Beauty Glimpsed, or If You Get Everybody Making Art,
Something Good Is Bound To Come Out Of It
Brian Fee

There are a lot of ways
Since Jesus left, and left us with the Holy Spirit, the means by which God may be experienced by his people has been of remarkable variety-a rather wonderfully fitting course for an all-powerful and creative Lord. A modest listing of such means might include scripture, prophetic words, healings, visions, musical compositions, teachings, and even the still, small voice. Yet Christians have, over time, shown a curious tendency to narrow this wide variety of ways to encounter God. The clearest example of this has been how, particularly since the Reformation, the written and spoken word has superceded and devalued other forms. As pointed out by David Brown, talking about art:

My purpose here is not to criticize or even lament the ascendance of words in Christian worship. [2] On the other hand, the undervaluation and neglect of certain pathways to God, given to us by Him, is lamentable. My goal is to help reacquaint us to art in particular among these overlooked channels, to remind us of what wealth is to be found there, and to suggest what may be done to recover it.

Mystery is not a bad thing
Perhaps the root of this over-emphasis on words is that people want very much to understand God, rather than just meet or experience Him. There is a famous paradox here:  to deeply understand God is to realize that he is, by definition, incomprehensible. "How unsearchable are his judgments, and his paths beyond tracing out," Paul says.  Job, for one, thought he understood God. Though considered by mortals and immortals alike to be a man of unsurpassed righteousness, he nonetheless had to endure tremendous physical suffering before realizing the arrogance of such an assumption. In one of the most beautiful passages in scripture, Job finally responds: "Surely I spoke of things I did not understand, things too wonderful for me to know . . .  My ears had heard of you but now my eyes have seen you." Yet this mysterious, unknowable side of God, which, being his greatest attribute might be sought more vigorously than all others, is often casually, quietly put aside because it may cloud or question our rational understanding of him. Pursuing an unknowable God is a wondrous, beautiful thing. It is also a bit daunting and very difficult to live by. Our everyday intercourse includes incomprehensible, impossible ideas: about eternity, omnipotence, resurrection, trinity-even faith-because they are part of our religious identity, our beliefs. But our every-day reality is a sub-culture that is intensely focused on evangelism, community, and moral behavior, because these are the things our intellect can understand and act upon.

The greatest commandment, the singular priority of the Christian life, is to love God. Yet how can we love God except that by the Spirit we know Him?  Reading, hearing, and speaking of God are ways to know Him-in part.  Sharing the gospel, living as the body of Christ, and seeking righteousness are ways to love God in part. But what about seeking God's beauty? This is the One Thing the Psalmist desires in Psalm 19. Seeking the whole person of God, basking in his unfathomable, mysterious ways of love and grace, stumbling faithfully into his infinite creation and capacity to create, this is the fuller joy that Job eventually found. "Reason's last step," says Pascal, "is the recognition that there are an infinite number of things which are beyond it." Words instruct and describe, but there is much more to be found if we are open to a wider range of experiences.

Be Sensual
How then does one go about actively encountering and experiencing the unknowable? We are invited by God to converse with him in prayer, and we have the spiritual disciplines to amplify that conversation: Slowing down, retreating to a place of quiet or beauty for meditation or reflection. Going on a fast, feeling a physical sensation of hunger or discomfort to enable one to focus on spiritual priorities. Worshiping Him in song and music and dance, sometimes with gestures of reverence or exultation. We call these, properly, "spiritual" disciplines. Yet each of these examples involves a sensual experience-that is, of the bodily senses-that leads to a greater spiritual encounter with God. "Humans do not lead their lives primarily on a verbal level; on the contrary, humans primarily exist on the level of the senses.whether they realize this or not, whether they like this or not, and whether they process this sensorial input or not."

