Seamus Heaney in his
poem ‘Skylight’ describes how, despite his loving his Irish cottage’s cosy,
claustrophobic almost nestlike feeling, goes along with his wife’s suggestion of
having a skylight made:
‘But when the slates
came off, extravagant sky entered
And held surprise
wide open.
For days I felt like
an inhabitant of that house
Where the man sick of
the palsy
Was lowered through
the roof,
Had his sins
forgiven,
Was healed, took up
his bed
And walked away.’
Imagination is like this, it can open up our
lives, especially when we feel isolated, enclosed at this time.
Albert Einstein said ‘imagination is more
important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited to all we now know and
understand, while imagination embraces the entire world, and all there ever
will be to know and understand’.
Oxford Professor of biophysics, Robert
Gilbert, a priest, describes science as spirituality in overalls and Jennifer
Yarne describes art as ‘spirituality in drag’ – breaking the boundaries with
exuberance.
As Sr Wendy Beckett said; “My love for art is
for me a way of loving God. I do not usually speak of Him explicitly since
religious language can sometimes put people off. But art is essentially beauty
that draws us into the truth of our own being, and whenever we have truth and
beauty, we have God. This does not have to be spelt out: it simply happens.
For me, it even seems that art can expose
parts of the self I was not aware of, so there is more of me laid bare for God
to possess. Art is a way of making me human, and you cannot pray unless you are
rooted in the truth of your own humanity. Prayer is never an escape but the
opposite, an exposure. The real self is held out to the real God, and any
pretence or lack of reality makes the whole exercise futile. …’.
During this time there are many extra
opportunities to grow and deepen our spirituality and novels, plays, poetry,
music and art can set off our imagination and act as that skylight and extravagant
sky entering once again into our world.
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