Scribbles from 4am

The prayer you don't say
will keep you up
till the break of day.

As you toss in bed,
sleepless through the night,
it arises in your head
to get up and to write.

So scribble your restless heart
as it searches for its home:
they may remain far apart,
but at least you'll have a poem.

The Meaning of Art

"To give the intellectual meaning of the Divine work of art is possible only by creating art."  

From a homily by Romilo Knežević

The relationship between the mystical life and the creative life is so deep as to often be overlooked, because our minds gets in the way.  For some reason, we don't intuit that a creative action requires a creative response: art is hung in museums and not in studios, while orchestras play to audiences and not to musicians.  The arts have become spectator sports, where the layman is puzzled and the intellectual evaluates.  So often people think the correct response to art  is to ask the questions, "What's it really about? What does it really mean?" These questions are asked about art as much as they are about religious life, but they are intellectual questions, which can only receive intellectual answers; and so they are essentially different than artistic or mystical questions, which must receive artistic or mystical answers.

Art doesn't work on the level of an intelligible formal cause alone, but asks us to value the fact that there is matter at all.  Paint, wood, sound, and wool are not the material wrapper to the formal lollipop anymore than human hands are to human thoughts.  All of this matter, this stuff was created with intrinsic value of its own: "God saw everything that he made and behold, it was very good" (Gen 1:31). The soul's greatness lies in its ability to elevate and sanctify the matter given to it.  This is true in the bread and wine offered by the priest in Liturgy.  This is true in health when we exercise and eat well.  This is true is social ethics when we meet the needs of our neighbor so that we can both be more than we were given.

So in one sense art pertains to the material cause, but even more so to the efficient cause.  If God's creativity is the thing we are the most thankful for, the only proper response is more creativity: "Go and do likewise" (Luke 10:37).  If we have really perceived the beauty in art we must become creative agents ourselves.  If we really hear beautiful music, we may so resonated as to sing along.  However the synaesthetic quality of humanity means that we do not only have to answer music with music: as so often we answer music with dance, which is no less creative.  The best way to give thanks for being created is to create.

So what is it really all about?  The final cause of art grows out of God's creativity and person, which are identical.  The end of every human soul is to become a partaker in the divine nature (2 Pet 1:4) such that our humanity resonates in a divine manner (theosis). Art is an energetic microcosm in which we become more creative and more persons, because just as art transforms material into a means to unite the artist with his audience, so we are the material which must be transformed to unite divinity and humanity.

Meaning means the relationship between the two entities, or the medium by which the two entities communicate themselves to one another.  Man finds his identity in being simultaneously the receptive listener in this conversation and the language created to speak the God's own Word.  We are the means to his end and we are what he means to say: "The medium is the message" (McLuhan).

The paradoxical dual- (and even hypostatic) existence of humanity, as both means and end, is the heart of artistic inspiration.  When are truly creative, we understand we can only move our pen or voice to the degree that we are moved ourselves.  Our creativity cannot come from ourselves, because what we wish to express is ourselves: how can a mouth say a word which is bigger than it?

I need a mouth as wide as the sky

to say the nature of a True Person, language

as large as longing.

—Rumi

Our creativity must draw on a creativity which is more primordial than our near-sighted idiosyncracies.  Art is a means of communication between the artist and his audience, which necessarily means it is something bigger than the artist herself: so her work must ecstatically root itself in a creativity deeper than any dreams she has sketched or criticism she could anticipate.  Some religious people root their criticism of some men in God's deeper criticism of all men, but with regard to art neither our criticism nor our appreciation cannot fathom the depths of his creativity.  So let us sketch his sketches and sing his songs until they are truly ours.

Photo credits:
Iconographer: http://vimeo.com/48602918
Arvo Pärt and Tintinnabuli: http://www.last.fm/music/Arvo+Pärt
Woman with Turkish Carpet: http://davidcolemanphoto.photoshelter.com/image/I0000WsPk0.e.aF0

Anam Cara: Friends In Silence

This book has been with me for almost a decade now.
One of my most formative books, without me realizing it.

"One of the tasks of true friendship is to listen compassionately and creatively to the hidden silences.  Often secrets are not revealed in words, they lie in the depth of what is unsayable between two people.  In modern life there is an immense rush to expression.  Sometimes the quality of what is expressed is superficial and immensely repetitive.  A greater tolerance of silence is desirable, that fecund silence, which is the source of our most resonant language.  The depth and substance of a friendship mirrors itself in the quality and shelter of the silence between two people."

When We're Away

When I think of what you hold
is it only wine and wheat?
Will this Mystery please unfold
and my hungry heart entreat?

Could all the days of your life,
when you walked this land,
put an end to all my strife
and set themselves in my hand?

All my friends and all your souls
safely swim in holy wine.
God who loves, God who consoles,
You gave me all I thought was mine.

Friends go away and rarely meet
scattered way too far:
crushed grapes and ground wheat
offered upon an altar.

I come to take this bread and wine,
I make my way to You,
You took all I thought was mine:
O Lord, take me too.

The Political Aisle

We're interested in what's right.
You can have whatever's left.

A Word On Time

My word embraces the silence as a drop holds the sea.

            A drop and the sea are thoroughly water: the only difference is time.  

One day a drop will fall and be held by the sea, 

which is nothing but the largest drop 

who receives its dancing brothers on its dimpled face.

            A word is born out of the same silence to which it will return.  

A word is silence through and through, though there is a difference of time.  

In time a word is a moving silence, 

dancing from mouth to ear, mind to mind, heart to heart. 

Then what is 

time? 

Eternity swallows every single moment 

while eternity is carried in every moment. 

            Rather than being a lost and lonely sister to the Past and the Future, 

the Present is their Mother who holds both so close to her breast.  

The Past bemoans her suffering and the Future confides her anxieties.  

The Past recounts her joys while the Future shares her hopes.  

In it all, the Present has selflessly receded to 

more lovingly listen to both her daughters. 

            She is that blink of an eye that embraces everything in sight.

Beauty and Balthasar

I read the following quote almost six years ago,
and then I knew I wasn't alone in my theological interest.

"Beauty is the word that shall be our first.  Beauty is the last thing which the thinking intellect dares to approach, since only it dances as an uncontained splendour around the double constellation of the true and the good and their inseparable relation to one another.  Beauty is the disinterested one, without which the ancient world refused to udnerstand itself, a word which both imperceptibly and yet unmistakably has bid farewell to our new world, a world of interests, leaving it to its own avarice and sadness.  No longer loved or fostered by religion, beauty is lifted from its face as a mask, and its absence exposes features on that face which threaten to become incomprehensible to man.  We no longer dare to believe in beauty and we make of it a mere appearance in order the more easily to dispose of it.  Our situation today shows that beauty demands for itself at least as much courage and decision as do truth and goodness, and she will not allow herself to be separated and banned from her two sisters without taking them along with herself in an act of mysterious vengeance.  We can be sure that whoever sneers at her name as if she were the ornament of a bourgeois past—whether he admits it or not—can no longer pray and soon will no longer be able to love."

From The Glory of the Lord. A Theological Aesthetics, Part I: Seeing the Form (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1982), 18.