Studying Martin Buber, the great jewish thinker mystic interpreter, on teaching art:

“Thus, when a teacher relies on explaining art (much like explaining God, versus leading people towards encounter!), rather then educating towards experiencing the painting or the sculpture. Only very rarely, such an approach will lead to a personal change in the way of life of the student, which may alter his or her manner of creating and relating to art, or towards creativity. Buber states that:

 “This is the eternal origin of art that a human being confronts a form that wants to become a work through him. Not a figment of his soul but something that appears to the soul and demands the soul’s creative power. What is required is a deed that a man does with his whole being: if he commits it and speaks with his being the basic word to the form that appears, then the creative power is released and the work comes into being.”

In other words, art can be transformative if encountered well.

An interview with a musician recently: “I am creating the work with the audience as mid air collaboration, depending on how deeply we show up and collaborate (with each other, with God), something transcendent and transformative can happen. But we both must show up fully in our deeper selves.”

We’ve all experienced this is great concerts–a Third (The Holy Spirit) is present, and we are mutually altered by it.

 Buber would call that the I-thou exchange versus the I-it. He considered it a grace give by God to encounter the heart of the other from our hearts. But something we could be positioned for, or oriented towards, in life, when we treat one another in love.

I might add, love puts us in a position for spirit to Spirit depth transformative encounter with one another, nature, or God.

 I love studying aesthetics and religion. In college, my mentor wrote a great article using Buber’s categories called, “Beauty is in the “I” of the beholder”. If you want to understand a piece of art, you have to “show up” with your deeper self, your heart.   He applied it to the life of St Francis, and it’s effects on nature around him.

 The Christian native american thinker John Sanford, who my wife studied under recently, has some good thoughts to add on this topic in his recent book called “healing the land”-nice christian perspective on spiritual ecology, which few Christian thinkers have really addressed well–our relationship with Nature.

 Still, my mentor’s article is one of my favorite articles on the purpose of art. It’s meant to engage our deeper spirit in a collaborative becoming process. That’s why we like to look at art, or make it, at the end of the day. It changes us, if encountered deeply enough, just as real conversation with other people, or nature, can and does. Deep to deep, spirit to Spirit encounter alters us, or allows God to fashion new contours in us.