SOME FUNDAMENTAL QUESTIONS

How do we live our relationship with God?
Is it an experience? If so, does it involve our whole being? The experience of God is lived emotionally, intellectually, and also physically. The body takes an active part in contemplation. The liturgy is addressed above all to our body: through our senses, it touches our soul and brings us into God's presence. Any experience, in particular one of God, begins with an impulse in the body.

Who is this God in whom you believe?
Personally, I believe in an incarnate God who came to share our human experience, taking on a human body and showing us that through the human experience and with the help of this body, we can live here on earth in a close and real relationship with God. For a long time it was thought, because of certain deviations, that Christianity saw the body and the spirit in opposition to each other. This is not my reading of the Gospels, nor of Christian thought. On the contrary! In the Christian experience, even more so than in other great religions, the spirit and the body are called to a complete and total unity and the body is called to become spiritual. Not to be forgotten, but to share the experience of the spirit, the experience of God. All this is possible because He whom we follow and who accompanies us in the faith is this incarnate and living God.

How do you express your experiences?
They cannot be explained by reasoning or theories, but rather by the so-called symbolic language. The symbol reveals another reality. Since the experience is given to us to be shared and is nourished in the sharing, it must be expressed. To do this, it is necessary to enter this wonderful world of symbolism, so necessary to the spiritual realm. In the Gospels, Christ uses language that is extremely symbolic. The parables are suggestive, opening, and revealing. They are not told in a rational language that closes and tries to control the experience. Experience HATES control. When you are in love, don't you hate when somebody tries to tell you what you are experiencing?

OUR SOCIETY : A CRISIS OF SYMBOLISM

Symbolic language withdraws from our daily life and, although our culture appeals to the body, we live disconnected from the experience. As artistic director of the Gesu¹ since 1993, I met hundreds of artists who were extremely concerned about the question of how to express their experience of God. Driven by the desire to fully express in their own language this fundamental experience, some of them make enormous sacrifices to respond to this call.

What is rather extraordinary in today's artists is their sensitivity toward sacred places, their respect for them. They sense a certain something… Very quickly, they enter into communion with the place. This sensitivity comes to them owing to the fact that they are connected to the experience. They sense all the human experiences which have filled this place, all the men and women who have come to lay down their quest, their searching, just as in the Holy Land one senses the faith of millions of pilgrims who have passed there for centuries, the human experiences, happy or sad, which have permeated the ground and surroundings. That's what a sacred place is. The artist knows it. It's a shame that the faithful-guardians of these places-often do not have this awareness!

To speak of the experience of God today will restore the meaning of symbols. The most sought-after these days are those that create an interior atmosphere of silence even in the midst of sight and sound. Nowadays, our eyes are very, very tired, because there are so many demands placed upon them. They need to rest, like our ears need the quiet, a necessary disposition to be able to grasp God's presence in the material, in the world, and to be in deep communion with oneself, with others and with God.

The artist doesn't take a didactic or rational approach, but a creative one that places him little by little into his own world of symbols. And the more one delves into the human person, the closer one comes to God. For we who believe in an incarnate God, the more one approaches the dignity and the scope of human beauty, the more one touches God. And the more one approaches God, the more one understands what it is to be a man or a woman. Above all, one develops a respect and deep sensitivity for human dignity.

SOME PARALLELS BETWEEN ART AND SPIRITUALITY

The difference between the artistic experience and the spiritual experience is intellectual.
The same starting point: the material.
The artist has only his material when he starts to work. The dancer has his body; the sculptor has wood and iron-nothing else. In the spiritual life too, there is only the raw material: our existence, our being in its entirety. We can't escape it!

An endless quest.
Both the spiritual person and the artist, are searching, a profound quest for the absolute, which never ends. A painter knows how to recognize the moment of the last stroke of the brush; he then experiences a profound spiritual unity. One glimpse of eternity. But, here one moment and gone the next! And when he begins another canvass, it is blank again. So the spiritual life alternates between moments of greater or lesser intensity, always returning to the beginning, because God, imperceptibly, escapes us.

