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Worship And the Arts
Rev. Sharon K. Dittmar
September 8, 2002

Joseph Campbell writes:

A sacred space is any space that is set apart from the usual context of life . . . You really don’t have a sacred space, a rescue land, until you find somewhere to be that’s not a wasteland, some field of action where there is a spring of ambrosia-a joy that comes from inside, not something external that puts joy into you-a place that lets you experience your own will and your own intention.[1]

If art and worship have one thing in common, it is this attempt to provide inspiration.  If they have another thing in common, it is how often they both slide into performance.

Don’t get me wrong, I appreciate, I want a quality concert, an emotional and thought-provoking sermon.  It’s just that art is meant to inspire, to be experienced, to do, not just to be critiqued, viewed or possessed.  And likewise, a sermon or worship service is a journey, a work in process.  I can’t say often enough that our object here on Sunday mornings is not perfection-will never be perfection, it is the journey, both good and bad, awkward and flawless.  Perhaps the larger questions is, are we ourselves the audience or the artist, and if we are (as I believe) the artist, is our purpose the outcome or the journey?

Joseph Campbell tells us that we do not have a sacred space until we have a place of joy inside, inside, not outside.  In the past few weeks, reading about art and artists, I found this common thread, this need even for our most talented artists to participate, to mix with, to co-create this internal spring.  The opera singer Leontyne Price says that “all artists are vessels.”  When she sings she says that she is “in the hands of God, who guides me far beyond any technical expertise that I may have.”[2]

Price believes in God, but even artists who don’t believe in God look towards that internal part of themselves that is like a well, deep and resonant, full of sustenance but not fully known.  One of the joys of the artistic process is that dance of mystery and discovery, like faith and its creation.

I thought of Campbell’s quote this week while I listened to a Susan Stamberg interview on National Public Radio.  The interview was with the author of the book, The Overscheduled Child (or The Hurried Child, I’m not sure), a book that addresses the problems of children with far too many things to do on their calendars, and not nearly enough free time.  Just this week my husband came home and told me that somehow, one of his colleagues at work, who had never gone on vacation, developed an extraordinary tan.  Peter asked him how this happened, and his colleague said “Oh, Peter, just you wait.  Soccer is really an enforced march.” 

The author of The Overscheduled Child maintains that children don’t need full calendars, to do lists, and the parental anxiety that comes along with them.  Instead they need our love, our time.  They need to know that they are enough as they are, not desperately scrambling to impress someone or get into a better school, but as they are.  Stamberg reminisced about the memories she had of spending endless hours laying in a field by her house as a child, doing, as she said “nothing”.  The author corrected her and said “But you were doing something.  You were reflecting, getting to know yourself.”  In my mind I saw Stamberg as a child laying in this field, sacred, set apart, learning from inside, far, far away from an enforced march.

Again I return to the question, is perfection or journey the goal.  There are artists and athletes who thrive under practice, who must embrace discipline for many reasons, who include a quest for perfection in their journey, and we delight at its creation, but not most of us, and not on Sunday mornings, not during worship.  I have come to believe that perfection can be a hidden enemy of both faith and art, preventing us from being, preventing us from creating, preventing us from growing.

In his essay “Concerning the Spiritual in Art and Painting in Particular”, painter Wassily Kandinsky writes

Connoisseurs admire “technique,” as one might admire a tight-rope walker, or enjoy the “painting quality”, as one might enjoy a cake.  But hungry souls go hungry away.  The public ambles through the rooms, saying “nice” or “interesting.”  Those who could speak have said nothing; those who could hear have heard nothing.  This condition is called “art for art’s sake.”  This annihilation of internal vibrations that constitute the life of the colors, this dwindling away of artistic force, is called “art for art’s sake.[3] 

Hungry souls go hungry away. 

What is our role in faith, art, worship?  Are we viewers or participants?  The power of art and worship or faith is that they move us (hopefully), they change us.  In his essay Kandinsky explains that the purpose of art is to connect the emotions of the artist to the emotions of the observer so that the observer is moved, becomes a participant, understands something about the artist’s vision.[4]  When I asked our Music Director, David Jackson, about the purpose of art he said virtually the same thing “artists are trying to express something so someone else feels something.”

I think about a collector who has a Picasso on her wall.  That’s “nice”, and probably a good investment, but does she like it?  Does it move her?  Does she have a connection to the emotions Picasso meant to convey?  Has this art changed her?

