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Reflections

Category: Art and Spirituality

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Artists Speaking About Their Art

I am honored to be included in this compilation of quotes by artists speaking about their art as a part of a grant project to explore creativity and spirituality.  Some intriguing words for reflection found there, not to mention links to some fabulous artists’ websites.  Click on over to find some inspiration. How would you articulate the connection between your creativity (whether visual, literary, movement, music, etc.) and your spirituality?  Feel free to answer in the comments below or provide a link back to your blog if you post a response there.  I’d really love to hear your responses. -Christine

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Longing for Beauty

“In one way, of course, God has given us the Morning Star already: you can go and enjoy the gift on many fine mornings if you get up early enough. What more, you may ask, do we want? Ah, but we want so much more–something the books on aesthetics take little notice of. But the poets and the mythologies know all about it. We do not want merely to see beauty, though, God knows, even that is bounty enough. We want something else which can hardly be put into words–to be united with the beauty we see, to pass into

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Words

After spending much of my summer immersed in both images and words I have been contemplating the relationship between them.  In my lettering class, the teacher began by saying that words are “bearers of meaning.”  I like the image the poem offers, that we come to know things more deeply in naming them.  And while words can feel ethereal or disembodied, it is true that there is something much more intimate about jasper, rather than red stone.  The words help to root us in the beauty of the particular which is what an incarnational spirituality is about. My life is filled with

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Creating Space

I had a dream the other night: In the building where we live one of the condos is going to be rented out for a couple of months, so I decide to go take a look at it. When I first walk in, there is a small cramped kitchen with a stairway going up from the middle of the room. I climb the stairs and discover a lovely room up above with floor-to-ceiling windows and a view of some lovely old stone church ruins (similar to the ones I saw in Ireland–photo above is on the Dingle Peninsula) and beyond

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Going Naked

“My own belief is that one regards oneself, if one is a serious writer, as an instrument for experiencing. Life—all of it—flows through this instrument and is distilled through it into works of art. How one lives as a private person is intimately bound into the work. And at some point, I believe one has to stop holding back for fear of alienating some imaginary reader or real relative or friend, and come out with personal truth. If we are to understand the human condition, and if we are to accept ourselves in all the complexity, self-doubt, extravagance of feeling,

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Wonder

Earlier this summer I watched the film “Children of Men” with Clive Owens and Michael Caine.  It is largely a bleak window into a future world where no children have been born for 18 years and everything is largely in chaos.  A young black woman becomes pregnant and there is a race to protect and save her.  For me, the whole movie was worth this one scene near the end where she walks down the stairs of a ramshackle building carrying her newborn infant.  There is a war raging around them as people try and take cover inside the building

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Inevitable Creating

“After all, the goal is not to make art, but to be in that wonderful state that makes art inevitable.” -Robert Henri from The Art Spirit “I don’t believe in it. . .Plumbers don’t get plumbers block, and doctor’s don’t get doctor’s block; why should writers be the only profession that gives a special name to the difficulty of working and then expect sympathy for it?” -Philip Pullman, author of The Golden Compass (His Dark Materials, Book 1) These two quotes have caught my attention today, in part because they seem to each speak of a different end of the

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