Art and Spiritual Practice

By Christine Valters Paintner - May 18, 2009

Art is an ancient and universal language used to confront life's difficulties and find ways of healing. The power of dance, music, ritual, and poetry have long been used to reveal and teach. Catholicism, as a two thousand year-old faith tradition, is thoroughly rooted in the power of the imagination. Myth, symbol, image, and metaphor are at the heart of the ways in which we try to understand reality and God - from psalms to icons, cathedrals to parables. The theologian and artist Jeremy Begbie writes that "The urge to make and enjoy art seems to be universal: the impulse to scratch out images on stone walls, revel in the delight of notes strung together, shape and re-shape words into patterns, and so on." He goes on to say that these activities go beyond entertainment and self-expression, that "they can also reveal, disclose, open up the world we live in, and in unique ways. In other words, they can be vehicles of discovery." The creation of art offers a vehicle of discovery - a discovery of insights into who we are, who God is, and who God calls each one of us to be - which is at the heart of using art as a form of prayer. All of the arts are rooted in a physical process, providing us with an increased awareness of our senses. This helps us to bypass critical thinking and to respond from our bodies and sensual awareness. It also gives God other ways to speak to us while providing us with other ways to respond.

As John O'Donohue says, ‘at the deepest level, creativity is holiness.' Creativity is a powerful shaping force in human life. It is an intangible human capacity that also seems to transcend human capacities. Creativity is "the process of bringing something new into being," something that did not exist before - an idea, a new arrangement, a painting, a story. This creation, which is a new reality, works to enlarge our ways of seeing the world and human consciousness of what is possible.

The creative process - creating for the joy of doing rather than for the product, is to explore creativity in a deeply intimate way and honors the process itself rather than focusing on the finished work. To be truly creative, one must move between states of openness to new associations of ideas and states of focused explorations of these associations. The meditative mind is open to flashes of insight because it is open rather than constricted. Similarly, prayer is an act focused more on the process itself rather than the outcome. We engage in a discipline within which we cultivate an attitude of openness towards surprise and serendipity, while we wait with patience and humility.