Art and the Sacred: A talk from the 1977 Lindisfarne Conference by Bro. David Steindl-Rast O.S.B.

Approval may not be the appropriate response in a given situation, but blessing is always appropriate.

I hope this can really be an opening talk in the sense that it opens things up. Remember when we were children and got a big apple sometimes, one of those big shiny red apples? We would say to our mother, “You take the first bite,” because we couldn’t get our teeth into it. Once a little bite was taken out of it, we could manage. And even though the bite I’m able to take out of this large apple may be only a very small bite, it may help us all to begin.

As I looked at this over-awing theme, Art and the Sacred, I realized that art alone would already be too big to get my teeth into. And the sacred would be too big. So I will concentrate, humbly, on the “ and” . If we get a little bite out of this “and” , the connection between the two, it might help us open up our topic. I would like to use words of poets and one picture – Picasso’s Guernica – to illustrate points about the link between art and the sacred. My aim is to actually move to that place where the two are linked, not just talk about it, and to help each one of us take our position there.

There is a passage that Gilbert Kerr, editor of the Harvard Advocate , wrote about W.H. Auden that might be a helpful text with which to start. Auden believed, said Kerr, that “a poet feels the impulse to create a work of art when the passive awe provoked by an event is transformed into a desire to express that awe in a rite of worship.” He doesn’t even say “into a work of art.” He says, “… into a rite of worship.” Art comes in through, the back door, as it were, because “to be fit homage, this rite must be beautiful.” So we start with an awe-inspiring event. What Kerr calls “the passive awe: of this experience is transformed by the artist. That rite of worship, in words, is poetry. In movement, it is dance. In color and line, it is painting. In all these forms there is a rite of worship. That would be one way of looking at it.

For our understanding we could separate this awe-inspiring event, or moment, into three phases. The first is stillness. In order to face reality, in whatever form it may be, we have to hold still. What kind of stillness is meant here will become clearer, I hope, when I read a few passages from T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets . But at this moment it is important for us not to think about the examples or about artists, but to appeal to our own experience. What is necessary when we want to face reality? Stillness. Let us, right now, each one of us, call to mind the kind of stillness that is absolutely necessary to face reality. Call to mind, in a kind of repentant way, how often we rush around and are not still, and so fail to face reality. Stillness is certainly a precondition for facing anything. When we run we do not have the steadiness to face things, or people, or events, to look at anything face to face.

The next phase of our moment of awe is discovery. Stillness is necessary for discovery, but there is also something else necessary: the letting go of our preconceived notions. This is a deepening of the concept of stillness. I think it deserves to be mentioned specifically. No matter how still you are externally when you look at things, you are not really looking at them unless you disengage yourself from your preconceived notions and allow reality to impress you. But the moment you open yourself to reality, the moment you allow it to do something to you, you discover an order that is not your order. You discover in things an order that existed millions and millions of years before we ever came around; in persons, you discover that mysterious order of the other.

The third phase I would like to single out of that one act of facing reality is what we might call the Yes. It is not enough to be still; it is not enough to open yourself for discovery. To fully face reality you have to say Yes. This is the Yes of blessing. It is not necessarily the “yes” of approval. Approval may not be the appropriate response in a given situation, but blessing is always appropriate. And blessing in this sense is an inner Yes. It is, as I hope you will see, a worshipful Yes, the essence, in fact, of worship.

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