And the Word become flesh and dwelt among us, full of grace and truth.
John 1:14
The more we abandon public spaces to ugliness, the more beauty retreats to the private realm. In direct proportion to the decaying sensory delight of our cities, we decorate our bodies with fashion and “hang art’ in our homes. The most sophisticated among us have replaced the celebration of budding dogwood and changing maple leaves with worship of the latest style. Sam Keen Hymns to an Unknown God.
How heron comes
It is a negligence of the mind
not to notice how at dusk
heron comes to the pond and
stands there in his death robes, perfect
servant of the system, hungry, his eyes
full of attention, his wings
pure light”
― Mary Oliver, Swan: Poems and Prose Poems
What does it mean to be human in this sensuous world? Were we created with a deep and vibrant sensorial empathy that has now gone into hiding or eluded us all together? Is our true status one of inter-being? In ancient times, it was the Voice from the heavens that disparaged the carnal experience of humans. Now technology has taken on the heavenly powers in superseding our sentient selves over against simulations and images.
Although we are consciousness are we not indeed in our flesh the earth as well? The earth in the sense of the created realm? Our sensorial empathy empowers and awakens us to the body of wonder of this world which then in turn demands reciprocity and respect. Is there offered through the vitality and validity of nature a deeper access to the cosmos?
Is the experience of beauty a return to the sensuous realm, a return to the animal-like physicality of our instinctual and perceptive bodies, back into the living cosmos, the created realm where our animality finds its home? Is this animism as some may contend or actually a distinctly Christian way to know and be present in this world?
Anyone who has had any college or secondary educational experiences has been trained to come to any studied phenomenon with a posture of inquiry and a desire to understand the wholistic nature of the encounter. We are trained by Western thought postures to look for over arching ideas and forms that allow us to have deeper insight and understanding with the studied material. We are always “other than” the materials or experiences or people being studied. We stand “above” and “apart from” that which we wish to know and understand. These objectifying modes of study and learning have proven to birth and sustain some of the most beneficial understanding to humankind.
However, are there experiences that the logical brain cannot totally experience, or cannot engage? Is the very earth upon which we sojourn much more animated and vocal than our mechanistic abstractions have deemed possible? Has science and religion been so desacralized from the sentient presence of the intuitive felt-knowing humans were born with that we no longer see, taste, hear, or touch the radiance inherent in our everyday lives?
How have we become so estranged from the simple beauty awaiting us each day? Can one believe truly in the Creator and disrespect the very creation into which He incarnated Himself? What does this respect look like in the 21st century given the ability to destroy vast panoramas of the created realm at the drop of a hat? What does it look like to re-enchant the world through the awareness and practice of beauty?
The Church historically has such a mistrust of personal experience. True experience can be untrustworthy in terms of ultimate truthfulness. Just look at the unconscious mind. Some ideas are truer and better than others. But to experience doctrinal truth one must first experience in the first place. In other words, experiencing the truth is not the same as experiencing the doctrine of the truth. Faith is always an original copy if you will. The lived experience is vital to the knowing of the truth. The essential meaning of life is indicated in the experience of the truth in our lives not merely in the abstract. Truth is always particular to a place, to a person, to a time. Beauty could be one of the ways that this convergence takes place. Before propositions and principles we are not mere bystanders or spectators. We are participants. Beauty is by its nature reciprocal and participatory.
Beauty often arrives when we feel the most alive. Why is that? What is beauty? Why do we feel more alive when we experience what we attribute to the realm of beauty? Is there a sentient knowledge inherent to the human experience of itself and its surroundings? Is this sense of beauty a primordial acquaintance an ancient congenital gift? Might the body have a wisdom our postmodern world has disparaged and held in suspicion? Art and the experience of beauty appear to offer a felt knowing brining our emotions and senses into a harmony. Have we come to accept a high degree of discord to the point where there is a lack of agreement between the created realm and ourselves?
