Spiritual Touchstone: Spiritual Practice and the Arts

Spiritual Touchstone:

Spiritual Practice and the Arts
By Rev. Dr. Melinda V. McLain

“Art enables us to find ourselves and lose ourselves at the same time.”
—Thomas Merton, Trappist monk and author (1915-1968)

Having just returned from our annual opera-cation in Santa Fe, New Mexico, I’ve been thinking about the art and life of the great painter Georgia O’Keefe.  Although her art is classified as modern and abstract, her paintings have always seemed quite realistic to me because I have spent a lot of time in the high deserts where she painted things pretty much the way they actually look, albeit she paints them from her own unique perspective.  For her flowers, she zooms in on the minute details, while her landscapes are sweeping vistas replete with the amazing colors of New Mexico.  But if you take the time to visit these places and pay attention, you too can see what she saw in a given place.

Being able to recognize that everything can be seen or experienced in a new or different way is a great gift from the practice of making art to our spiritual practice. Making and/or seeing art can also help us to exercise our ability to see and perceive the world in a new way.

We all have the ability to perceive the same things quite differently once we take into account the way our experiences, education, and current life situation affect our ability to make sense of the world.  This is a wonderful gift AND it can be a source of difficulty in a diverse community.  The difficulty comes when any one of us simply assumes that others share our same point of view or worse yet that our point of view is exclusively correct.

Recognizing that a flower can be experienced differently and/or seen differently is a good way to correct our sense that “my way” is the only way. This understanding can then be applied to disagreements between people and can become the basis for expanding our empathy - the willingness to recognize the point of view of someone else.

Do you enjoy looking at art? Have you ever felt your heart stirred by a particular painting or sculpture? How does the experience of making or seeing art affect your spirituality?