God has made us to know Him, and God has made us sensing creatures. We see, hear, feel, smell the burning bush! This is how God shows himself. Floods and rainbows, darkness and lamb's blood, pillars of fire and ladders to heaven, water into wine and stinking corpses risen.  God himself walking, eating, crying, suffering in the sensual, carnal form known as Jesus Christ. Not heard about. Not imagined. God is constantly revealing himself through the physical. When we awaken to this, every material experience becomes incarnational, pointing to beauty of the mystery of God. The problem of dualism-the irreconcilability of spirit and matter that has confounded philosophers and theologians and everyone else for millennia-has long been "solved" by Christians who conveniently adopt a Platonist stance about the supremacy of things spiritual. But God's incarnational system is not a problem that wants solving. Instead, it is a perfect cosmic order. God is both spiritual and sensual, or neither. His material creation doesn't just point to the spiritual. Instead, with the spiritual, it points to God.

Art for Christians
Sadly, Christians are culturally predisposed to be suspicious of things sensual.  Paul's warnings on the sins of the flesh, and the reformation's corrections of "idolatrous" images and practices, among other things, have been oversimplified and misinterpreted for centuries by zealous rule-makers. The result is the depletion of sensual awareness of God, and the negation of one of the richest spiritual disciplines: art. Earlier I spoke of people awakening to the spectacle of God revealing himself in the physical world. It is the province of artists to be the first awake, and then to shake the others. Artists reveal the layers of beauty in creation: they celebrate what is known as beautiful, they uncover beauty in things too complex or too ordinary for others to readily see, they create new beauty that no one-not even themselves-has seen before. Artists excite the senses, by which we acquire knowledge without words.

All of the arts work on this carnal, experiential level, and all remain in place to some degree in current Christian worship. Music, dance, and drama  are performing, often participatory arts, in which worshipers do have a sensual experience of God, and in some sense these are omnipresent in Christian liturgy.  One especially cannot imagine worship without music; indeed, many congregations designate singing as the "worship portion" of their service. Then, at a greatly diminished level, come the visual arts: architecture, painting, sculpture, vestments, and decorative arts. [3] The key distinction here is between performing and visual arts.  Clearly performing arts are a more natural fit for public expression of praise for God. Visual arts tend to be more private, more one-on-one. It is harder, for instance, to gather communally around a painting than to participate communally in a hymn. It requires great foreknowledge and discipline to feel the effects of the worship space compared to those of a dance or a play.

Still, part of what makes visual art feel so unwieldy in worship is simply a lack of cultural value for, and therefore practice in, using these forms. Much could be said here about the tremendous beauty and effectiveness of these visual forms in worship, both historically and currently. Perhaps architecture is the oldest and clearest example. Architecture works first in the vast sculpture of a church's exterior, signaling to the world about the glory to be found within. Inside, from the play of light off of translucent glass and stone to the soaring vaulted heights, the same message is given. The sequence, by the building guides the worshiper begins always from the west, through the baptismal, eastward along the nave to the center of the cruciform floor plan, and into the word and sacraments of Christ at the altar, is clearly filled with theologically grounded symbolism.  Every proportion, every material substance, every color and sound, every open space is to the glory of God through worship. If this does not sound like the meeting/lecture hall format of most modern churches, remember that the spoken word has been primary in worship for some four centuries, and mourn for the lost beauty of the sensual experience of the spaces of  God.

Painting [4] has similar expressive and symbolic potential. A painting is an amazing vehicle of incarnational power. It is a physical object covered with physical stuff. And it is a spiritual "object" that speaks into its beholder about itself, the world, its creator, the Creator. A painting's meaning and beauty lie in both what the senses actually perceive about it, and in how it is transformed in the imagination of the perceiver into something felt. In churches it has been used to explain and instruct where words fail, to perpetuate the memory of history and tradition, and most importantly to provide symbols of God and his attributes.

Art may become the means through which we know grace in worship. Even though Art is a human construct, it may become that through which we experience the Holy.when a work of art is sacramental, or when worship uses art.to provide the possibility of a sacramental encounter, we know ourselves to be on holy ground and we know God's presence in the world. In these ways it is not only useful but essential to the life of worship.  (Wilson Yates)6

The First Life of Art
It is necessary here to return to the idea of art as a personal spiritual discipline, apart from that of a collective participatory experience. A work of art's two lives-first for its maker, then for its receiver-are often intermingled in generalizations about art, but they are really quite distinct:
For the receiver:

For the maker:

The second life of art, that of the receiver, is what most people focus on when they talk about art's contribution to worship. But it is in its first life-its formation-that art has its greatest potential for meeting God. An artist making art is experiencing an activity of God. God is never finished creating, never finished redeeming creation. God is not a tame lion, C. S. Lewis said. Among his incredible mysteries is being simultaneously in omniscient control and in limitless freedom. How is it that he can be disappointed, or angry, or pleased when he already knows what's going to happen? An artist making art gets to taste a little of this paradox. The artist is working in the context of what has been and what he plans to do, and then in freedom responds to the pull of what must happen now.