We live in an enchanted world. When we regard beauty as gift it becomes sacramental. Now everything we encounter become astonishing hint of a deeper and more pervasive religious sensibility, which inclines us as believers to seethe holy lurking in creation. We find our daily lives, our homes and our world to be hunted by a sense that these encounters in our daily lives are revelations of grace. Our imagination become a lens for the ephemeral and now sees created reality as a sacrament that is a revelation of the very presence of the Father.
This special Catholic imagination can appropriately be called sacramental. It sees created reality as a “sacrament,” that is, a revelation of the presence of God. All page 1
This sacramental perspective is indeed a manner of engagement and a way of addressing and naming reality. Life now becomes “ permeated by, dense in, awash with two precious awareness’s- we are human and are embraced by the divine.
The cosmos now are enchanted. The proclivity towards demystification in our academies, our houses of faith, our political halls now seem at odds with the way in which the universe chooses to disclose itself. Are humans by their very nature pre modern versus modern or postmodern? Is our longing and questing nearly involuntary? Are we designed to sense this belonging with the created realm? Is the ground of our being restless for beauty and mystery?
Presence, awareness mindfulness
We use the phrase “being in touch.
Satan masquerades as an angel of light.
Being in touch
Be in the thick of
Be in the throes of
Be knee deep in
Be in the zone
Be in to deep
Be in the way
Be in two minds
“Whatever you eye falls on – for it will fall on what you love – will lead you to the questions of your life, the questions that are incumbent upon you to answer, because that is how the mind works in concert with the eye. The things of this world draw us where we need to go.”
― Mary Rose O’Reilley, The Barn at the End of the World: The Apprenticeship of a Quaker, Buddhist Shepherd
“Mindfulness, also called wise attention, helps us see what we’re adding to our experiences, not only during meditation sessions but also elsewhere.”
― Sharon Salzberg, Real Happiness: The Power of Meditation
“Walk as if you are kissing the Earth with your feet.”
― Thích Nhất Hạnh, Peace Is Every Step: The Path of Mindfulness in Everyday Life
“We long for permanence but everything in the known universe is transient. That’s a fact but one we fight.”
― Sharon Salzberg, Real Happiness: The Power of Meditation
“Patience requires a slowing down, a spaciousness, a sense of ease.”
― Allan Lokos, Patience: The Art of Peaceful Living
“Cooking gives you the opportunity to meet the things you eat. You can touch each carrot or olive and get to know its smell and texture.You can feel its weight and notice its color and form. If it is going to become part of you, it seems worthy, at least, of acknowledgment, respect, and thanks. It takes much time and care in order for things to grow, and many labors are needed to bring these ingredients to the kitchen. There is a lot to be grateful for that takes place between the wheat field and the dumpling.”
― Gary Thorp, Sweeping Changes: Discovering the Joy of Zen in Everyday Tasks
“When I say ‘practice’ I don’t mean
repeating an act until you get it right. In this use, it means to instill regular discipline to accomplish a specific task, ritual without which we feel incomplete, or that our experience of each day is less.”
― S. Kelley Harrell, Teen Spirit Guide to Modern Shamanism
“As we encounter new experiences with a mindful and wise attention, we discover that one of three things will happen to our new experience: it will go away, it will stay the same, or it will get more intense. whatever happens does not really matter.”
― Jack Kornfield, A Path with Heart: A Guide Through the Perils and Promises of Spiritual Life
“Like a child standing in a beautiful park with his eyes shut tight, there’s no need to imagine trees, flowers, deer, birds, and sky; we merely need to open our eyes and realize what is already here, who we already are – as soon as we stop pretending we’re small or unholy.”
― Bo Lozoff
“A bird cried jubilation. In that moment they lived long. All minor motions were stilled and only the great ones were perceived. Beneath them the earth turned, singing.”
