What if Ornstein and Naranjo were right forty years ago when they informed us that art as meditation is the way of the prophets? And what if the perspective we have been sharing these last few weeks in this Daily Meditation page, about art as meditation and its relationship to educating people in prophetic action and spiritual warriorhood, is accurate?
I think such information would be, in Mary Oliver’s words, something “very important.”
With less than twelve years left to change our ways as a species, we need to we need to prepare ourselves to become the prophets and warriors we are all called to be at this critical time in human and planetary history.
We need to, in Wendell Berry’s words, “fight the worst with the best.” We need to bolster our courage and vision and ground our spirituality ever deeper as we develop our moral imaginations to make better things happen. This means we cannot settle for just introvert meditation as a practice.
Following are additional teachings from people who recognized the prophetic dimension to art.
“Art seduces us into the struggle against repression….What the great world needs, of course, is a little more Eros and less strife; but the intellectual world needs it just as much.” (Norman O. Brown)
“There is no creativity without fantasy and play.” (Carl Jung)
“The nearest thing to contemplation is play.” (Thomas Aquinas)
“There is wisdom in all creative works.” (Hildegard of Bingen)
“Art is more spiritual than dogma.” (George Santayana)
“An artist’s mission must not be to produce an irrefutable solution to a problem, but to compel us to love life in all its countless and inexhaustible manifestations. If I were told I might write a book in which I should demonstrate beyond any doubt the correctness of my opinions on every social problem I should not waste two hours at it; but if I were told that what I wrote would be read twenty years from now by people who are children today and that they would read and laugh over my book and love life more because of it, then I should devote all my life and strength to such a work.” (Leo Tolstoy)
“Life would speak thus if life could speak.” (Charles du Bos on Tolstoy’s War and Peace)
“God is Life, per se Life.” (Thomas Aquinas)
There lies a subtle connection between theology as overly rationalistic and theology as ideology; between nonrecognition of the artistic and childlike substratum of our spiritual existence and the felt need to control others.
Inquisitors make lousy baby-sitters.
Adapted from Matthew Fox, Prayer: A Radical Response to Life, pp. xxi, xix, 141.
Banner image: “Black and White Chords Friends” by Rawpixel, on Pexels
For Deeper Contemplation
Take any phrase from this meditation and be with it. Let it wash over you. What is it saying to you? What is your heart saying in response?
What does it mean to say “God is Life”? And to pronounce that a writer—Tolstoy—gets Life to talk to us?
2 thoughts on “More Thoughts and Thinkers on Art as Meditation and Our Prophetic Vocations”
Thank you, Matthew Fox for this and all your inspirations, including Order of the Sacred Earth. I met you briefly 3 years ago at Rowe Conference Center; you were teaching; my accommodation room was next to yours and Paul Winter’s.
I will be publishing a daily meditation through the Season of Creation; you will be one of the featured citations.
Thank you- going back to Original Blessing.
Peter
Thank you for this meditation. It sacralizes my understanding of both art and life.