Someone said to me recently, in what first seemed like blasphemy, that there is more true beauty to be found in an artist's painting of a tree than in the tree itself. OK, I thought, it is possible to celebrate the Creator's beauty in a painting of a tree. Or even better, in uncovering some unseen strangeness about a tree to reveal a more sublime beauty. Or best of all, bringing out a personal or universal feeling evoked by trees-about nature or life or the subconscious-in some "abstract" response to a tree. Van Gogh and Caspar David Fredreich and Mondrian famously did all three. But God, the Creator, made the tree and all of its permutations and associations. It cannot be that our responses to his work are greater than his work. The answer to this is that God made people-not trees, nor anything else-in his image. We are his greatest artworks, however incomplete, and in exercising our creative nature by making the painting of the tree we become more fully realized artworks still. Thus the painting, not as a record but as an incarnation of this act, is greater. Because it's God's better work.

Ask a painter and you will hear that painting is hardly a magical experience. It is a lot of hard work, often boring, painstaking, frustrating, filled with error, unsure, ugly. No inspirational beam of light; no angel choir accompaniment. If that sounds a lot like prayer, or fasting, or meditation, that's because painting is a spiritual discipline. Yet almost always, we look back and see beautiful and amazing results, though we're not quite sure how they happened. Occasionally, like in the other spiritual disciplines, we actually get a vision, a revelation. Either way it is a miracle, a perceptible visitation of God here and now, and we are invited to participate! (The result, the artwork, is a symbol of the mystery of incarnation: a physical presence that somehow contains the power and meaning of the spiritual reality that birthed it. It lives, it speaks to different people in different ways-to some not at all-and, like a child, delights and amazes its parent most of all). This time of creating is a true place of worship. Can there be a better way to know God, and thus be able to love him than to participate in the activity that defines him?  Pope John Paul II in his letter to artists:

The main thing
Now all of this sounds very wonderful-if you're an artist. If even the "second life" of art, when it is handed over to the viewing public, is baffling for many people, how accessible really is its "first life"-its creation? (Art as the domain of the cultural elite is a prevailing stereotype, even though it is caused more by social and religious devaluation of art rather than its supposed inaccessibility). So the main thing-my real purpose here-is to show that making art really is available to everyone. It is a form of worship that, like prayer, can be done wonderfully in honest naiveté, but that becomes richer with knowledge and experience.

God has made people in his image.  God is by definition creative. The logical corollary is that we are all creative, we are all artists. Now, a socially oriented fear of making something ugly (translation: of not drawing realistically enough) is usually reason enough to prevent most adults from trying to make visual art. But until those insecurities set in (or with knowledge of what art is really about, i.e. not much to do with drawing realistically), we are all natural creators. We have to be. We are made to be. At every age we play by coloring and building and cooking and growing things. We are born designers, automatically making hundreds of visual aesthetic decisions every day. We arrange, like some huge collage: our wardrobe, our hair, our rooms, our walls, our gardens, our collections, our purchases.  (This is not to be confused with being organized: there is no pragmatism or efficiency involved). So why does everybody do it? Because, that's why.