― Sheri S. Tepper, The Revenants
If you know how to be happy with the wonders of life that are already there for you to enjoy, you don’t need to stress your mind and your body by striving harder and harder, and you don’t need to stress this planet by purchasing more and more stuff. The Earth belongs to our children. We have already borrowed too much from it, from them; and the way things have been going, we’re not sure we’ll be able to give it back to them in decent shape. And who are our children, actually? They are us, because they are our own continuation. So we’ve been shortchanging our own selves. Much of our modern way of life is permeated by mindless over borrowing. The more we borrow, the more we loser. That’s why it’s critical that we wake up and see we don’t need to do that anymore. What’s already available in the here and now is plenty for us to be nourished, to be happy. Only that kind of insight will get us, each one of us, to stop engaging in the compulsive, self-sabotaging behaviors of our species. We need a collective awakening. One Buddha is not enough. All of us have to become Buddhas in order for our planet to have a chance. Fortunately, we have the power to wake up, to touch enlightenment from moment to moment, in our very own ordinary and, yes, busy lives. So let’s start right now. Peace is your every breath.”
― Thích Nhất Hạnh, Peace Is Every Breath: A Practice for Our Busy Lives
Does the body have wisdom? Are there truly fell knowing and meaning in our emotions, feelings and senses?
Reality is personal and is felt by the person. Have we lost our personhood?
We could study for decades the embodied nature of the mind. Note Phenomenology and Lakoff’s work.
Quote Without feelings nothing matters dr. Thomas Hohstadt
Quote
What many theologians and scientists fail to admit is the even that study and doctrinal research involves experience. So experience and reality are the same according to Hohstadt. To be in touch implies that there is something to be in touch with.
What I am seeking here is balance. We have so estranged our very being from the experience of truth that we now believe reality is something outside our experience of it. We never really experience truth we only study it, dissect it, organize it into principles. The felt knowing aspect of truth and goodness is no longer necessary as we have the book, we have the documents, we have the laws, we have the language, we have the lexicon and the dictionary…we have the grammatical understanding of how to interpret the language we just don’t speak it any more. I would contend that our sense of beauty is the medium of our faith. David desire more than anything to behold and gaze upon the beauty (the sweet attractiveness and delightful loveliness of the Lord) o Psalms 24:7
C.S Lewis said that the grasp of the transcendent comes only through physical sensations of the real Presence Le Anne Payne
In psychoanalysis emotions become the basis for suspicions. But in religious language, emotions become the basis of belief. Lewis Edwin Hahn Editor Theo Philosophy of Paul Ricoeur
The possibility of error is a necessary element of any belief Michael Polanyi Personal Knowledge: Towards a Post-Critical Philosophy
I am not talking here about Bogus Bliss (I like this phrase form Hohstadt) it talks about the new agey stuff.
In the church we are always talking bout the ideas of our experiences.
Beauty assists and mediates for us the meaning in the messenger. The messenger is known by our senses but ultimate meaning in known by the message. In other words, beauty mediates here and not here us and not us our spiritual and sensual life. It crates a dialogue with the world both within us and without us.
Can we discern what emotions are life giving and Spirit informing? Yes by their fruit. No one would assume that all feelings are worthy of response or development.
Hohstadt
Test Your Emotions before Proceeding Future Church Good article
Might there be a bodily and corporeal knowing that the experience of beauty mediates that is pre-conceptual or at the least not dependent upon abstract rumination? What happens when we are removed or we remove ourselves from the created realm of the living? Do we cease in part to actually inhabit this realm? Do we then live in a dis-enchanted world?
As we re-enchant our very sentient presence and reunite with nature, what then happens to our naming, our sense of connection with nature, with creation itself?
Granted, Abrams seems to highlight the animistic tendencies but his gift was his immersion into the world of immediate perception & away from the world of concepts or at least abstractions of experience as the real.
Regarding beauty as a lens is a style of thinking that focuses on relationship and reciprocity. It takes us out of isolation and seclusion healing the lack of any sense of belonging we have with our world and each other.
Is beauty the gaze we have pre conceptually into the real of the un-interpreted world? Is our Western penchant for running all our experience through concepts and judgments keeping us from deeply encountering the sentient part of very being? Is our orientation toward mind built manacles? How do we liberate our selves from this inner and outer vision of abstraction and judgment?
