Creativity as spiritual...

"One experience we may easily overlook as spiritual is our creativity; the inspiration behind a drawing, a poem, a play, a dance, a painting, story, a weaving, a gourmet meal, a product of our design and/or manufacture, or a speech that can come from God. The whole creative process can be guided by God, and it can change the style and intent of the product and process. Even creativity can be enriched by simply letting go." 

 The Critical Journey, Stages in the Life of Faith by Janet O. Hagberg and Robert A. Guelich 

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

We do not create alone.

"An artist is a nourisher and creator who knows that during the act of creation there is collaboration. We do not create alone." Madeleine L'Engle Walking on Water - Reflections on Faith & Art

Reflections on Faith and Art - Madeleine L'Engle

Obedience is an unpopular word nowadays, but the artist must be obedient to the work, whether it is a symphony, a painting, or a story for a small child. I believe that each work of art, whether it is a work of great genius, or something very small, comes to the artist and says, "Here I am. Enflesh me. Give birth to me."

Excerpt from Walking on Water by Madeleine L'Engle

Brown Jug with Oranges
Oil Painting

Art for God's Sake

"The making of art is an end in and of itself; it is an act of worship in and of itself; it is an act of humility and joy at once; and, in the life of the believer, it is accomplished as a gift back to the Creator who made us—art for God's sake instead of art for art's sake, as it were." Bret Lott, novelist quoted from Christianity Today, March 2010.

NT Wright on Art and Mission

We have lived for too long with the arts as the pretty bit around the edge, with the reality as the non-artistic thing in the middle. But the world is charged with the grandeur of God! Why should we not celebrate and rejoice in that?

Genuine art takes seriously the fact that the world is full of the glory of God, and that it will be full "as the waters cover the sea," and at present (Rom. 8) it is groaning in travail. ...Genuine art responds to that triple awareness...and holds them together as the Psalms do, and asks why and what and where are we. You can do that in music and you can do that in painting, and our generation needs us to do that not simply to decorate the gospel but to announce the gospel.