In my hometown of Kansas City, MO people gather in the Crossroads District on the First Friday of every month in order to attend the Gallery openings. Suburbanites and Urbanites lay their differences aside and mix it up in crowded galleries and on street corners while artists and musicians play the muse for just this one precious night a month. The wine leaps to lips wearing joy and laughter. The arts! The arts! Viva la Arts! Well… let’s not get carried away… First Fridays is just one night a month. In Ray Bradbury’s The Martian Chronicles one character describes this common American attendee approach to the arts this way, “Art was something you took in Sunday doses, mixed with religion perhaps”.
The live theater, movies, rock concerts, gallery openings, and religious services are most obviously similar simply because we must attend them. They are finite and spacial, segmented from the rest of life, and clinically set aside in order for us to examine. And yet both Religion and Art inspire and explore the mystery of finite life trapped in eternity.
The obsessive quality of art is an attempt to reconcile opposites and keep equilibrium, and, as in religion, this is art’s validity. If you strip away the dogmas and doctrines, religion becomes a very precarious relationship between a frail and finite reality and a sense of all-present infinite reality; and it is such a strange disequilibrium that this struggle to create an equilibrium creates religion.
-Stephen De Staebler Reflections on Art and the Spirit
Even though Religion and Art are clearly competing for our time, a more inclusive definition of both would help dissipate this unnecessary dissonance. Though it would be easy to draw hard lines between Pop Art, High Art, True Religious Experience, and Tele-Evangelists perhaps putting them all together as simply expressions of the human desire to explore the mystery of life would keep us all, the Religious and the Artists, a little more humble; and a little less certain that our personal experience is the way, the truth, and the life.
Though we may live in an age where the mystery has been revealed to a greater degree, thanks to Jesus Christ making it perfectly clear He alone is the Way, the Truth, and the Life; He is still a mystery. A relationship with the living mystery of Jesus Christ is what the Aha! moments in Art and Religion are all about. Sadly, Art and Religion fail miserably when they forget their place and instead embrace the signs and experiences they have created as the mystery of Jesus Christ. Then they are little more than play actors who refuse to leave the theater once the show has ended and insist on walking about a dimly lit stage; reciting their lines to an empty auditorium.
Art & Religion
In my hometown of Kansas City, MO people gather in the Crossroads District on the First Friday of every month in order to attend the Gallery openings. Suburbanites and Urbanites lay their differences aside and mix it up in crowded galleries and on street corners while artists and musicians play the muse for just this one precious night a month. The wine leaps to lips wearing joy and laughter. The arts! The arts! Viva la Arts! Well… let’s not get carried away… First Fridays is just one night a month. In Ray Bradbury’s The Martian Chronicles one character describes this common American attendee approach to the arts this way, “Art was something you took in Sunday doses, mixed with religion perhaps”.
The live theater, movies, rock concerts, gallery openings, and religious services are most obviously similar simply because we must attend them. They are finite and spacial, segmented from the rest of life, and clinically set aside in order for us to examine. And yet both Religion and Art inspire and explore the mystery of finite life trapped in eternity.
Even though Religion and Art are clearly competing for our time, a more inclusive definition of both would help dissipate this unnecessary dissonance. Though it would be easy to draw hard lines between Pop Art, High Art, True Religious Experience, and Tele-Evangelists perhaps putting them all together as simply expressions of the human desire to explore the mystery of life would keep us all, the Religious and the Artists, a little more humble; and a little less certain that our personal experience is the way, the truth, and the life.
Though we may live in an age where the mystery has been revealed to a greater degree, thanks to Jesus Christ making it perfectly clear He alone is the Way, the Truth, and the Life; He is still a mystery. A relationship with the living mystery of Jesus Christ is what the Aha! moments in Art and Religion are all about. Sadly, Art and Religion fail miserably when they forget their place and instead embrace the signs and experiences they have created as the mystery of Jesus Christ. Then they are little more than play actors who refuse to leave the theater once the show has ended and insist on walking about a dimly lit stage; reciting their lines to an empty auditorium.