Daily there is the immediate play of events into which our senses engage and respond. This experiential knowing has as resonate beauty to it. How do we experience our awareness of the world? Could this perception of this sentient connection be beauty’s gaze? Is this a mindfulness we can discipline and heighten?
Beauty is about reciprocity, relationships, the way we name these encounters, the very presentness of the pace we find ourselves inn. It is truly living in the ordinary that becomes extra ordinary. Our very natures are intertwined with the vast “more than humanness” of our world.
Beauty offers up reality as it shows itself. It offers up an experience of the world that resonates with our deeper sense of being human. Beauty may be a deeper language of immediacy that offers up the livingness of the world to us. Art making might be one most “human” things one can do. I watch the beaver build its dam, the sparrow its nest, the ___ its___ and it is clear some deeper pre critical presence within us is often lived out in the making of things. How can we re-sacralize our experience with the created realm? How can we see the very presence of the other as revelation? How can we restore the relationship God intended for us to have with Him, with the created order?
Beauty serves as an introduction, a re-approaching of the very elements that constitute our living universe. How can beauty help us reinvigorate what it might mean to be human but not just merely human? To be human and still be an intricate part of a much broader existence, one that is informed by the subtle beauty of creation, and the implicate energy of our surroundings in all their splendor and color.
We live in ugly times. We have become so desensitized to the place in which we live. Our need for wonder and appreciation, or our awareness of our need The dailyness of our lives is so surrounded by equally as detached humans who have lost or maybe never had any visceral sense of their connectedness to the larger than human world of the created realm. Social interaction in the age of simulation now takes on an even has been dulled by the controlled assault of a consumerist world. Although we live in a world over siltation in terms of images, sounds, smells and so on, in truth, our ability to experience them is highly diminished. There are fewer crannies of loveliness as Sam Keen says. As funds have fallen for parks, museums, gardens and so on, so to have the common experience of beauty. The rich and wealthy have been able to create protected sections of lowliness in the ugly urban landscape but these are supported and sustained through their wealth and not the common experience of all peoples in that place. This is an elitist experience. Darker distance from localized art making as people see their most closet friends to be those miles if not lifetimes away form each other. Even our connection with the non human world now becomes a lethal rejection as we regard a film short as the same as “being there.”
Beauty unites us with the inside, underneath, within and withoutness of our very presence in this world. How often have you been captured by beauty unknowingly until your sense of being present came alive? This could have happened through a garden, a song, a beautifully designed piece of artwork, and a well made culinary experience and on and on. Is our reuniting and re approaching of beauty what is necessary for us to address the deterioration of our very primal life and our primary contacts with its meaning through our senses?
Metaphors matter, Nancy Murphy in __ of Fundamentalism talks about the shift of the metaphor from a building to a flexible web that stretches. Just imagining that offers the Kingdom more into which to pour itself Foundations of Fundamentalisms Nancy Murphy of
It is customary in most theological schools of Protestantism to focus on the material world apart from the experience of it. It lacks a felt knowing. This penchant for disembodiment is a part of the scientific worldview handed down during the Enlightenment to religion.
The language of beauty, especially poetry and in recent years rap, is a language first of sensuality, an evocative dimension of tone, rhythm and resonance that builds upon the very flesh of language.
How did we find ourselves so disconnected from nature? Have we become so sophisticated in our perceptions that we are now so distanced from our sense place and the life world into which we are placed? How does this distancing make itself manifest? Is there sustenance in the gift of beauty to which we are no longer privy? Have we lost the awareness of beauty’s accompanying reverence? Is there a sentient conversation to which we are no longer listening? Is there a richness and meaning to everyday life waiting to be revealed and is part of that encounter through the reverence of the created realm? How can we recognize the disconnection and lead us back to a reconnection and the dynamics needed for that restoration?
