Art and Spirituality

The summer homily series asked the question, “who is Jesus to you now.”  This summer i had the opportunity to take a class through CMU partly called Arts Approaches to Spirituality. When i embarked on my course project, i asked Who is God to me – what kind of images do i have for God?  This led me on an incredible journey.  I researched images of God from the Bible, Christian hymnody and reflected on characteristics of God and contemporary characterizations of these images.  What emerged was an artistic representation of at least twelve of these images (three colours, three birds, three trees, circle, hole, rain sound).

One set of images is the colour green, a golden oak tree and a pelican.  What could all these have in common?!  The colour green often evokes ideas of the earth, of creation, fertility.  A gnarled old oak tree, in its golden years can evoke ideas of wisdom, ancientness and solidity.  The pelican was an image i discovered in the earliest Christian practices.  It was believed that a mother pelican would feed her young from her own blood as the ultimate in personal sacrifice for her offspring, and so, it became an image for how God loves us sacrificially, giving of her very self so that we might live.  For me, these images came together to represent characteristics of a perfect, divine Mother.  A hymn i discovered in the HWB says this wonderfully and so i invite you to sing #482 Mothering God, You gave me Birth.

Another set is the colour orange, twin silver birches and a sparrow.   The birch tree often grows in stands that are genetically identical.  The sparrow is used as a symbol of companionship, since it is rarely seen alone.  Orange is sometimes represented as a healing colour and a colour of joy.

When i was growing up, there was this community of Aunts that was my mother’s sisters.  I watched them with keen observations (not without some envy, since i had no sisters of my own).  I noticed how they cared for each other, interrupted each other’s thoughts, laughed uproariously together and seemed to share a familial bond that was the most intense i have seen.  Their joy in each other seemed to draw us in.  When they were all in the kitchen together with my Grandma during family gatherings, that’s where i wanted to be, too.  Never mind that i may very well be pulled into drying the dishes; i wanted to be at the centre of this incredible joy-filled love. This was community at its best.  They seemed to know each other in a deeply personal way (they all grew up sharing the same bedroom!) and loved each other unconditionally.  They each have their distinct personalities and views, but the love they have for each other goes beyond their differences. 

When i reflect on the characteristics of God, i see how some of them are demonstrated in this beautiful community of sisters that i have seen up close throughout my life.  There is such joy in the community of God – the Trinity – that we can’t help but be drawn in when we catch a glimpse of this divine gift. 

Have you ever just let yourself go in joy-filled laughter?  This is an icon of God.  Have you ever been in a circle of unconditional acceptance?  This is an icon of God.  Has there even been someone in your life that knows you intimately enough to occasionally know one of your thoughts?  This too, is an icon of God.  We catch glimpses of her Glory through pictures of sisterhood.

 Another set of images has the colour purple, a branch of pinecones and a phoenix.  If every good part of creation can be a window to God, imagine seeing God in seeds and new beginnings.  The pinecone needs intense heat to burst open and release the seed that then can grow into a new tree.  Sometimes when God comes to us, there is such intensity that it can be painful.  We don’t understand what God is doing in our lives but we know it hurts.  Often in the scriptures, God says, “I am doing a new thing…”.  Sometimes God comes to us in the new.

The legend of the phoenix varies from story to story, but what is true in each of them is that, after a long time, she builds a nest and burns up.  Then within the nest amongst the ashes is an egg and in that egg is a new phoenix that hatches and the cycle continues.

Sometimes the things and ideas and ways of doing things that we most cherish burn up.  They end, they change, they die.  I have seen many things in my life end this way.  The church i was born into died and that really hurt, but it also meant that i could be here, among you.  Some of the old images of God that i had been given became stale and meaningless to me, but that gave me the opportunity to embark on a new journey of discovery, which has led to incredible gifts of insight and a deeper spirituality. 

Sometimes we don’t understand the deeper meanings to the endings we experience, whether that’s relationships that end, or miscarriages or other deaths, or betrayals by friends.  This is part of the deep mystery that God has planted in the universe and it does it no justice to explain it all.  One of the most humble prayers we can submit ourselves to is for God to be born in us, and surrender to that new seed of God within – whatever that brings.  I invite you to sing this prayer with me, found in HWB #191 O Little Town of Bethlehem, vs. 3&4.

There is much more i could say about this project.  I designed it over and over with so much in mind.  But i will conclude by talking about the spirals in the design and the hole in the centre.

The swirls are to represent a simple labyrinth – a design that has one path towards a centre.  This speaks to the journey of life: the important things somehow find a way to return to us.  When we miss an important life lesson, we have the opportunity to learn it again, somewhere else, as it comes around again.  When we lose something, we find something as well if we are paying attention. Life seems to somehow carry similar themes as we go along.

At the very centre is absolutely nothing.  It is a hole.  In the end, we can not know God.  We can not say that God is this, or God is that.  We can see the Divine in many things, in the created world, in people, in ideas, but, in the end, we can not fully know God.  The hole speaks to us of this truth.  It also represents the womb of God, out of which comes everything that is created.  God is passionately creative and so, the image of a womb is used to evoke the idea of things being created out of God, just as we can be born again of the Spirit of God.

The hole also represents an idea that has been in my mind since the early 1990’s at Bible College.  I came to understand that since we are all created in the image of God, as we live out whom we were created to be, we reflect an aspect of who God is.  So, to liken that to a circle, if we were all to stand in the perfect place, the unique place where we were created to be, it would make a perfect circle, with each of us equidistant from the centre.  Then, if the centre were above us and were represented as a hole and each of us were to look through it, we would each see something slightly, or even dramatically different.  So too it is with God and how we experience the Divine.  Each of us has a different, yet equally valid experience of God when we live out of who we were created to be.  When we participate in community, we have the opportunity to see God in a variety of ways through each other’s lives and each other’s reflections of who they experience God to be.

Laura Funk, Sept. 27, 2009