You can encounter God through the arts as well. Whether it is the literary arts (poetry or prose), the visual arts (painting, sculpture, or photography), or the performing arts (theatre, music or dance), they can produce a singular, often transcendent experience or understanding in themselves. There is often no other way to communicate with quite the same effect. They speak to the poet’s soul in all of us. It is therefore understandable that classical literature, within the order of its deities, ascribes to the muses—and they transported on Pegasus' wings—the gifting and inspiration of artistic expression.
So much of all deistic worship and communication stands on the gifting of the arts for expression and transcendent understanding. To the extent that music, drama, poetry and prose, paintings, icons or sculptures are media used to make more meaningful our apprehension or worship of God, to the extent they mediate our understanding of His identity, His message or His work, they are truly the highest expression of the arts.
That is to say, there is an incarnational or sacramental aspect to the arts. Don’t we sense or feel some of what we know about God through them? Don’t you? They do seem to mediate in unique, effective ways the expression and our understanding of God's invitation to us and relationship with us. Much of the Bible is art in that sense, and certainly the psalms are. As the last few psalms relate to expressing our praise and worship with the joyful playing of cymbals, lyre and other instruments, and as others speak clearly of singing songs, dancing or dramatically crying out in our angst or our joy, so we should not be surprised that God uses those same expressions in those same ways today for some of our communication from Him and to Him.
I especially have that experience with poetry—and not just Christian poetry. Certainly, I love the psalms (as I’ve implied), and pray and meditate on them often. Of all the biblical genres, they speak most powerfully to me in that way. And the poetry and writings of an array of Christian intimates of God provide insight, epiphany, and assurance to me as well, and sometimes attend my personal prayer and contemplative time. But I also find the experience of God revealed in the Sufi poetry of Hafiz and Rumi, in the Diamond Sutra, as well as the poetry of those who claim no faith other than an undefined spirituality informed in large part by their inspiration and work. I have felt this in much of the work of Mary Oliver. (And in time, much later, she came to recognize and experience Him, too.)
If the totality of our experience in the world itself has an incarnational backdrop—and I believe it does—then our experiences with the arts often provide discrete insights or epiphanies that stop us in timeless reflection, that augment or complement the understandings revealed in Scripture, prayer, worship and community. In those times, in those places, your ears may also hear, your eyes may also see. You may hear the whisper, see the light, and feel the stirring.
First written: January - June 2005
© Gregory E. Hudson 2007
