"Art is beauty and God is beauty. If you can get people to look at art; you are bringing them closer to Him, even if they don't know His name."
"My own definition of beauty is that which perpetually satisfies us. You look at it again and again and there is more of it to satisfy us. I would say that beauty is very much an attribute of God - He is essential beauty. But only those of us who have been fortunate enough to have faith know where beauty comes from. For the others, they are responding to beauty and responding to Him, though they mightn't be aware of that - they are responding to the pure, free, strong, loving spirit of God."
-- Sister Wendy Beckett here.
At the point that Art (in the larger sense) ceases to describe our experiences of God, I wonder what it describes?
I wonder if there is something inherent in the "being of a human" that always is searching for that spark of what we call divine -- that the search for beauty is the search for God, but disguised. Maybe it is in the searching for beauty and in the finding that we can re-discover the divine even in secular Art.
All artists feel that pull -- that indescribable state of being where you dwell in a place outside of self. Here a Christian will understand that he/she is participating an act that makes God God -- the act of creation. Here will we really find Imago Dei -- the artist participating in Divine Creation.
I have long believed that this is a neglected area of theology.
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