkins’ line, and in their works. And sometimes you see it in the works of composers who were avowedly not Christian or were avowedly atheist or agnostic. Their works speak louder than their words sometimes, and you actually hear the “stones crying out” (Luke 19:40) when you listen to their music and you realize that God has inhabited this in some way …  I think there’s an interplay between my music and my faith in a way that goes both ways. Setting a psalm to music is the best Bible study I’ve ever done … There is some kind of core within yourself or that indwells you, that helps you sift, almost like spiritual discernment, through your [musical] ideas to try and find the proper idea for that line of sacred text. And I think that’s an exercise that is something to be thankful for as a composer, that we have the privilege of doing that.

What’s your advice to Christians working in the arts?

There was an interesting observation in the book [The Narnian] that Alan Jacobs wrote about C. S. Lewis … He was talking about how Lewis didn’t take the Christian ideas that he was trying to incarnate in a novel form and find ways of sticking them into characters. He had ideas that occurred to him that were story ideas completely apart from theology … Lewis didn’t even plan on Aslan at the beginning, but he said at some point this lion bounded into the picture and he could never get it out. In other words, he was true to the story and to the characters. The thing that is encouraging about that for a Christian, is that … you have to dip the bucket down deep into the dark lake within you. And that can be scary because it’s murky. It’s dark, and sometimes it doesn’t look like your church’s statement of faith. But if you are a Christian, your confidence is that God promises to indwell you. So that whatever you pull up in that bucket, he’s in it also. He’s promised that he’s at the very core of you. That’s where he lives. So, if you trust that promise, whatever you dip that bucket down into and pull up, you’re going to find him there somehow somewhere. So, if you write what you love, that too will come out.