Relationship between Spirituality and artistic expression: in the words of Christine Painter

VOLUME 3, ISSUE 2 JANUARY 2007, The Relationship Between Spirituality and Artistic Expression: Cultivating the Capacity for Imagining, By Christine Valters Paintner, Ph.D.

The heart of human identity is the capacity and desire for birthing. To be is to become creative and bring forth the beautiful. John O’Donohue (1)

A study of creativity and the arts, show that cultivating the arts as a spiritual practice is a path to freeing our imaginations and developing valuable skills for vital living in the world. 

Defining Spirituality

There are three dimensions of spirituality that I consider especially relevant to exploring its intersection with artistic expression.  First, spirituality can be considered a search for meaning in life. The psychologist Viktor Frankl developed a school of therapy around this profound human need after being in a concentration camp and discovering that those who were able to create a sense of meaningfulness fared much better than those who did not. He described the search for meaning in one’s life as “the primary motivational force” in persons. (2)  By cultivating a sense of meaning, spirituality can provide an orientation to our lives, a set of values to live by, a sense of direction, and a basis for hope.

Second, spirituality can help us to cultivate a relationship to mystery.  In our search for meaning we discover a hunger for something that is beyond the limits of our capacity to fully describe in language. We come to recognize there is a depth dimension to the world beyond surface appearances. This is the presence that great mystics have described as the God beyond all names.  It also is an awareness of the presence of love in the world where there might only have been hate; hope where there might only have been despair; being where there might have been nothing. Spirituality facilitates an encounter with the presence of mystery in our lives and nurtures a relationship with it.

Third, spirituality is about transformation and should challenge us to stretch and grow through commitment to a set of practices.  In our search for meaning and relationship to mystery, spiritual traditions have advised particular ways of entering more deeply into this search through a set of practices or disciplines.  Practices help us to cultivate a way of being intentional about our spirituality and help us shape our lives around the meaning and mystery we are discovering through this commitment.

Creativity is a powerful shaping force in human life.  It is an intangible human capacity of a transcendent nature – it moves us beyond ourselves in a similar way to spirituality.  The psychologist Rollo May describes creativity as “the process of bringing something new into being,” (3) something that did not exist before – an idea, a new arrangement, a painting, a story. Ellen Dissanayake, an anthropologist, suggests that the act of creating is actually a biological need that is basic to human nature.  She describes creating as “making special.” (4)  Creativity includes the arts, but really encompasses the whole of our lives.  Every act in which we “make special” can be a creative one.

Carl Jung believed images are expressions of deep human experience and our authentic selves.  They are the natural and primary language for the psyche and only secondarily do we move to conceptual thought.  Jung saw images as clues to the unlived life that move toward some form of outward expression and urged others to look at the images of their lives in a symbolic way so as to reveal deeper meanings and their fuller, more authentic selves. (5) The arts help us to access this storehouse of images within ourselves and create a sense of meaning.

700 years ago the Sufi poet Rumi wrote about two intelligences.  The first is called acquired knowledge or book learning.  It is the kind of intelligence that helps us to get ahead in the world and is tested to see how well we retain information.  Rumi describes it as “getting always more marks on your preserving tablets.” This is the intelligence of our schooling and striving to succeed.  Rumi also describes another kind of tablet or intelligence: “one already completed and preserved inside you./ A spring overflowing its springbox.”  This intelligence is not the kind that moves from the outside in, as in traditional learning. “This second knowing is a fountainhead from within you, moving out.” (6) Creativity is about honoring another kind of intelligence that originates from within us rather than from outside sources.

We live in a time when our capacity for imagining is being thwarted by television programs and video games that encourage us to tune out of life and become passive consumers rather than active imaginers.  We have become paralyzed by our own busyness. Everything about our culture encourages us to keep busy.  We do not slow down enough to really contemplate things and listen to the ways we are being drawn to live in response. The news gives us 30-second sound bytes that render us feeling helpless, rather than empowering us to act.  Yet we live in a time desperately hungry for new ideas and visions, new possibilities in a world gone awry with war and ecological destruction.

Our imaginations are constrained and narrowed by the limiting ideas and contexts in which we live.  We are lulled into passivity, and our creative capacity is dulled through a constant barrage of media images and frenzied life pace.  In a culture that demands we hurry up and do, produce, move faster and higher up the ladder, become breathless, worship speed and efficiency, it can be a real challenge to find space.

