Discover the relationship between the Creator and human creativity!

Discover the relationship between the Creator and human creativity!

“In both the Jewish and Christian Scriptures, when God reveals himself to mortals they often respond by “making something,” erecting a monument in permanent sign of the encounter. Thus Jacob, after the dream in which he saw the Lord, “got up, took the stone he had used as a cushion and erected it as a marker” (Genesis 28:10–22). And in the same way, after seeing Jesus transfigured on Tabor, the Apostle Peter wanted to make “three tents”: one for Jesus, one for Moses, and one for Elijah, in order to prolong the joy of that moment (see Luke 9:33).

Such creativity—which can be expressed in many ways: as poetry or music, dance, sculpture, or architecture—is always a “religious” response, through which earth is “bound back” to heaven, and man to God...

The work of art made to record similar experiences is therefore a work of supreme synthesis: 

The creative context is thus numinous: the appropriate spiritual state is a rapture that may be experienced as weariness, exhaustion—as when, their own strength gone, humans abandon themselves and dream, remaining nonetheless awake.

The relationship with God’s word in the liturgical context and this link with the wellsprings of human creativity suggest the ultimate purpose of art in the life of the Church: to help establish a contact that can be characterized as “prayer,” “contemplation,” and “adoration.”

—Mons. Timothy Verdon, The Ecumenism of Beauty
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