Finding ourselves in art...

“Art enables us to find ourselves and lose ourselves at the same time.” 
― Thomas Merton, No Man Is an Island

"The liturgical celebration should be an “experience of beauty as well as of faith and prayer.”"

In an article written for Worship in 1980 entitled, “The Vesting of Liturgical Ministers,” Robert Hovda reminds us that the liturgical celebration should be an “experience of beauty as well as of faith and prayer.” ¹ Referencing Harvey Cox, Hovda goes on to say that liturgical celebrations demand that vesture “incarnate” the “conscious excess of festivity,” because “dressing up in an uncommonly beautiful and colorful way” is part of the service of the liturgical minister to the assembly.² The chasuble, says Hovda, helps the presiding celebrant recognize that he is “wearing something important, something that urges grace and dignity in movement, something that serves the festival excess” of the liturgical ministry.³ The chasuble’s “design and form and texture help to focus the action of the assembly” and its “massive color relates to feast and season and festive celebration.”⁴ Like lilies in full bloom, “liturgical vesture has a considerable impact on the feelings of the assembly“⁵ as well as the liturgical minister. Members of the assembly need the “massive color” of the chasuble or dalmatic to remind them that something very big is happening right before their eyes, that God’s love, lavish and breathtaking in its vastness, is accessible, ready-to-hand in Christ, in Word and Sacrament. This is what we join together to celebrate. And this is what vesture must help the People of God to do. Unabashedly beautiful vesture is what the Eucharistic gathering requires. (Of Lilies and Chasubles by Fr. James Palmigiano)

1 Robert Hovda, “The Vesting of Liturgical Ministers,” Worship 54 (March 1980) 99.
2 Ibid., 101
3 Ibid., 109-110.
4 Ibid., 109.
5 Ibid., 104.

"We do not want merely to see beauty,..."

"We do not want merely to see beauty, though, God knows, even that is bounty enough. We want something else which can hardly be put into words – to be united with the beauty we see, to pass into it, to receive it into ourselves."  C. S. Lewis

An artist at work...

An artist at work is in a condition of complete and total faith. Madeleine L'Engle Walking on Water - Reflections on Faith & Art

Servant of the glory...

An Eastern Orthodox theologian, Timothy Kallistos Ware, writes that "an abstract composition by Kandinsky or Van Gogh's landscape of the cornfield with birds...is a real instance of divine transfiguration, in which we see matter rendered spiritual and entering into the 'glorious liberty of the children of God.' This remains true, even when the artist does not personally believe in God. Provided he is an artist of integrity, he is a genuine servant of the glory which he does not recognize, and unknown to himself there is 'something divine' about his work. We rest confident that at the last judgement the angels will produce his work of art as testimony on his behalf." Madeleine L'Engle Walking on Water - Reflections on Faith & Art

Servant of the work...

"When the artist is truly the servant of the work, the work is better than the artist; Shakespeare knew how to listen to his work, and so he often wrote better than he could write; Bach composed more deeply, more truly than he knew; Rembrandt's brush put more of the human spirit on canvas than Rembrandt could comprehend." Madeleine L'Engle Walking on Water - Reflections on Faith & Art