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Photo Credit: Laine Lingle

By: Andrea Lingle

The spiritual life, to which art belongs and of which she is one of the mightiest elements, is a complicated but definite and easily definable movement forwards and upwards. This movement is the movement of experience, It may take different forms, but it holds at the bottom to the same inner thought and purpose.

Wassily Kandinsky Concerning the Spiritual in Art, 4

Last week there was a brush fire 1.7 miles from my house. As smoke sinuously crept through every unsealed window and loosely hung door, my children began to ask what would happen if we needed to evacuate. We were never in real danger, but I did warn them that if the rather stiff wind that was tumbling through our mountains brought us to that, we would not be packing everything.

Approaching fire forces the question: What do you hold dear enough to carry in your arms?

Lent is a time when the approaching fire of the Passion forces the question, what do you hold dear enough to carry in your soul? What creeds? What beliefs? What practices? If you are a refugee, what would you need to keep you whole?

Perhaps the answer is very little.

Content and not unwilling now to give
A respite to this passion, I paced on
With brisk and eager steps, and came, at length,
To a green shady place where down I sat
Beneath a tree, slackening my thoughts by choice,
And settling into gentler happiness.

The Prelude, Wordsworth, 59

During the season of Lent, we will be embracing creativity. How does being made in the Image of a Creator shape who we are as spiritual beings? You, standing in front of the easel, are you reproducing what you see or infusing the world with spirit? You, pulling the bow across the string, how are you speaking the fundamental language of the universe? With vibrations of love and justice or jealousy and self-aggrandizement? How about you who has never so much as sketched out an idea or hummed a jingle—what about the one who has never considered him/her/themself a creator? Have you ever brought order to a pile of dishes? Made a meal of nothing but hamburger and pantry-wizardry? Have you ever applied a bandage to a scraped knee? Then you are one who creates.

But before the first sketch, before the curtain ascends, before the downbeat, there is a pause. If you have ever watched an orchestra perform, you know this moment. It is the moment after the applause and tuning and acknowledgements. It is the moment when the conductor stands behind the carefully placed musical plan, the crowd’s whispers dwindle, the conductor’s hands are clasped eyes quickly scanning the score, and the musicians are poised with their instruments in rest position and weeks of practice waiting in their fingers and breath: a stillness hovering in the not yet begun.

In order to create, we have to find the attentive stillness of the oboe and timpani and violin.

The ex nihilo-ness of art and design and music and odd sculptures and bizarre television shows reminds us of the ex nihilo-ness of our lives—we come out of nothing. And we’re here. And we get to make something with what we’ve been given.

Rob Bell, How to Be Here, 13

When the fire creeps to your door you grab your people and your pets and you go. With the crucible of the Passion approaching, we must, as Wordsworth recommends, “slacken [our] thoughts by choice.” We must allow the annoyances of the overburdened schedule, the clamor of the Must Do list, the constant drip of disappointment to dwindle to expectant silence. We must scoot, poised, to the edge of this holy season, and attune ourselves to the gentle breeze of the Divine Spirit.

The down beat will come and the music will begin. It will or won’t go as planned, and something which had never been will spring into being. There will be moments of ineffable transcendence, and there will be mistakes. And the Being-ness of the universe will be increased.

Don’t rush it. Breathe here. Stay here. Wait until you can’t anymore…until grace compels you to lift your instrument to your chin and…

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