Dock

Gregory Wolfe, the editor of IMAGE: A Journal of the Arts and Religion, writes in his excellent collection of IMAGE editorials - Intruding upon the timeless: meditations on Art, Faith and Mystery (Square Halo Books, 2003) - of "a hunger, on the part of both secularist and believer, for a deeper understanding of mystery, that borderland where reason fails and only faith and imagination can go." The IMAGE journal that he created sought to explore the "intersection between faith and imagination." He states that for him, "the first principle had to be aesthetic excellence: what we published had to be good art, able to stand alongside the best that was being produced...IMAGE had to be present on the public square, and not in some sort of self-imposed religious ghetto. For it is precisely in the imaginative space created by works of art that a diverse, multicultural society can explore religious matters without the divisiveness of polemics and propositions." He sees the collected editorials as meditations which attempt "to probe the ways that art and faith, poetry and prayer, can nourish and sustain one another." In a "fragmented and contentious world, art that engages faith can body forth an incarnational balance between the letter and the spirit, make ancient truths new, and allow the time-bound to briefly and tentatively intrude upon the timeless."
Greg Wolfe's meditations have been an inspiration to me as I probe my own experience of art, faith and mystery. I shall share more of his book from time to time.

(c) Photo: "Dock" by John Robert Lee