Mar 07 | Art and the Divine: Lent Journal #2

 Ash Wednesday marked the anniversary of the Writing the Dark Night Lenten project that my friend Alex and I developed with the help of the St. Paul’s Artists’ Guild. (You can still find the blog here). In honour of that awesome experience, here’s a piece on God as artist.

God the Artist; God the Theologian

God for someone like me – an artist and a very “Celtic” or holistically-oriented and creation-revering Christian – is best encountered through openness. Openness for me is best experienced through silence and contemplation, both of which I would name requirements for the Hebrew Bible scholar Michael Fishbane’s conception of theology. In his book Sacred Attunement, theology must speak profoundly to people where they exist in the current moment but also set forth a framework for all of existence. Scripture read as “primordial truth” is scripture empowered to continue to speak meaningfully for all people at all times. How this is done is impossible to tackle in its breadth of possibilities. What seems more important is the imperative that comes with theology: it must not be solely a retreat but praxis-oriented. Like art it should seek to transform directly and deliberately – unlike art the possibility of self-indulgence should never be entertained (while art can be self-indulgent and still transformative in its beauty, self-indulgent theology is usually not helpful to anyone beyond the self).

What is so beautiful about the paradigm Fishbane introduces is that, to me, it presents God as an artist. God in scripture is the constant (and often tormented!) author of “caesural moments” for the people. Interestingly, few of these moments are split along the binary of experience that Fishbane provides; they are deliberate and “natural.” Moments like the Flood (transforming Noah’s physical world – literally) and Jacob’s dream (aesthetically arresting[1]) transformed the inner and outer worlds of those who experienced them. God’s mediums can then be creation, silence, and words (to correspond with Fishbane’s painting, music, and poetry). God also has a very different sense of awareness than we do, naturally: “[A]rtists may live…continuously in these spaces of awareness, often disconnected from ordinary perceptions.” In God’s endorsements of Jacob and David, we see a refusal to play by the common rules of human perception and the establishment of a new way of thinking.

God was more than a simple still-life painter, though. The artist seeks to “cultivate the self” by reaching into the multitude of different expressions of reality and giving life to one (or a few). This rather reminds me of tohu wabohu, the oddly onomatopoetic phrase describing the earth before creation. In fact, it leads me to wonder and pursue my own brief theological reflection on God’s artistry: If we claim Scripture is necessary and authoritative (however that might be true), how do we affirm the diversity of voices and perceptions while still affirming that God created one earth? Perhaps, my Celtic mind giggles, we affirm the diversity in the tohu wabohu (out of which the earth is formed) and affirm the unity in the interconnectedness of all life on the planet. This is true art – we may at first feel overwhelmed by the thickness of sound emanating from the choir, but as we slip into the awareness that the voices are singing in harmony, we are instead fully transported into a very “thin place” indeed.

And of course the most wondrous thing to realize from this image of God as an artist was that God was also a theologian! The first task of a theologian according to Fishbane is to “provide a perspective that would place one firmly upon the earth and set forth a framework for the entirety of existence.” This to me describes God perfectly! Theology is also the integration, as stated above, of the unexpected “in-breaking” of nature and the deliberate nature of art.[2] Of course as a process theologian and someone who would heartily affirm the omnipotence of God I am delighted by the notion that God would spend time contemplating Godself. However, as a Christian, in this vision I also enjoy a slowly bleeding binary thought process that explores the vulnerability inherent in artistic openness (and so, in God).


[1] I recognize that what for me always manifests itself mentally as a beautiful and awe-inspiring image might indeed have been terrifying to Jacob! Here, then, I use a descriptive word that attempts to convey the hugeness of the emotion that must have accompanied this dream.

[2] The use of the word “in-breaking” is entirely deliberate here – I’m sure another paper awaits on the subject of Jesus as artist.

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