Beauty informs and invites us into an immersion of the sensible phenomena that are alive and aware on some level. This may not be human communications but it is communication nonetheless and just as vitally important as those we have with people. Even science is beginning to reveal the majestic and exquisite languages of one-celled creatures.
Have we unwittingly deified thinking as over against our senses as a sole way of knowing? Is the human condition being compromised by this inordinate need for abstraction? As much as Abrams leads us towards a much more informed and embedded sense of how to engage nature this is a work that is not merely about the human being but about human thinking. Is our way of thinking deeply rooted in the natural realm? Have we learned of God from His creation? Is there revelation form nature that evokes His deepest nature?
Artists are pedestrian mystics in that they look for and are attentive to the wonder of the ordinary. The mystical is not some esoteric world separate from this one but one not merely interconnected but reflective of the integrity of it all. The discovery of beauty may indeed be a normalization of the human experience rather than a distinctly difficult one to experience. This is not to say that disciplines don’t need to be developed. In fact, the aesthetics of everyday life involve a degree of ascetic discipline. Aesthetics and ascetics go hand in hand. Artists begin to ignore the seeming walls Western scientific and philosophical thought have had on the experience of consciousness. When one imagines a seamlessness to experience between he body and the mind, the intimacy between the landscape and the inner space of consciousness are counter melodies. They are not different songs.
Beauty is the conversation the webwork of perceptions sensations that come from the countless encounters we have with the sentient filled experience we call nature. This would also include humans as well. As we return to our sentient inclinations that were a part of the original blessing, we begin to discover our place, our resonance with the beings, the creations that are in the place in which we abide. We become native to our surroundings, familiar with the voice of the summer wind, humbled by the first chill of winter,
If we return to scripture and read it as more of an oral tradition rather than one of detailed abstractions or a book of law, we become part of the storied world into which the prophets and ___were immersed. There is a radicalizing power that will accompany this reorientation, this re enchantment. It may seem to teachers and pastors that this is merely a subjective approach to truth and that the mythopoeic nature of its encouragement is tantamount to heresy. On the contrary, this is a renewal of the felt knowing only beauty can induce. How might beauty enable us to return to thinking in a sensory manner?
Current theological discourse favors the sensible field of abstraction from the sensory experience. It also maintains that the subjective experience is “caused” by the objective law written into the cosmos via the Creator. This penchant for abstraction tends to make our encounter with the carted order mechanistic and governed solely by the sensible. I am not suggesting like many in the New age movement that all experience is pure sentience or subjective. In other worlds, this realm in which we walk and live is not illusory. This material realm is not maintained in some Platonic immaterial mind of sprit. I am asking that beauty be included in the way we determine the realty of our experience by prioritizing one way of engaging over another. Could they not be simultaneously engaged? Is the downside of this prioritizing a perception that we can indeed be separate form the realm in which we live and donate it?
Our Protestant tradition for exalting God’s transcendence has tended to avoid or ignore His immanence, If God is not “of this world” then what can we expect from this world? IT is passing flawed, broken; crying with it at all times the howling loss of the fall. This drains from our very beings the connectedness we have as part of creation. We regard the created realm as inert and lifeless. Now we derogate our very sentient experience and our sensual awareness as not merely untrustworthy but non-essential to the idea of our experience. We live in the abstraction of our somatic encounter. Now those encounters apparent to us in the real world are eschewed in favor of the non-sensorial world of ideas and the pursuit of truth. Is the create realm actually full of stories, songs, speeches and even oracles?
Is beauty the permeable membrane of the created order that spills into our body, our body’s way of knowing? Should we admit and repent of this thought that our mind so able to capture this the worldly realm and do so at the cost of this one? When does language begin to interiorize the very presence of the most informative presence there is and that is the crated realm?
This is not to denigrate language or thought. IN fact, could Christ’s being the Word actually mean a more earthy word, a more sentient world, a more creative Word, a more creative and powerfully imaginative world?
What is lost here is wonder. What is lost is the very somatic relationship God desired we have with our very world.
