Drawing in Faith with Rothko

“No one can fathom what God has done from beginning to end.”

-Ecclesiastes. 3:11

Years ago, I lived in Amsterdam, a city of quiet charm and loud bluntness. One evening, after drinks with my Dutch colleagues by the canals, I invited them back to my place for take-out. Somehow, the topic of faith came up, and each shared their experience. Most had grown up Dutch Calvinist, a faith that shaped Dutch culture towards hard work, thrift, and communal duty. Yet they carried negative connotations with the Church: “My dad took us camping in the rain because he wanted us to experience misery,” my friend Sjoert recalled. I realized their stories echo many Americans who attended church but struggled to find love or belonging there.

I grew up around Southern Evangelicals, where “sharing your faith” with colleagues is both a duty and what you’re supposed to dream of. But I was never the type who had this passion for sharing. Pew surveys show a sharp decline in Americans identifying as Christians from 80% in 2007 to 60% today, and even most believers agree the public perception is worsening. What role should faith play in modern life? And how do you convey that belief authentically? As a creative professional, I know how important it is for a message to land, and that night in Amsterdam, I was anxious about how I would explain my own Christian story.

When my colleague René finally asked, the words arrived as if by divine intervention and spoke like an artist. I found myself comparing my experience with God as with Rothko: to love his paintings, you have to experience them. You have to walk up to them — uncomfortably close. Only then can you hear the sounds paint makes or feel the colors wash over you. You could analyze the pigments, but it wouldn’t help you understand the mystery.

In American Christianity, there’s a tradition called the “altar call,” where a minister invites people to step forward if they feel God’s presence for the first time. That initial step of faith is often a literal one. Despite uncertainty and discomfort, people walk forward because they know they need change. It’s a gesture of reverence, acknowledging mystery without dissecting it. Faith, like art, is about bearing witness, not claiming certainty. And that’s why the reverence I’ve found in Rothko comes closest to explaining a faith worth sharing.

Understanding God is like experiencing a Rothko: to love his painting, you have to experience them.

Change Happens with Perspective

Just as a Rothko painting shifts as you move closer, my faith has evolved with movement, both literal and figurative. Leaving my conservative upbringing in Charlotte for college in the Appalachian Mountains, I encountered new people with different perspectives. My best friend there, a Yo La Tengo-loving feminist, was the first to show me (with kindness, not condemnation) that even casual words, like using “gay” as an insult, carried weight. It didn’t matter that I wasn’t trying to be hurtful. That moment changed me. I began to see that respecting someone’s experience isn’t about agreeing, but about being open enough to let their life move something in me.

In my twenties, when leaving the South for Portland, my faith began to shed the rigid cultural mold it was born in. I started a group where people could ask what they couldn’t in church. Though wasn’t the point of the Church to “seek and you will find; knock and the door will be opened to you”?

I remember one night arguing with God after a party as I walked my bike with a flat tire home. My friend Jay had just gone through a painful divorce and told me he had lost his faith in God because if God couldn’t save his marriage, God probably couldn’t save him. As I walked, his words stayed with me, and something in me boiled over. I told God that if Jay couldn’t go to heaven, I didn’t want to be there either. I thundered and quaked, and then, “after the earthquake, a fire, but the Lord was not in the fire; and after the fire, a sound of sheer silence.” Just as Elijah heard God in the silence of the desert, I felt something in that quiet. No words, just a calm presence. My faith didn’t need a tidy resolution. I could keep walking, trusting the mystery, even not knowing where I was going.

I’ve never quite figured out where home is or where faith is taking me, but I’ve found pieces of it in every place and conversation. What first seems like an overwhelming, dark mass reveals layers of color and depth. As Brené Brown puts it, “People are hard to hate close-up. Move in.”

The same could be said of art. Like people, it rarely offers tidy conclusions. There’s beauty in both understanding and not understanding a piece. Robert Frost, when asked to explain one of his poems, reportedly responded, “What? You want me to say it worse?” My college photography professor added a good photograph should ask more questions than it answers. That idea has shaped my approach to art and faith — to provoke thought, reveal the world as it is, and embrace its contradictions. Light exposes shadows, but it also creates them. That tension doesn’t make an experience less true. Faith is stepping into something you cannot fully name, into a beauty you cannot explain, but somehow trust to be real.