Last week I saw the film Possession, based on the book by the same name by the author A. S Byatt.  The film tells the story of two modern scholars, Maud and Roland, who discover an intimate relationship between two fictional Victorian poets, Randolph Ash and Christabel LaMotte.  Maud and Roland discover this relationship, which has been secret for over a century, through hidden letters, pieces of the poets’ work, diaries, and historical clues.  The movie is a good example of the power of art to connect people and evoke change. 

The opening action that sets the stage for the movie occurs when Roland, while researching Ash, stumbles across an original letter written by Ash in a collection of his work tucked away in the London Museum.  In a pivotal and uncomfortable scene Roland takes the letter, he steals it so that he can read it later.

We all know that no one should remove historical information.  I think Roland steals the letter because he feels its emotion.  This letter is the first of many of what will become love letters from Ash to LaMotte.  It is almost as if one hundred years later Roland can sense the illicit potential and performs an illicit act. 

I juxtapose this scene with the film’s opening scene, a Sotheby’s auction.  During this auction scene, an original plastic encased letter by Ash is held up for the elite audience and the highest bidder to win.  So distant, so removed, voyeuristic and controlling.  Art professor Diane Apostolos-Cappadona writes of the artistic process “The ‘magic’ of the initial creative process occurs within the individual and we are the recipients of that magic, which somehow becomes our magic.”[5]

How does art become our magic?  Are we possessed by its emotion and spirit, or are we possessed by a desire to have it, to own it, to control it?  Throughout the rest of the film we see Maud and Roland struggle with these issues of possession, who they are, what they learn, and how this changes them. 

When I think of art and faith or worship I think of holding on, and of sometimes holding too tightly.  It’s almost like a magic symbol.  We want to hold on to the art, our faith, our worship, keep it powerful and safe, or even ecstatic.  There is such joy in being swept away, by having this emotion come, that we are afraid to lose it.  So we will just hold on, even though everything always changes, and both art and faith are strangled when we hold too tightly.

In his essay “Art and Ultimate Reality”, theologian Paul Tillich explains “the religious danger of all sacramental religion is idolatry, the attempt to make a sacramentally consecrated reality into the divine itself . . . The artistic danger appears when things are used as mere symbols, losing their independent power of expression.”[6]  In his very Protestant way Tillich is talking about what happens when faith and art lose their fluidity, the very essential quality that connect them to humanity and the sacred.

Leontyne Price speaks of herself as a vessel.  Potter Cecilia Davis Cunningham explains “this process is not to be found in the single act of throwing a pot on the wheel.  It devolves from the larger process of the potter’s life, from the very rhythm of making.”[7]  Prior to shooting a film, director Ang Lee hosts an opening Chinese ceremony.  He explains “this ceremony is very good for putting ourselves aside, and for allowing inspiration to fill us.”[8]  Vessel, devolve, rhythm, process, inspiration, filling.  These are words of motion, fluidity, movement, and change.  These are not words of stagnation, not words of permanence.  We are moved by art precisely because it moves, and if it succeeds, it then moves us (not just professional artists, amateur artists, doodlers – does your art move you/mother-in-law learning to play piano after retirement-father-in-law).   This is also the pattern of sustaining faith and worship.

Tillich speaks about the idolatry of sacramental religion – the experience of calcifying objects and meaning into one thing that is perceived as divine.  One of the values that I treasure about Unitarian Universalism is our embrace of fluid faith and worship.  For many people this is not comforting, not stable, and it does have its problems.  But the strength is that there is always room for growth, change, there is always the ability to tap our internal well and find new voices, meaning, and language.  I would be so sad if my faith calcified.  There would be no new inspiration, no new joy and struggle.  Even worse my faith would not have the ability to cope with life, which always changes.

Margaret Mead writes:

Change and risk-taking are normal aspects of the creative process.  They are the lubricants that keep the wheels in motion.  A creative act is not necessarily something that has never been done; it is something you haven’t done before.[9]

In Divinity School I was required to participate in theological reflections.  We selected an incident and then, essentially, dissected it from every imaginable angle.  What were the emotions, the language, the situation, the characters, the symbols, similarity to myth or religious text?  As a caution, our teachers always told us “Expect change”.  My experience with theological reflection is that there is no way to authentically participate without being changed.  Authentic theological reflection is also a painful process that strips away assumptions before reassembling pieces, usually in a new fashion.  It is really a breathtaking enterprise of falling into the abyss before finding some ground to stand on again.  And it is a fluid process, there is no certainty where you or I will find ourselves at the end.

This is part of our Sunday experience here.  None of us knows where we will be at the end of our hour together.  We take part in a creative process here on Sunday mornings, you and I, the spirit between and among us.  Art, mostly through music, moves the experience to a deeper level.

