The highest art is always the most religious, and the greatest artist is always a devout person. – Abraham Lincoln
In college, I attended the University of the Arts in Philadelphia. It was sort of the real world version of the old movie/TV series, FAME; a community of artists, dancers, musicians, and actors, all coming together to hone their craft, to be mentored by amazing instructors, and to be encouraged and challenged by the best of the best in their field.
With that many creative types together in one place, art was everywhere; with late night songwriting sessions, mini dance recitals, and painting parties popping-up at any hour of the day.
As an illustrator, and someone who had basically wanted to be an artist from the womb, it was one of the most invigorating, inspirational places I’d ever experienced.
As a lifelong Christian, through, it was a faith-shaking, head-scratching collision with something that had never occurred to me before: Some artists don’t believe in God.
Sure, I’d known people growing-up, who claimed no religious faith, and I guess plenty of them must have been singers or painters or dancers, but now, to be in a gathering that large, and to be confronted with the sheer number of performers and players who denied the existence of God, it was shocking to my spiritual system, to say the least.
You see, I completely get not believing in God, I really do, at least when it comes to many people who I encounter. I’m totally cool with plumbers and pilots and lawyers and bus drivers, who have trouble concluding that there is a Greater Source to this world, (though I could easily point them to evidence to the contrary in their particular career experience).
But when I see those who paint and write songs, who compose musicals and form sculptures, unable to sense the Divine in their midst, I simply marvel at their profound blindness; how they could be so extremely close to light, and yet so unable to see it.
There’s something incredibly sacred about the Arts; the way that they allow ordinary people to be “creators”; to actually participate, in some infinitesimal way, in work that echoes the very work of God.
Many years ago, I was sitting in front of my computer with a guitar, and as I’d heard people describe a million times, a melody “just came to me”. I started playing and singing simultaneously, and the words flowed from my mouth, faster than I could capture them. Within a few minutes, I sat there with a song that had never existed on the planet, before I sat down, (barring any unintended copyright infringement of course).
In those quiet moments, in that tiny spare bedroom in a suburban townhome, I remember the hair standing-up on my arms, and my heart beating loudly enough to hear it. I remember having the overwhelming feeling that I was siting on holy ground.
It was the most real that God had ever been to me.
It was as if He was giving me a tiny glimpse into the act of speaking something into being; the Bible’s description of the Creation story.
I am especially fascinated by professional musicians and artists who passionately, repeatedly, and triumphantly deny God, while the very art that they create, points directly and unmistakably to Him. It’s like a child, who wants desperately to disown his or her parents, yet in whose own wrinkled smile, distinct laughter, or specific hand shape, they are unquestionably branded as sons and daughters.
I have profoundly experienced God’s presence in the music and art, made by those whose expressed purpose with it, was to refute His very existence. I long to meet these people; not to get their autographs, or to fawn over them, but to genuinely thank them, for reflecting a Creator they cannot or will not acknowledge. I want to tell them that the very method they to use to describe a Godless world, is often my very reason for still believing.
I find religion in the songs of the faithless.
I don’t believe that artists are better or more holy or more reverent than other people, (certainly the opposite is often true), yet I am convinced that those who create, when they create, are closer in those moments than any, to the very heart of God.
Today, as you create, or as you listen, watch, or sing the work crafted by others, may it encourage you that every work of art, has a creator, who is reflected in it.
It might cause you to look around at everything you see, and view it all as the work of an Artist’s hand.