I have taught literally thousands of art students, from 3 years old to college-age and beyond. I have taught the unteachables: other teachers.  Mostly I have taught high school students in New York City. I have yet to meet the person that does not contain a really interesting artist somewhere inside.  Teaching art to non-artists is a challenge, but not in the way most people would expect. The barriers that require breaking down are not behavioral, or ethnic, or socio-economic.  They aren't even unique to any group and place.  The problem is a stereotypical way of seeing caused by years of a homogenizing, word-driven public school environment. The images they give me at first are types: human clip-art that is exactly interchangeable with the words that name them. Draw a house.Draw a tree. Draw a bird.you can easily imagine the identical bland result on everyone's page. Christians are not only not exempt from this homogenization, they are worse, since they have the numbing barrage of repeated phrases, verses, and simplifications from their own sub-culture added to that from the world. Yet there is always good news. There is always hope. God has put some weirdness, some uniqueness in all people, and it finds its way out. Thank God. It's the part of each student's drawing that they're a little embarrassed about-it's too strange. It's too personal and unpredictable, the first two ingredients in all good art.

I read an interview with a certain once-famous iconoclast recently, one with whom I could agree on very little. But this notion of his-in defense of his own inconsistency-struck me: we each have our version of the truth, which cannot be the truth, and which we feel obligated to tell. From this clash of versions something very close to the Truth emerges. A group of people will witness the exact same event, but each person will relate it differently, sure they're telling the truth but unavoidably filtering it through their unique experiences, tastes, personalities, cultures, biases, etc. Which is right? Similarly, an imagined meeting of history's ten greatest portraitists, each trying to truly capture a sitter's likeness, will undoubtedly yield ten completely different results. These artists are not trying to flash their style, but they cannot do otherwise. In my beginner students' work I have been delighted to find strange propensities for acute, sickly detail; for huge, gestural waves; for dark, solid mass; for dangerous, tactile surfaces: All looking at the same twig I picked up in the street that morning. God has given all people their eyes to see uniquely a part of the Creation-the whole of which no person can know, but the clashing versions of which give us a truer picture of God himself.

Or consider this story of three friends, the first of whom was jealous of the attentions his favorite paid to the other. When his "rival" eventually died, however, the first man did not receive the larger portion of his friend that he anticipated. Instead he found that there was a valuable quality in his favorite that only his former rival could bring forth, and that now his enjoyment of his friend had actually diminished. It is certain that what we see about God or his Creation is ours uniquely, graciously given by God, and we are loving him and others by revealing it.  If we make our painting of an orange flower, it may not be very "realistic," nor will it likely push Manet, O'Keefe, Chardin, Morandi, Cezanne, or a score of other orange flower painters out of the museum. So why make it? Because you get to participate in his mysterious creative process. Because you get to use the gift and vision he gave you-even if no one else ever sees it. Because only you possess certain knowledge about orange flowers-an original artwork by God-and if you do show it you are helping to build his kingdom. Because it is knowing and enjoying God. Because it is a sublime worship. As wonderful as an artwork can be for manifesting (and therefore worshiping) God,  I have to believe that there is more to be found out about him in this simple activity of making.

A useful analogy here is prayer-the spiritual discipline which Christians are most likely to engage.  It has tremendous visibility, importance, and effectiveness in public worship (the Lord's prayer, prayer of thanksgiving, intercession, confession, healing, dedication, benediction, etc). But its purest, truest beauty comes when we are able to personally speak with God. Unpolished and real. God looking into our hearts. An open-ended conversation. God showing himself to us. At some level all Christians desire this in prayer, and even desire other ways for this to happen. Making art-any kind of art-is an other way for this to happen. God has planted this seed of creativity that, even if we let it grow in the light of day, we rarely acknowledge or nurture for what it is: a means of glorifying and enjoying him. I know painting so I talk about painting, but it's really about creating, and the wider the list, the better. Gardening? Cooking? Writing, teaching, singing, journaling collecting? Yes and yes and yes. The church leads, instructs, encourages about prayer, fasting, and meditation.  Can it do the same for creating? Is it a less worthy spiritual discipline? My brother the pastor says that by my definition of good art (personal and unpredictable, planned but wonderfully interrupted by discovery), his sermons are like artworks. My friend the worship leader and musician says the same. If they are so aware of the pleasurable mystery of creating alongside the Holy Spirit, perhaps they will realize the vast potential in their congregations for similar experiences. Perhaps creating will take its place among the spiritual disciplines encouraged in the church and God the Creator, Jesus the Incarnate, and the Holy Spirit the Truth-teller will be glorified.