As we privilege the experience of the mind what is lost? IS there then a deeper silence as we have not merely stilled but lost tour sense of hearing, hearing the cacophony of conversations beaten ourselves and our world? The re-sacralization for some may be act to late and needful of more than repentance. Are we in a significant shift in our understanding of the nature of the very cosmos? As our desire to control and
When art making is seen as gift as well as commodity, the engagement and processes of art making draw closer to the irreplaceable gift of creation as offered in creation narrative. This re-awakening seeks to move beyond the idea of science that may see the created realm as atoms and molecules governed by unchanging laws and forces.
In Alister McGrath’s work The Re-enchantment of Nature: The Denial of Religion and the Ecological Crisis, he lays out a fairly exhaustive study into the mechanistic view of nature as well as the romanticized view of nature. One sees nature as a force to be controlled and domesticated while the other sees nature as the moral and spiritual educator of humanity. Authors and poets like Goethe, Wordsworth and Shelley, which posit the idea that nature has an intuited higher power, which saturates nature with its presence and beauty. Page 132
The transcendentalists took this view even further seeing nature as Transcendent in and of itself. Authors like Emerson were avid proponents of seeing nature as Nature, which then eschewed the need to listen and learn form dad theologians when living-breathing nature was before us.
McGrath goes on to talk about how the imagination needs to be captured as well as the rational activities of the human mind. When wonder is lost, reverence is diminished. When ideas begin to tacitly blanket all experience ruling out direct encounters, being a follower of Christ becomes problematic as well. Can we be alive but not living? Can we be seated in an immersive sentient place and know little of its voice and presence?
The pedagogy of beauty reinvigorates story and narrative as a language of the lifeworld in which we inhabit. Christians and other fundamentalists have lessened the power of their own story setting the deeper metaphoric and allegorical nature of their traditions over against the world of science and rationalism making evidence that proves the story more important than the formative power of the myth. Myth in this context is the stories of the faith.
Abram, an ecologist and philosopher now living in New Mexico, says we are intelligent, subjective beings because we are part of an intelligent, subjective universe.
Our speech inscribes us in the chattering, whispering landscape. Poem material
It could be one of many important stepping-stones into a new collective worldview that realigns us with the more than human world and gives hope for a sustainable coexistence on this planet.
It’s a great introduction to some major differences in how indigenous/oral-language people experience, interact with, and communicate with their world vs. how written-language people do, which, Abram says, basically happened after the Greek alphabet came into use, which was the first completely phonetic alphabet (no symbols left that involve imagery that ties the alphabetic letter to the tangible world).
Me Art making has a synesthesia inducing aspect to it in that we are applying a color or an abstract symbol to a sound. IT would be an interesting study to understand what Wycliffe Bible Translators have gone through when attempting to translate scripture into t native languages. They first have to go in and do some cosmological study of how this people group configures their world. Things like blood sacrifices, even gods that were Trinitarian in nature are not in their lexicon of language let alone written down somewhere.
Beauty book Re sacralization e-enchantment WHY Catholics get it and we PROTESTENS DON’T
Our Protestant tradition for exalting God’s transcendence has tended to avoid or ignore His immanence, If God is not “of this world” then what can we expect from this world? It is passing, flawed, broken; crying with it at all times the howling loss of the fall. This drains from our very beings the connectedness we have as part of creation. We regard the created realm as inert and lifeless. Now we derogate our very sentient experience and our sensual awareness as not merely untrustworthy but non-essential to the idea of our experience. We live in the abstraction of our somatic encounter. Now those encounters apparent to us in the real world are eschewed in favor of the non-sensorial world of ideas and the pursuit of truth. Is the create realm actually full of stories, songs, speeches and even oracles?
Our speech inscribes us in the chattering, whispering landscape. Poem material
.
Is beauty the permeable membrane of the created order that spills into our body, our body’s way of knowing? Should we admit and repent of this thought that our mind so able to capture this the worldly realm and do so at the cost of this one? When does language begin to interiorize the very presence of the most informative presence there is and that is the crated realm?
