Art As Religion

Two fuzzy words and that’s alright.

I don’t mean art as an investment or hedge against inflation. And I’m not referring to religion as some sort of hollow ritual reeking of piety and drained of relevance. Not the illusion of permanence but rather the experience of emergence.

In their best sense both art and religion are experiential and share the common goal of transformation and transcendence. They reach. They move us beyond words. Yet each is an expression grounded in the world of human possibility. The most intimate moments between people or a solitary in-dwelling have a religious dimension. When I was drawn into Van Gogh’s iris flowers vibrating on the wall in Amsterdam I was as transfixed and lifted as a shaman touching the sublime. A numinous moment from liturgical music is no different than viewing a Japanese ceramic exhibit or watching Judith Jamison from the Alvin Ailey troupe dancing Revelations.

The way that dance or sculpture redefines visual space, music rearranges acoustic space. They each bring us a sense of the sacred. So too does poetry by reinvigorating language and evoking what is ineffable. Poetry can be a portal to a realm beyond explication; not religion the noun but religious the adjective, as in a religious experience.

We need, at least I need, to be fed in this way. To find, in the quotidian, what is resoundingly and overwhelmingly true and felt. There is an essence, a mystery to existence which art yields in glimpses. After all, one must prepare for the afterlife, futile but a fine madness.  

I avoid the word spiritual only because it seems to have been hijacked by the New-Agers or quasi-Buddhists; those who have changed their names to Sunset or Sylvan Glen Glade. Same with the word soul which has been debased from overuse. Too bad, I welcome these words back into ordinary discourse.

I think of spirit as the breath, as to enthuse, an outpouring of vitality, exuberance, an offering of oneself. Soul is a metaphor for that most vulnerable inscape; the place where we live in quietude, contemplatively. To live fully is to bring them together. One derivation of the word religion is meant to bind. It says nothing about the supernatural. It is enough to live wholly rather than holy. Or to put it another way, what humans do out of their spirit and soul is holy, worthy of wor(th)ship.

To pause at the bud on the morning glory that wasn't there yesterday. To walk in the woods and become a vessel. Devoutly to notice. To repair what we can. To act religiously.