The choir sings its anthem this morning and I feel joy and celebration.  Char sings a verse from “Over My Head” and I feel sorrow, sustenance, and hope.  I wasn’t in ministry very long before I learned that music shares and deepens a worship experience faster than words.  I have been part of countless memorial services where someone has said to me “I was fine until I heard Amazing Grace, or until the bag pipes played, or until I heard her favorite song. Then I started to cry”

“Fine” translates here as staid, composed, distant.  It is good to cry at a memorial service.  That could very well be the purpose of the service.  Crying means that we care, that we feel connected, that we are still connected.  Death is an ultimate experience of separation and isolation, and as much as people say they don’t want to cry, or feel embarrassed to cry, tears say “I loved you.”  I love you still.”  Tears say we are still connected.  And as much as people have this strange notion that it is undignified to cry, I think it is undignified to hold back honest tears, to attempt to deny love and connection.  I have learned that people can fool themselves through words including a well-crafted eulogy, but not music.

Last year many of us watched the national prayer service held in Washington D. C. after September 11.  For me, the words of the Reverend Doctor Billy Graham got in the way.  I found myself too concerned with what he said to feel consolation from the burden of sadness and isolation that was overwhelming me.  The deepest moment of connection for me was when Denyce Graves sang “America the Beautiful”.  That was when I could cry.  Then I felt the loss, pain, and struggle to hope.  The art matched my mood, deepened it, gave it focus, and I knew that although I was alone in my house, I was not alone in my tears.  Music provided the communal sharing for emotion, made it safe, true, and human.

This past week I watched an absolutely extraordinary PBS Frontline show entitled “faith and doubt at Ground 0”.  One woman whose mother died on that day had this to say about a memorial service she attended at Ground 0 in October 2001, “Music transported me to this place of hope.  What was in this mess was not the end of her spirit.”

Here we come back to music, or any art, taking us beyond the moment, the mess, and what we know, to a field, a well, a spring of ambrosia, leading us into a sacred space.  Wassily Kandinsky writes:

There is another art capable of further developments, which also springs from contemporary feeling.  Not only is it simultaneously its echo and mirror but it possesses also an awakening prophetic power which can have far-reaching and profound effect.  The spiritual life to which art belongs, and of which it is one of the mightiest agents, is a complex but definite movement above and beyond.[10]

This year First Church will host this awakening prophetic power through Sunday services, social activities, and adult education opportunities.  Making meaning with art is our worship theme for this year.  Later this fall we will have an intergenerational Halloween service in honor of the second book in the Harry Potter series.  I suspect that Professors McGonagall and Dumbledore will reappear with some new friends.  This fall we will also have a service on the death penalty seen through the eyes of the book, Dead Man Walking.  So many of you were moved by the opera performance last June, we will continue the dialogue. 

Lynn Meyers from the Ensemble Theatre will speak to us at a First Church dinner after we have had a chance to see new Ensemble Theatre productions.  Later there will be jazz, folk, Linton concert series opportunities, I hope some dance, a study group on the Epic of Gilgamesh, that great and ancient text about life and death that sounds a lot like Genesis, and of course, next spring, some Shakespeare.

With these art offerings I hope that you are moved, I hope that we are moved beyond where we sit and stand today.  I hope we dip into sacred wells and far fields, risk change, explore joy and pain, find connection to the sacred and one another, and do it together, not in perfection of form or for the purposes of perfection of being, but to honor what we are, human, evolving, creative, and holy.  May it always be so.

Reading

Every work of art is the child of its time; often it is the mother of our emotions.  It follows that each period of culture produces an art of its own, which cannot be repeated.  Efforts to revive the art principles of the past at best produce works of art that resemble a stillborn child.  For example, it is impossible for us to live and feel as did the ancient Greeks.  For this reason those who follow Greek principles in sculpture reach only a similarity of form, while the work remains for all time without soul . . . There is another art capable of further developments, which also springs from contemporary feeling.  Not only is it simultaneously its echo and mirror but it possesses also an awakening prophetic power which can have far-reaching and profound effect.  The spiritual life to which art belongs, and of which it is one of the mightiest agents, is a complex but definite movement above and beyond, which can be translated into simplicity.  This movement is that of cognition.  Although it may take different forms, it holds basically to the same internal meaning and purpose.  The causes of the necessity to move forward and upward-through sweat, suffering, evil and torments-are obscure.  When a stage has been reached at which obstacles have been cleared from the way, a hidden, malevolent hand scatters new obstacles.  The path often seems blocked or destroyed.  But someone always comes to the rescue-someone like ourselves in everything, but with a secretly implanted power of “vision.”[11]

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