This is not to denigrate language or thought. In fact, could Christ’s being the Word actually mean a more earthy word, a more sentient world, a more creative Word, a more creative and powerfully imaginative world?
What is lost here is wonder. What is lost is the very somatic relationship God desired we have with our very world.
As we privilege the experience of the mind what is lost? Is there then a deeper silence as we have not merely stilled but lost our sense of hearing, hearing the cacophony of conversations beneath our world and us? The re-sacralization for some may be act to late and needful of more than repentance. Are we in a significant shift in our understanding of the nature of the very cosmos? As our desire to control and
Beauty and Apologetics
Apologetics is a disinterested science. We are more than spectators in this world. Our daily ordinary lives do not offer up to us a world that is thematized and defined. Far from it. The rarified atmosphere of theology and aesthetics are not the lived experience for us. My own life and the bigger life, bigger than my humanness beckon intermittently. I discover the world the world is not some “inherent or mechanical object,” as Abrams offers, No; it is an out of the pre-conceptual world that my deeper sensibility offers up itself. I am relative to a larger world full of conversations. Beauty and the “the experienced world”
Imagination as its expression
In an attempt to discover and reveal one over arching “objective reality” we put at bay the immediacy of our inherent and communal presences. We want to “be “ourselves. It is the mistake of a Cartesian mind and body spilt.
Art as an Ascetic Practice
Daniel Siedell
The Great Misunderstanding (my phrase)
“Art is where one’s individuality and creativity is affirmed, celebrated, and defended and where one’s personal testimony is heard while it offers leisure, entertainment, and affirmation for your audience.”
Daniel Siedell is Director of Cultural and Theological Practice at Coral Ridge Presbyterian Church, Fort Lauderdale, FL
Tolstoy Quote
TO define art correctly it is necessary first of all to cease to consider it as a means to pleasure, and to consider it as one of the conditions of human life.”
Art grabs you by the throat and tells you that you must change your life. Rilke
MY ideas
Some art is not found in self-expression but in self-denial is only partly true. This sequesters art into one purpose or solely in this domain.
Theologians tend to see art as a trait akin to God’s creative nature as seen through the created world. This is an attributional engagement. Because of who we believe God to be and our experience and awareness of His nature, we can attribute much of the beauty we experience to the mind and character of God.
Academic see beauty as an idea, a sublime idea. Its symmetry, orderliness, its sense of symmetry all point to a Platonic ideal that praises the same things in the universe one experienced through this idea. This is also attributional in its primary form of engagement.
But Siedell has a great point in this quote
An artist’s distinctive singular voice emerges only to the degree that she allows herself to be shaped and formed by great works of art, literature, poetry, music; molded by great works of love, self-sacrifice, service, suffering, and heroism; and hewn through the resistance of a particular artistic medium. Only by recognizing learning from, and perhaps even submitting to the great work of others will the self develop fuller in its integrity, wholeness, and singular integrity. This is authentic individuality.
From Daniel Siedell’s article Art as an Ascetic Practice
I NEED A SECTION on
ART AS AN ASCETIC PRACTICE
The connection between the ascetic and the aesthetic
Siedell who is on staff at Coral ridge says that he tells his students, “ The intimate connection between the aesthetic and the ascetic is a theme I often probe with my students. We talk about delivering and cultivating disciplines in the studio that will mold, cultivate, and enhance the decision making required to produce powerful works that comes from a rich and robust life experience honed through sustained encounters with and lived for others, for our neighbor, and even for God. These disciplines are adapted directly form the classical Christian disciplines of prayer, fasting, reading of Scripture, alms giving, solitude, silence, contemplation and physical labour…”
Siedell Quote he goes on…Like Christian practice, artistic practice is a struggle. For both the ultimate goal is ultimately aesthetic. The Christian is to present her life to the Farther, lived with and through the work of Christ and the Holy Spirit, as a work of art, a beautiful work wrought through denial and struggle in love.
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