“For what is your life? It is even a vapour, that appeareth for a little time, and then vanisheth away.” (James 4:14). These words, penned almost 2,000 years ago, reflect two key truths about humanity – all people contemplate life, and they have an acute awareness that life is short. Moreover, the ephemeral breadth between one’s birth and death is replete with complex internal and external struggles, emotions, conflict, love, survival and so forth, forging a shared human experience commonly known as the human condition. This universal state is revealed when the need to articulate one’s perceptions of life, with all its emotional, intellectual, and spiritual responses, is expressed.
The result of such expression takes on the form of creative arts – music, writing, dance, painting, sculpting, and other fine arts. Across the ages, humanity has woven an artistic tapestry made of common threads. Mankind’s search for meaning, answers to questions of origin, purpose, faith and science, the quest for significance, beauty, love and belonging, and the despair of war, hatred, fear, loss and grief, are all evident throughout history by those creatives who wrestled with them within the arts.
Artistic Theology is a platform that expresses creative thought in both written and visual language. Its focus is on theology – to contemplate God and his relationship with mankind. Within this pursuit lies the deepest questions and longings common to every human heart, the very ones often suppressed and silenced by individuals and culture alike. Often, to be human is to be busy, and our days are filled with work, commitments, commuting and other tasks necessary to survival. For those in unstable and war-torn countries, the very act of survival is all-consuming. For others, extra time is filled up with the genuine pleasures of recreation and relationships, or mindless avenues, such as scrolling through social media. Amid it all, every person encounters junctures when it all stops, and for a divine moment, those profound questions and earnest longings surface. Inescapable to every human is this searching, this pursuit to know and be known, this yearning of the soul that desires what it does not yet know.
Perhaps the words
of C.S. Lewis, writer, scholar, and one of the intellectual giants of the
twentieth century, explain this phenomenon further: "If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world."
C.M. Blain-Cohn