Everything is in the material.
In the course of one's work, one sees what must emerge, which was already there. The artist is there to bring out the Presence that is there in the material. The primary material of those who create is their lives, their being. The canvass is only a mirror. In our lives too, everything is there. It is not we who bring God there-He is already there, alive, present everywhere, in all things. It is up to us to develop our perceptiveness and our receptiveness in order to allow Him to reveal Himself, that He can rise up through our lives.

The results are uncontrollable.
The fundamental vocation of art is somewhat skewed if the artist controls his discipline; if, before beginning, he knows what will be produced. Likewise, the spiritual life is unpredictable. All attempts at control just reveal the need for conversion! There are none so blind as those who think they know where they're going. In artistic acts, as in those of the spiritual life, when we are aware of being finally fulfilled and free of uncertainty, freed from our conditionings, our pains, our life's baggage, we can then savour a profound freedom: to be where we are wanted, where we are desired.
Beyond professions, beyond a series of planned acts, however beautiful, art and spirituality are a way of looking at others, ourselves and life; it is a way of living, but especially a way of being. Sometimes an artist is asked: "How long did it take to make this artwork?" "Well, my friend, all my life!" Creating does not stop. It is like breathing with the rhythm of God, with the rhythm of our souls.

SOME PRINCIPLES AND FUNDAMENTAL THOUGHTS

By delving into what's human, one is always sure to find the divine.
That's for sure. But if we delve into the person we imagine ourselves to be, we are taking the wrong road to meet God. It is necessary to dig, dig, dig. In the workshop, the artist may be alone, but never feels lonely. Solitude is precisely a place where one can really discover his humanity, confronting it, exposing it. This is not done in peaceful quietude. It's a real battle! Just like in the spiritual life. Prayer occurs through a profound encounter with ourselves… and with others, because we come close to touching God when we dig there too.

It is extremely important to marvel at life and our human endeavours. Art makes that happen. The person who creates is struck with wonder and calls those who are looking or listening to enter this world of astonishment. For Maurice Zundel, wonder is that zone where we lose all our familiar landmarks, where we go beyond our limits to enter into the openness necessary to meet God. It is the path to Beauty. It is also the only place where we can hope to escape from our conditionings and enter into another world.

What is your experience of the resurrection?
Inevitably, artists face this every day because they always create based on their own limitations and failures. It is through this insight that resurrection comes to them. Accepting mistakes can take the artwork somewhere else. Likewise in our lives, if we want to welcome God and we judge ourselves, we are blocked. We must let ourselves be loved. Nothing happens for nothing. Everything carries us elsewhere. What one perceives to be a failure can prove to be a springboard towards a more abundant life… if and only if one sheds on it a view of resurrection.

The body is pulled by the Breath of the Spirit.
A spiritualized body lives a conversion of the senses. In the sacrament of baptism, a secondary rite relates specifically to the senses: the officiant lays his hands on the senses of the future baptized and says Effata! ("Open up!"), a word which Christ pronounced when He cured somebody. Beyond the physical cure, it meant Open yourself up, open the person you are, open all your being! This baptismal ritual shows that our body takes part in the spiritual experience. Because our knowledge of God comes to us from our senses, our body has to change, our senses have to be converted.

Life is indivisible.
How can we separate contemplation from action? We are contemplative beings in action.

Art and spirituality are closely linked with humanity.
Praying links us with the major challenges of humanity, with the sufferings of the world, with its great stakes. If our prayer does not produce such an opening, it is because we have reached neither the human part in ourselves, nor God. A sacred work of art, even several centuries old, can continue to move us and to speak of a part of the experience of God. If art is not deeply linked with humanity, it is an escape. It is like running away, in order to forget. It is disguising the mission and the meaning, the purpose of art. But to create in order to forget, in order to flee, is also a travesty and betrayal of the religious experience.

FOR A THEOLOGY OF BEAUTY

In the words of theologian Hans Urs Von Balthasar: In a world without beauty, in a world which is perhaps not wholly without beauty, but which can no longer see it, or reckon with it, the Good also loses its attractiveness, the self evidence of why it must be carried out. In a world that no longer has any confidence in itself to affirm the beautiful, the proofs of the truth have lost their cogency…

Marie-Eve Homier
MIC Mission News
October-November-December 2005

1- (GESU) In a Montreal church, a theatre and creative centre for artist in residence. Annual event of sacred art.

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