“All activities are a medium to commune with, get to know and hence love, and actually encounter, and thus be transformed by God; this includes the arts.” Reverend Shoehorn

Sorry for the length again, I’m long winded and worded-more a Whitman, less an haiku poet-but enjoying studying great spiritual thinkers about art and spirituality again today. Theology of the imagination is one of my favorite subjects. Came upon this gem by Thomas Merton:

“Art-even a true deep to deep encounter with art- allows us to find ourselves and lose ourselves simultaneously, for art is not an end in itself. It introduces the soul into a higher spiritual order, which it expresses and in some sense explains.

Music and art, photography and poetry attune the soul to God because they induce a kind of contact with the Creator and Ruler of the Universe. The genius of the artist finds its way by the affinity of creative sympathy, or co-naturality, into the living law that rules the universe. This law is nothing but the secret gravitation that draws all things to God as to their true center…it makes us alive to the tremendous mystery of being, in which we ourselves, together with all other living and existing things, come forth from the depths of God and return again to Him. And art that does not produce something of this is not worthy of its name.” (No Man is an Island)

Merton had a great, and unfortunately rare in the Christian tradition, ability to integrate his understanding of the arts and spirituality, and express them both from a Kingdom Perspective-a type of revealed theology, i would say. (I can think of George MacDonald, Oswald Chambers, Lewis and a few others who have modeled this integration well-not the worship of the imagination as the Romantics did, but a sanctified imagination, a yielded imagination; creativity as a place of spiritual collaboration with Our Source and Creator. In this sense, creativity becomes a place where our true identity is called forth or activated.)

“Things are beautiful to the degree that they conform to real Reality. Everything that is, is beautiful insofar that it is real.” Nice meditation today, echoing King David’s meditations on the commandments (Psalm 111), as a way to trail into the Reality in God of what they pointed towards, law into Spirit, sort of thing. (Tillich’s “Symbols participate in The Reality to which they point!”).  Just as we are His symbols or poems of Himself (Ephesians 2:10). Art can facilitate this!

The relationship between the imagination and spirituality has always captivated me. As another creative saint put it, “To have a sanctified imagination is to meet God directly in His and our own true creativity-being to Being-by encountering His, ours is called forth and formed. We become collaborators again, as in the garden, even collaborators in interpretation! Art making becomes a tabernacle of meeting, just as all activities should be.”

Anyway, fun researching this stream of knowing. Now I’m going to go make some art! Or as Elvis sang, “A little less conversation, a little more action.” Or is it, incarnation!