The Arts:Creativity & Healing

Tad Dunne

Artistic creativity is a wayof being wholesome

Everyone is a Natural Artist

GROOMING:

Presenting our faces = presenting ourselves

Artworks are Essentially Social

Specialized Art Forms

Songs, instrumental music, dance

Landscape, architecture, symphonies

Painting, sculpture, carvings, clothing

Poetry, legends, fiction

Rituals

An Aesthetic Experience

“Streams of Consciousness”:

Examples: practical, analytical, dramatic, worshipful, aesthetic

Definition: “An Aesthetic Experience”:

An experience focused on beauty

Undistracted: Especially by practical, analytic, or dramatic concerns.

Our Yen for Beauty

We yen for beauty, but never possess it.

Beauty possesses us.

Beauty takes us beyond ourselvestoward being more fully wholesome

The Art Event

The value of an artwork

Lesser values:Make money

Become famous

Energize /calm our nerves

Highest value:Communicate a sense of

wholesomeness about life.

Being Wholesome

Open ourselves fully to reality1. Recognize Possibilities

2. Maintain Order

3. Cherish Uniqueness

4. Moved by the splendor of Goodness

5. Surrender ourselves to Love

1. The Allure of the Possible

2. The Harmony of Order

Painting courtesy of Sr. Barbara Cervenka, OP

3. Cherishing Uniqueness

This vase This girl This melody

4. The Splendor of Goodness

5. The Surrender to Love

Artistic Healing

Besides artistic creativity, there’s also . . .

The Need for Healing

Fractures in being wholesome:

Don’t notice possibilities

Don’t seek order in what we notice

Don’t cherish the uniqueness of some “this”

Don’t appreciate goodness in what is unique

Don’t surrender ourselves to the good of love

Creativity is vastly overrated

The yen for beauty makes being wholesome possible

The liberation of being in Love

The splendor of Goodness

The uniqueness of “This”

The harmony of Order

The allure of the Possible

Yen For

Beauty

Being in Love makes our wholesomeness actual

Being in Love

Appreciate Goodness

Cherish Uniqueness

Maintain Order

Recognize Possibilities

Beauty also symbolizes the mystery of life.

“Nothing is ever just something.”

There is a life above the obvious, a life above our natural life:

A super-natural life

A life that heals the fracturesin our wholeness.

The Mystery of Love

The mystery of life = a mystery of love.

Shall I trust being in love all the way?

Is my yen for boundless beauty an experience of being in love?

Shall I love my creator by loving all whom my creator loves?

Is this the “super-natural” life?

Is my wholesomeness part of the wholesomeness God desires for all creation?

A DiscoverySiena Heights is a Christian collegein the Roman Catholic, Dominican tradition.

Founded on the event of a discovery.

We discover wholesomeness by:

Taking to heart the gift of God’s innermost Spirit of Love

Creating the community of love for which God’s innermost Word, Jesus of Nazareth, gave his entire self.

God’s Beloved Community

What Jesus wanted was for Israel to be a community of such peace and lovethat nations everywhere would strive to be as wholesome.

Gerhard Lohfink, What Jesus Wanted, Who He Was.

“Beloved Community” = What Jesus wanted

Martin Luther King

Gerard Manley Hopkins:

Those who are just, act justly,

Act in God’s eyes

what in God’s eye they are:

Christ.

. . .

The Divine Beauty of Human Life

The Divine Beauty of Human Life

… for Christ plays in ten thousand places,lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes

not his, to the Father,

through the featuresof our faces.

G.M Hopkins, “Kingfishers”

Puzzled? Moved?