THE LAST LANGUAGE: ART AS SPIRITUAL FORMATION
Faith asks believers for a virtuosic act of imagination: to believe in a world beyond the one we see, and to believe that something better than what we see could be true in this one.
That means that faith depends on the same mechanism that makes art possible: the power of imagination that allows us to see a face in some daubs of paint, accept that a man dressed in mangy furs is a lion for the duration of a play, or gasp at a fistfight that is really nothing more than words on a page.
But art and religion make radically different claims about what happens in the moment we surrender our imagination to them. Religion claims to bring us into contact with a reality more fundamental than the one we can now touch and feel. And art, although it deals in themes that strike at the heart of human life, insists that in the end it is really nothing more than a story, a picture, a show. No artist would want to be held responsible for the crimes or violence their art depicts—or many other things the figures in their images and stories say or do.
But on both sides, these are false claims. Religion denies the fact that it depends on faith. It pretends to be a system of rules that can help us get what we want, rather than a means to surrender to an untameable God. And art denies the seriousness of its own consequences: the way it rewires our minds and reorganizes our hearts—and can reshape our world.
This competition for the territory of the imagination has created longstanding hostility between religion and art, when it should have revealed a fundamental sympathy. Religion has been terrified that if it acknowledges the role imagination plays in belief, religion could be reduced to nothing more than smoke, mirrors, costumes and greasepaint. But in today’s world, art may be the last language capable of grappling with religion’s central concerns of truth and transcendence.
Virtually every form of modern speech is so compromised that it doesn’t even function as a lie anymore, since nobody believes it in the first place. We no longer believe our advertisements, our politicians, our journalists, our religious leaders—or each other on social media. But in art, we can still speak without cynicism about our hunger for faith and meaning, our deep sense of right and wrong, our longing for justice, for love, for a better home.
When we create art, or when we confront it, we have transcendent experiences—the sense that we’re touching something from beyond this world. Throughout history and across disciplines, artists have reached for religious language to describe this experience. Lamont Dozier, writer of “How Sweet It Is To Be Loved By You”, says he believes God gives him his songs. Poet Li-Young Lee begins his poems by asking, “Is there a word from the Lord?” Jazz great Ornette Coleman says that ideas reside in the same place as prayers. Painter Gerhart Richter says that despite his personal pessimism and nihilism, his art arrives from something better, wiser, and more universal than him. Toni Morrison talks about the rituals that writers create to open themselves to becoming a conduit for a spirit beyond themselves.
All of this testimony from artists is echoed in the opening lines of John’s gospel, where the writer asserts that all things were made through God, and without God, nothing was made that has been made.
It’s a claim that even the most fervent believers rarely believe. Instead, we draw bright lines between what we see as made by humans and what is made by God, between what we suppose is sacred and what we think is secular.
But what if the transcendent experiences we have around art aren’t just a mirage? What if they’re real encounters with God? What if God is present in every true act of creation, right down to the present day? How would that change how we think about God? About our ministries? About art? About ourselves?
As we pursue a life of the spirit, we often labor under an enormous weight of tradition and expectation. We may long to approach God through our imagination, or begin to recognize our own emotions and desires as spiritual clues. But the fragments we discover may be strange or frightening to us, impossible to explain to others, and difficult to defend against the pressure of duty and rules: what we’ve been taught are the proper ways—or the only ways—to approach God.
This is where art offers us a unique space for spiritual formation: one in which our only tools are imagination and desire. There is no general agreement on the rules of art. In fact, one of the major functions of art is to upend expectations and rules. And in any case, rules are not the way real art gets made. When we create or confront art, seeking the spirit of inspiration that gives it all life, we’re completely dependent on our imagination, our instincts, our gut reactions—on the prompts and intuitions, the hints or suspicions, the whispers of the still small voice that are so easy to ignore in the press of daily life—because without them, in the space of art, we have nothing. So creating art can teach us to listen for the voice of God, to better understand our own imagination and our own impulses, in all of life.
When art appears in the church, it’s often confined and instrumentalized in performances or worship. We sing the same songs the same way—or we leave most of the singing to professionals. There’s beauty and power in these traditions, the way they bind us together, and the grooves they wear into our souls. But when we recognize the presence of God in everything from a child’s drawing to the Sistine Chapel, art can become a different kind of invitation to faith. It can offer a new door to people who have been harmed by their encounters with church. It can welcome in people who have never set foot in one before. And it can help us see our ministries not as a series of endless duties and tasks, but as a form of art – where we follow the voice of a creative spirit that leads us beyond our own limits and fears, into places we don’t always understand, to create something we could never make on our own.
We can’t do this by creating more elaborate sacred performances, more magnificent collections of art, or better simulacrums of pop concerts. Instead, we extend this welcome by becoming a home for creation: not just for the chosen few, the special breed called artists, but for all of us.
Ironically, the gestures that welcome people to meet God in and the process of creation can be far less complex and costly than traditional church arts programs. They can take the form of classes that encourage everyone both to create and to recognize the spirit of God in inspiration—whether they’re part of your church community, or from beyond it. They can be as simple as covering a large wall with craft paper and handing out paintbrushes, not just to the people everyone knows as artists, but to the ones nobody does. Taking a trip to a museum or concert, sharing the moments that meant the most, and wondering together what clues those moments might give us about God. Creating opportunities to create that anyone can engage in, whether it’s a simple craft project or an ambitious vision for a new liturgical season, and then inviting everyone to join in—especially the ones who seem least likely or interested, who may be the ones who need those invitations the most.
In all these ways, and millions more, we can recognize the urge to create as part of the image of a God who creates, present in every single one of us. We can invite people into the transcendent experience of creating and confronting art, and let them know that the creative spirit that inspires it all has a heart and a history—and a family that they can become part of.
Where together, art can form our imaginations to believe in a world beyond our own, and envision a better hope for this one.
