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

How can we bless in the midst of disaster? In the midst of the fearfulness that lies at the root of so many terrible things?

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I will read our initial text once more and hope in the light of this first survey of the act of facing reality that it will sink in a little deeper. “The 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. To be fit homage, this rite must be beautiful.” Many of the terms used in this quotation ought to be examined. We ought to be sure we speak the same language.

Perhaps there should be a few points here about art, for instance, just to make sure we are on the same wavelength. Right now, the important thing is that we are talking about a making. Whether it be poetry or painting or architecture or cooking, or anything made with material such as movement and gesture, it is a making. And yet art is distinguished from crafts, which are characterized by making things for a purpose. When I am using “art” now, it is distinguished by an emphasis on meaning rather than purpose, on celebration rather than use of the thing made. This is a celebration, ultimately, of the superfluous. The superfluous is somehow celebrated with the deep intuition that nothing is more important to us humans than the superfluous.

When I speak about the sacred, what matters here is awe, in the sense of a strange and inexplicable fusion of fear and fascination. You see it when a very small child stands at the ocean and the waves are coming in. You see the little child torn between wanting to rush into the ocean and fearfully drawing back. Every time the wave comes, the child gets a little frightened, and every time the wave withdraws, the child runs up and gets closer. And then runs back again.

And beauty—probably we could never finish thinking about it. At this moment I would merely like to insist that we think of beauty as an aspect of everything there is, as an aspect of all reality. Whatever is, is good. Whatever is, is true. What ever is, is beautiful. That is just what truth means: reality as faced by the intellect. And beauty, in turn, is reality faced by the senses. Beautiful is, as St. Thomas said, the splendor of truth, the clarity everything has, if we would only see. If we can do just this: be still, open ourselves, and say that inner Yes, and then that splendor breaks forth without limit. Only our own limitations determine the measure in which we are able to accept it. The facing of reality in this attitude is worship. You do not have to add anything special to it. This facing of reality can only be done on our knees. It brings us to our knees. Kneeling is the position we feel to be most appropriate at that moment. We need only put ourselves in that place and we’ll find ourselves on our knees. That is worship. It is not even necessary at this point in our considerations to introduce that which receives our worship. It could be introduced; it would fit; but what we have said will suffice. The awe-struck kneeling is by itself an act through which meaning flows into our lives.

Now up to this point everything looks just really nice and smooth. I think not even Reader’s Digest could have too much difficulty with all this. But now comes the real difficulty. And that’s why I’ve brought to show you a print of Picasso’s Guernica which is one of the great pieces of art of our time.

It was provoked forty years ago, on April 29, 1937, when for the first time in history a squad of bombers wiped out a village. The timing for this saturation bombing, as historians have shown, was deliberately set during the busiest hours of the morning when everybody was out of their houses and in the market. The bombers came and a few minutes later this village, unarmed, strategically unimportant, was simply wiped out. A few days later Picasso, under the tremendous shock of this experience, started sketching for Guernica.

For us here the question this event imposes is decisive. Here was certainly an awe-inspiring event, but a terrible one. Here is something to which you can hardly say Yes. Or can you? What was it the artist said to this event? What was the inner gesture that produced a painting like this? Only when we focus on this most difficult point where the “ and” that stands between art and the sacred becomes almost impossible to deal with will we be able to maintain the link between the two. And I must admit I have no glib answer at all. I am not offering you some easy answer: “Oh, that’s it. Well, that’s fine then.” No. I’m struggling with it and I invite you to struggle with me. Struggle with these questions: How can we bless in the midst of disaster? In the midst of apathy? In the midst of destruction? In the midst of decay? In the midst of stupidity? In the midst of the fearfulness that lies at the root of so many terrible things?

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