art

In our community gathering of this Sunday past, at one point we stood around one of five worship stations where we gave focused attention to God who is Eternal Word, Trinity, and Creator by listening to a high-volume rendition of Joseph Haydn’s, The Creation, Chorus and Trio No.14. “The heavens are telling the glory of God,” shouts the chorus in full-voiced opulence, and the trio explains more fully that thus “the word gets out through all the world, sounding in every ear, stranger to no tongue.” The orchestral colouring of crisp brass and tight percussion add a sense of emphatic punctuation that even the best grammatical exegesis can hardly match. It was, for most of us there, one of those moments. “Epiphany” is not too strong a word.

This is a chapter from a series of essays, perhaps a book, called “Which Art in Heaven”. I wrote most of it three or four years ago (apart from an obvious updated reference) and have been exploring its meaning with hungry artists since then.

For some time now I have been fairly convinced that God has much to say to artists because there is much that we can say, and do, that cannot be done in other ways.