Unfortunately modern, Western culture has largely emphasized the verbal and analytic in our educational processes and has removed the creative arts from everyday experience by professionalizing them.  Consumerism further places value only on art that sells, rendering the focus on art-as-product or commodity.  Unless we have been trained as artists, too often we shy away from engaging in the arts.  Yet the process of art-making itself can be a path of discovery.

While in graduate school studying theology I discovered the therapeutic field of expressive arts and found it to be very liberating.  The focus in the expressive arts is on the process of art-making rather than the art product itself.  In this way, art-making becomes accessible to anyone, because the creative process is central to the journey of discovery, rather than what the final product will look like.  The focus of the expressive arts is not on a specific technique or the quality of the product itself.  It is on the power and process of symbolic expression in any of the arts for healing and integration.

The spiritual life, like the expressive arts, is largely about process rather than product.  A dominant metaphor for spirituality is the journey, which evokes a sense of constant movement and progression.  We never fully arrive but are always unfolding and discovering.  Spirituality is also about a process of integration – of slowly bringing the whole of our selves and our experiences to our crafting of meaning.

Engaging in the arts as a spiritual practice means honoring the process of meaningmaking, of cultivating a relationship to mystery.  Paolo Knill, one of the founders of expressive arts therapy says: “The practice of the arts, as disciplined rituals of play in painting, sculpting, acting, dancing, making music, writing, story-telling, is and always was a safe container, a secure vessel to meet existential themes, pathos and mystery.”

Graham Wallas, a social psychologist of the late 19th and early 20th century, suggested that creativity has four main moments or stages to it: preparation, incubation, illumination, and verification. (11) These can be roughly expressed as preparing to do the work, those times when we need to step away from the work for insight to occur, those moments of insight that often are called inspiration, and finally the work of creating itself.  The practice of art-making requires spaciousness and time for incubation, which in our busy lives can help us to slow down. There is also a rhythm of receptivity and activity that is central to creativity.  Engaging in the arts could help us to be more present in any given moment and to nurture our creative rhythms.

Conclusion

The practice of art-making can inform the way we live.  I invite you to consider the ways in which you might engage the creative process more intentionally in your teaching, classes, and mentoring, both through introducing the practices of art-making, in particular, as well as through broader attention to elements that nurture creativity.  I leave you with some questions: Do you allow for spaciousness in your teaching to foster a sense of creativity, imagination, and openness to exploration of new and alternate possibilities?  Does your educational framework involve a rhythmic balance between receptivity and activity?  Do you invite students to engage their different intelligences and ways of knowing?  Do you encourage students to consider their intuition when choosing a research project? Are you able to surrender some level of control and allow the creative process to unfold freely in order to usher in a sense of newness? And in your own spiritual life: In what ways do you tend to your own desire and capacity for birthing? Do you have practices that contribute to the cultivation of meaning and mystery in your life?  Do you take time to simply play and be spontaneous?  When do you feel most vital and fully alive?  In what ways do you model a lived way of honoring the creative process?  I encourage you to reflect on each of these questions and begin to make the changes that will open up new aspects of self, life, and creativity to you and those around you.

Endnotes

1.     O’Donohue, John.  Beauty: The Invisible Embrace. New York: HarperCollins, 2004 :142.

2.     Frankl, Viktor E.  Man’s Search for Meaning (New York: Washington Square Press, 1963): 153.

3.     May, Rollo.  The Courage to Create.  New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1975: 39.

4.     Dissanayake, Ellen.  Conversations Before the End of Time. Suzi Gablik, ed. London: Thames and Hudson, 1995.

5.     Welch, John.  Spiritual Pilgrims: Carl Jung and Theresa of Avila.  New York: Paulist Press, 1982: 1.

6.     Barks, Coleman and John Moyne, trans.  The Essential Rumi.  Edison NJ: Castle Books 1997: 178.

7.     Gardner, Howard.  Multiple Intelligences: New Horizons.  New York: Perseus Books, 2006.

8.     Wright, Wendy.  “’A Wide and Fleshy Love’: Images, Imagination, and the Study of Christian Spirituality.” In Christian Spirituality Bulletin Vol. 7, No. 1 Spring 1999: 6.

9.     Knill, Paolo.  “Soul Nourishment or the Intermodal Language of the Imagination.”  In Foundations of Expressive Arts Therapy.  Philadelphia, PA: Jessica Kingsley Publications, 1999: 45.

10.  Begbie, Jeremy.  Beholding the Glory.  Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Books, 2000: xi.

11.  Wallas, Graham.  “Stages in the Creative Process.”  The Creativity Question.  Albert Rothenberg and Carl R. Hausman, eds. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1981: 69-73.