This is what I love about Rothko, too. His works don’t explain, they linger. The canvases can be heavy and quiet, yet still tender. Rothko once said he admired Mozart “because Mozart was always smiling through the tears.” His paintings hold grief and beauty, presence and absence, shadow and light, all held in tension, all in balance.

One of my favorites (No. 46) features a wide ochre band between fields of black and red. From a distance, it looks like the ochre is holding the black in place, keeping it from overtaking the canvas. But if you stay with it, the ochre begins to rise, creating harmony rather than resistance. The darkness isn’t erased, it’s integrated.

It reminds me of Tolkien’s creation story, where the world is created by the richness of music. One spirit tries to sow vain discord into it, yet that darkness is woven into a greater symphony by the supreme god. That’s what great art (and great faith) can do. It doesn’t deny darkness but gives it a place to create something more whole.

The Crisis of American Christianity

The modern American Church often resists the tensions that faith inherently requires. Abstract or nuanced ideas are considered weak, and doubt is treated as a disease. Yet Kierkegaard reminds us, “Without risk, there is no faith.” Instead of stepping forward, parts of the Church seem to be digging in, more focused on preserving cultural or political influence than pursuing love. This rigidity frames faith as opposition: against questions, against change, against anything that challenges a settled worldview. By excluding, how can we extend Christ’s invitation? “Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest.” In closing down, the essential reverence is lost, and faith can feel homogeneous.

My friend James, an Anglican vicar in London, once told me some Christians see their faith as a brick structure — solid, immovable, but brittle. Remove one brick, and the whole thing collapses. Others see faith more like a trampoline — stretching, maybe risky, but capable of launching us to greater heights. When we mistake rigidity for strength, we build something too unbalanced to hold belief.

Faith was never meant to be this rigid. “The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath.” Christianity has always held paradox, “the Word became flesh and dwelt among us.” It calls believers to be born again, to move forward in mystery and openness.

These days, I’m not alone when I find myself adding a disclaimer, “I’m Christian, but not that kind of Christian.” Maybe that’s the real crisis, not that people are walking away from faith, but that there’s no longer a version that feels like an open door.

Where Can Faith Go?

The Dutch word gezellig [hu-zel-luck] captures how faith should feel. The Dutch love to say it has no translation, though they’ll offer “cozy” as a starting point. But it’s not comfort in isolation — it requires connection. At its core is hospitality and a sense of belonging, without the hidden pressure to conform.

People used to describe profound moments as “religious experiences,” but maybe religion should feel more like an artistic one. Think of Dr. King, speaking with reverent fire the night before he was assassinated. Or the film that brings tears from nowhere. Or a viral video of thousands of strangers at a concert becoming an impromptu choir. These moments are profound because they move us — together — toward something greater than ourselves.

There’s a difference between noticing beauty and being swept away by it, like standing in a river versus diving in and letting it carry you somewhere unknown. Only the latter makes you feel fully alive and come forward. Cultivating that kind of openness means being willing to sit in tension, confront hard truths, and still know you belong. As the Dutch priest Henri Nouwen wrote, “Hospitality is not to change people but to offer them space where change can take place.”

Faith, at its best, should feel like that kind of hospitality, a space where doubt isn’t dangerous, where questions enrich rather than divide. We’ve mistaken faith for certainty and reverence for rigidity. But if God is anything like a Rothko painting, She’s not found in the easy or already-decided answers. He’s in the encounter, in the unknown, where light meets shadow, and beauty holds both loss and redemption.

Faith is a curious act. It’s stepping closer to an unfamiliar museum piece. Or sitting with someone sharing their life’s mess. Or simply being open with coworkers over drinks. It’s becoming comfortable with discomfort. Like art, faith gives us a language to hold what can’t be explained and to be moved by it.

As for where I am with my own Christian faith? I don’t know. I’ve been lost in the dark woods of life. Some days, light filters through the canopy and I see clearly. Other days, I stumble, unsure if I’m moving forward or backward. Do I still have faith? I’d like to think so — because wandering the wilderness is better than standing still, guarding walls built from fear.

Faith might not be about finding a way out of the wilderness at all. As John O’Donohue writes, “this is not about forging a relationship with a distant God but about the realization that we are already within God.” Maybe the wilderness is the point.