Sitting in the back garden of our home on Saint Simons Island recently, I was looking into the tangles of maple and tallow and palms, Spanish moss hanging down in languid streams, the interplay of light dappled in the deep, the dark and the darker recesses of the shade overlaid by the bare reflection of sunlight off a palmetto. 

Now, if I were going to paint this patch of vegetation, my temptation would be to paint it just as I named it. And as I categorized it. And as I judged it. (You can feel the judgment in the words I chose.) And the viewer of that painting would be invited into my labeling of it, my categorizing of it, my judging of it …. and perhaps my judging of myself too as a viewer. 

But what would it look like if I painted this patch of vegetation in a way that somehow left out or circumvented my labeling? In other words, what would I have to do to invite the viewer of the painting not to participate in my labeling of the world, but into their own experience of exploring it without labels. 

Well, first of all, I would need to alienate the viewer from the security of being able to identify and name what they are seeing. I would need to let the viewer explore this reality not as a scene of some unruly patch of vegetation in a sadly neglected corner of our garden (notice the loads of judgment I just deposited in this sentence!), but as what it is in itself before we attempt to dominate it and incorporate it into our structures of meaning, colors, forms, lines. 

In a sense I would need to “bewilder” potential viewers by showing them a stand-in for what I’m looking at, not so that they can “identify it properly” (thus placing it in its “proper” category and under their power), but so that they can experience it for themselves. I want them to be able to see what they haven’t seen before, even if they’ve looked at many tangled southern gardens. 

The world around us is a world of mystery. We have never tamed it. It will never be tamed. It is truly beyond our comprehension. And we are part of it. 

We have imposed linguistic/mental structures on the world around us. These structures provide the illusion that the world we encounter is understood. These structures reassure us that the world and we are separated in a comfortable relationship that we have somehow mastered. I have come to believe, however, as philosopher Paul Woodruff has said, that the appropriate “spiritual” posture of human beings in this world is “reverence,” awe and wonder, an attitude that is the polar opposite of the arrogance, judgment, and hubris which underlies our habitual labeling and categorizing of the world around us. 

My spiritual journey has led me into a new relationship not only with the created world, but with art. It has moved me gradually to try to evoke wonder in the presence of mystery by inviting the viewer to look into reality without the possession of a sure place to stand. In this, I am attempting to put us in a position aesthetically relative to the natural world that both Pema Chodron (the contemporary Buddhist teacher) and Meister Eckhart (the medieval Christian mystic) have described spiritually as “groundlessness.” 

“Groundlessness” is, in fact, our ordinary and actual position in creation from which we try to distract ourselves with a variety of strategies and substances, or to delude ourselves with a variety of self-generated illusions. Among the most popular of illusions we use to convince ourselves we are not “groundless” are the structures of meaning and judgement we construct through language for whatever we encounter in the world. But by doing this we risk losing the precious awareness that the groundlessness of existence, if encountered sincerely, opens to us a relationship with the God (the “groundless ground of being” as Meister Eckhart would say) in whom we may find genuine rest in the flux of existence. 

Life is uncertain, ever-changing, impermanent, fleeting. Life is, as the biblical book of Ecclesiastes (or Koheleth) tells us “a breath, a sigh.” We have as little control over life as we do a wisp of wind whispering through the tree tops. And the path to sanity is not to deny this reality, or to distract ourselves from it, but to embrace it deeply and to learn to stand upon the “groundless ground.”

But, let’s back up just a moment. 

Is this project of understanding (and of art) even justified, we might ask. Isn’t reality, including the spiritual, pretty straightforward? Don’t we see what we get and get what we see? 

A theological story: 

Several years ago when I was a professor of pastoral theology at Austin Presbyterian Seminary, a young woman came up to me after a lecture. She wanted to complain. I had known her for several years, even before she came to the seminary. She was a clinical psychologist by profession. Really smart. A delightful person with whom I had a great relationship. We attended the same church. I took her complaint very seriously. 

She said, “Michael, I’m frustrated.” (By the way, being a clinical psychologist, she would know that the phrase “I am frustrated” is a socially acceptable way to say “I am angry.”) She continued, “You and other professors here at the seminary make this whole business of talking about God so complicated, and it’s not. It’s perfectly simple.” 

“Hmmm,” I said. And looking down at the wooden table on which my books were stacked, I knocked on the table a few raps. 

“Is this table solid?” I asked. 

“Yes, yes, of course it’s solid,” she responded, showing a little more frustration than before. 

“Not so fast.” I said, “I am reliably told by physicists across the street at the university that, at a subatomic level, this thing I call a table isn’t really static, solid or stable. Subatomic particles are whizzing and zipping through it all the time, exchanging with the surrounding environment whatever the heck is here. I’m not convinced I even know what’s going on with this thing (knocking on the table again). I’m not even sure I understand what this thing I call a table really is.”

“Yes, yes, but that’s physics we’re talking about.” 

“Ah,” I answered, “So whatever Ultimate Being is, whether we call it God, or Creator, or Master of the Universe, or Divine Trinity, or First Cause, or Windowless Monad, that which holds existence in existence, including the unimaginable massive universe of galaxies or the world of unseen realities of which subatomic physics tells us, that Being of Beings behind and beneath, within, and yet beyond all other being is simpler than this table? …. Really?” 

Here’s the secret that the Christian faith hasn’t shared nearly enough. The real purpose of Christian theology, and, indeed, all serious religious studies, is to render us mute in the presence of the mystery of ultimate reality. As Saint Augustine of Hippo once said, “If you understand God, it isn’t God you’ve understood.” I want to bring that statement home even more, especially through art: “If you understand reality, it isn’t reality you’ve understood.” 

Earlier this summer a man contacted my representative at the gallery where my work is shown. He had seen a painting I had done last year and wanted to look at more of my work in person. At that time I was serving as artist in residence for the gallery and some of my work was being exhibited in the studio there. He flew in and visited the studio with his interior decorator. As we were walking around the studio, he stopped in front of a painting. He said, “When I saw this painting online, I wanted to see more of your work because I think you may be as weird as I am.” 

At first I wasn’t sure whether to feel complimented or insulted, but in the end I took his comment positively. Later he explained that what we see looking at a beautiful scene out of the window isn’t as interesting to him as what we are prompted to imagine in a painting that opens us to (possibly) a new or different understanding of reality.

My point is this: Visual art has the potential to open the eyes of our imaginations and hearts to reality in a way to undercut old assumptions, staid orthodoxies, and the false images we have constructed in order to feel more secure. And by undercutting these illusions, visual art can introduce us to an experience that replaces our small worlds with a much larger one. This larger world teems with the breath of the God who blesses us but resists the names we try to force upon “the groundless ground of being.” And here, I think, sacred imagination can flourish.