Finding God in the arts

by Dr Raymond Perrier · August 10, 2014

Imagine a group of highly talented people who through their work were able to influence large parts of the population, sometimes in invisible and subtle ways. �Imagine if the Church built up a wonderful tradition of support and collaboration with that group of people over many centuries.

St Aiden’s Chapel in Grahamstown, a beautiful stone neo-gothic building, is now used by the Arts Festival.

And then imagine if, in the last 150 years, the Church had almost entirely lost that relationship such that it felt that they now operated in two parallel universes.

Wouldn�t that be a shocking waste and a missed opportunity?

I fear that this is what has become of the Church�s relationship with artists and so with the arts. But why?

A few weeks ago the Jesuit Institute attended the National Arts Festival in Grahamstown. If you have not visited this yourself it is hard to imagine the sheer scale of the event: 2500 performances of 350 different productions in dozens of venues dotted around the small city. Every lamppost, tree and fence covered in posters advertising the various performances of drama, comedy, classical music, jazz, traditional dance, contemporary dance, visual arts, lectures and even puppetry.

We were there working with Spiritfest which is based at the Anglican cathedral to help people to explore the spiritual dimension of the arts.

Grahamstown is known as the �City of Saints�; indeed many of the churches and schools named after saints are used as venues for festival activities. And yet, even with an explicit intervention such as Spiritfest, the spiritual dimension of creating and experiencing art goes mostly unnoticed.

But this was not always the case. Recall that in previous centuries the Church was the single most important patron of the arts and religious subjects were the focus of most artistic expression.

Any list of the greatest artistic achievements of all time will be dominated by religious works: in sculpture, Michelangelo�s Piet�; in painting, Leonardo�s Last Supper; in music, Handel�s �Hallelujah Chorus�; in poetry, Dante�s Divine Comedy; in drama, Goethe�s Faust; in architecture, the medieval cathedrals.

The arts and religion both help us to do something similar: to enable us to look beyond our day-to-day concerns and draw us up to something higher, or inwards to something deeper, or outwards to something bigger. Theologians have fancy terms for this � the transcendent or the numinous or �the other�; in other words, the recognition that there is more to reality than what lies on the surface.

One of the defining characteristics of humans is our desire to reach out to these higher, deeper, bigger realities.

The arts and religion also paradoxically do the opposite. They help us to see within the big picture, the role of the individual human person. When we applaud at the end of a great spectacle we are acknowledging each of the individuals who made that possible. Notice how at the end of a film each person involved, from the grandest to the lowliest, gets their name listed.

So when politics and the media and academia can sometimes lose focus on the individuals�or treat them merely as cogs in a bigger machine � the arts and religion at their most powerful show us that the big questions and the grand vision are made up of individual persons. That connects closely to the fundamental Christian understanding that each human is uniquely created by God.

It is, I fear, the failure of the Church to recognise the unique creation that is each artist that has resulted in this modern non-relationship between the arts and the Church.

Let�s face it: artists by and large do not fit into neat models of what the world �should� be like. They are unpredictable and strong-willed; they often lead lives that are do not follow social or ethical conventions; they say things that we do not approve of; they are comfortable with paradox and contradiction � in other words they are creative.

But if the Church used only works from artists of which she approved, our church walls would be pretty bare, our choirs would have little to sing, and the Vatican Museums would be vast empty chambers.

The Jesuits ran St Aidan�s school in Grahamstown for almost 100 years and, ironically, the school closed 40 years ago just as the Arts Festival was starting. The school is now the office of the local education department and the room that was the chapel�a beautiful stone neo-gothic building �usually stands empty.

But for the eleven days of the festival it was filled again with praise of God: not because it was being used as a chapel but because it was a jazz caf�.

The artists who performed there � who had not taken vows of poverty, chastity and obedience �helped raise up the hearts and minds of their listeners in a way that was still strangely prayerful.

Collaboration in the past between the Church and artists has been constructive, creative and mutually enriching because the Church was able to take seriously the unique characteristics of the individuals who are artists.

There was not an artist I spoke to at the festival who felt that their skills and perspective on the world were simply the result of a random biological act. They had a sense of the spiritual, of the other. But most did not find formal religion a place that helped them to explore that; some had stories of being excluded or rejected by churches.

The artists I met felt they were creative because they felt created and that their creations in turn connected them with the Creator.

One famous South African singer, now operating on the world stage, commented to me that he could feel deep inside the difference between singing religious songs and other works.

I am sure that the artists would be very comfortable with the words of Vatican II that we are �co-creators� with God in God�s enterprise.

The challenge to formal religion is to find a way of co-creating with artists so that we can all journey together towards the one Creator.