There has been a conversation among a few of us in the comment section of my recent post, “Spirit and Art.” We have been discussing this statement which I make near the end of the post.

Today, rather than trying to sell ideas, churches should be providing means by which people can experience and know the spiritual dimension of life. Artists … point to the reality of this dimension and of people’s longing to know it.

Before the Enlightenment and the Modern Age, spiritual experience was an important part of worship and much of the Christian life. Despite the emphasis of church hierarchy on doctrine and theology, with the mass in Latin and low literacy rates,  for most people in the pews religion was not about concepts and teachings but experience. Christianity was more felt than intellectually believed.

The Reformation was right in condemning the resulting abuse and emotional manipulation that had grown from this over the centuries. But as with many things, the reformers threw out the baby with the bathwater, replacing emotion with intellect. The brain now had to rule over the heart. Stained glass and statuary were smashed and the worship space became little more than a lecture hall, at least in the Calvinist tradition. In this version of the Christian life, believing the right ideas trumped experience and feeling.

In the centuries that have followed, both Protestantism and Catholicism have swung, wildly sometimes, between the poles of rationality and emotion. Of course, that is not unlike the story of modern Western culture generally. But in following those cultural trends, churches have shown they have little sense of a core Christian identity which transcends history and current fashion. That realization has now left the church floundering.

In my last comment in the conversation, I mentioned a magnificent leaded-glass window recently acquired and displayed by the Art Institute of Chicago. The Hartwell Memorial Window was designed and created by Tiffany Studios in 1917 for Central Baptist Church in Providence, Rhode Island. (The church sold the window because it lacked the funds to adequately maintain it.) It was commissioned by a church member as a memorial to her husband, and depicts a New England mountain landscape viewed from his family home.

The 25 x 18-foot window was placed at the front of the church’s sanctuary. Having seen the window a couple times now, I can only describe it as stunning. It was thoroughly cleaned and restored, and then installed with backlighting in a soaring museum atrium. If you click on the link above, be sure to click on the window itself and it will open separately in an expandable window. I also highly recommend the short video on the page that tells the window’s story.

Despite its dominating presence in a worship space, it has no explicitly religious content, except for the quotation of Psalm 121:2 across the bottom: “My help commeth from the Lord who made heaven and earth.” Yet that provides all the context that’s needed. The window evokes the glorious world in which we live. The question, “Who is the God we worship?” is answered as one is bathed in the window’s brilliant color and light, “The one who created this.”

But what makes the window so remarkable is that no intellectual or verbal response is needed. Like an experience in nature we have all had at some time, our awe at the sights and sounds and smells is enough without having to put it into words and concepts. We know that at that moment we are somehow transcending our ordinary life experience and getting a glimpse, at least, of another dimension of existence. And at the same time, we become aware of another dimension and reality within ourselves which is responding to the experience, which is often called Spirit.

Apart from whatever preaching, hymns, and liturgy occurred in that space, I can’t imagine that experiencing that window week-after-week didn’t have a profound effect on that church’s worshipers, shaping their knowing of God, themselves, and the world. Of course, not every church can have a monumental Tiffany window. Yet we have all been in spaces, religious or not, that somehow made us aware of the “eternal now” that surrounds us but which we so often forget.

This is what art can do, and I would say, should do. Which is why art should be a significant part of the religious and spiritual life. Christianity used to know that. Today, however, the banality of most worship spaces is appalling. They are designed for comfort, with wall-to-wall carpet and padded seats, and with the practicality of a convention center or sports arena, with their hi-tech lighting, sound systems, and video screens. And to alleviate the blandness of the room, there is somewhere a colored-glass window with a cartoonish picture of Jesus or some other biblical figure. These architectural travesties are yet another sign of how far Christianity has fallen.

But don’t hear this as more nostalgic pining for the church of the past. As stupendous as they are, building yet more monumental cathedrals is not the answer. Nor is reviving antique doctrines or mythological stories. Again, they testify to what moved people in the past. Our question is what moves people today?

To visually center their worship space on a scene of pure nature was a radical and profoundly insightful decision by Central Baptist Church over a century ago. They knew the endless visual parade of Bible scenes and symbols had lost their power to speak to modern people. The lush greenery and cascading water expressed in glass moved the church’s worshipers and now museum visitors of any spiritual persuasion.

In the 1960s, the Houston art collector and philanthropist, Dominique de Menil, asked Mark Rothko to create the artwork for a new meditative, interfaith chapel. The result was the Rothko Chapel, which opened in 1971. The walls of the octagonal space are filled with 14 large canvases which are unlike Rothko’s previous work, as a chapel staff member explained to NPR.

These paintings do not feature the luminous color fields that made Rothko famous. The paintings in the chapel are dark, in purplish or black hues. And there’s a reason for that, says Umari. “They’re sort of a window to beyond,” she explains. “He said the bright colors sort of stop your vision at the canvas, where dark colors go beyond. And definitely you’re looking at the beyond. You’re looking at the infinite.”

Over 100,000 people visit the chapel annually. Some do so to attend conferences and other special events there. But many come simply to be in silence, often sitting on the chapel’s plain benches or floor mats.

Unlike the realism of the Tiffany window, Rothko’s canvases use pure color and abstract form to evoke a spiritual awakening and even knowing. Together they demonstrate how art of any type can move us if they themselves express the artist’s own spirit and life. They are examples of what characterizes true spiritual art, or any real art: risk and honesty. That is also what characterizes genuine faith, and what has become so rare in the church today.

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