GB: A few years ago I went to an art show consisting of two sculptures. In one room was a small sculpture of the Buddha, sitting in meditation; in the other room a female nude, by Giacometti. The sculpture of the Buddha was particularly strong and people rushing in off the street paused in front of it to reflect. It conveyed the power of holiness to such a degree that everyone who entered suddenly became silent.

My experience pointed out to me my abiding hunger for images that conveyed the sense of God's Spirit and raised a fundamental question concerning our species: What is it about the human being that craves images? When I use my eyes, what I see can touch my deeper being and draw me in. God speaks to me through what I see, through my eyes, not just my ears. A powerful image touches my spirit in powerful ways.

SRD: There was a famous argument in the Middle Ages between Bernard of Clairvaux, a reform-minded Cistercian abbot, and Abbot Suger, under whose patronage the lovely Gothic choir of St. Denis, outside of Paris, was built. Bernard condemned the proliferation of images in monastic churches because he thought they obstructed the soul's connection to God. Suger, on the contrary, wrote a beautiful passage about the power of art: "Bright is the noble work; but, being nobly bright, the work should brighten the minds, so that they may travel, through the true lights, to the True Light where Christ is the true door."

So - distraction or vehicle? At least both these men recognized the power of visual art!

GB: You touch on a point that has been alive for me for many years. I have always known visual art is a vehicle that has the potential to open me up to the mystery of God. However, I often worked with and around people for whom visual arts seemed to be a mere distraction. My hands tingled with their desire to create and my eyes hungered for images that would inspire, but I often felt as if I lived more under the authority of Bernard of Clairvaux than the exuberance of Abbot Suger. How can we welcome the voice of Abbot Suger into our midst to bless the creative spirit in each of us?

SRD: Yes, today Bernard wouldn't have anything to scold about - the Reformation institutionalized a climate of severity that has stripped most of our churches of any sense of celebration. And it is a shame, because the artists' generosity of spirit can teach us all about the extravagent generosity of God's creation.

Message received 25 March from Steven Hendrickson:

I tend to agree with Bernard. I find that if I try to visualize an icon which represents Christ, I cannot depict it; I have a tendency to want to "Renaissance the form." My work has to be more of a poem, hinting at a direction, but leaving space for the viewer to formulate images. (Perhaps I am also impatient.) As a visual artist who is also a Christian, I find that I am wanting to communicate the "peace that passeth all understanding," so I suppose I am a universalist in this respect. I use the medium to quiet my mind. I practice the visual arts in order to slow down. Also, God's beautiful creation is another theme which I am drawn to, depicted in the watercolor format. Being trained in a highly respected but secular art school , I was encouraged to refine my craft; content would come as I matured. I still adhere to this philosophy. In my search for God's Love, I think that it must be all right at this stage of my spiritual development, to seek to convey what I am capable of conveying and leave it at this for the time being. A friend of mine makes ceramic angels which are very popular in our town. Whenever I attempt to make any kind of a representation which is of a human or divine, face or figure, I cannot. I can draw, but over the years, I have found that I seek to present an idea instead of a realistic representation. Currently, I have silk paintings hanging in our church throughout the liturgical year. They are entirely non-representational. The viewer is allowed to dip into a reflective, contemplative or silent place within. I believe that this is an adequate example of Christian art. I am still a novice in the walk with God.

Message received 7 April from Helen Tye Talkin:

Of course the visual arts are a vehicle, not a distraction. However, some people are undoubtedly more visual than others. I have always had a love of color and texture and most people visiting churches, maybe, especially the children, appreciate the stained glass windows. The whole of God's creation is filled with images, both beautiful and ugly, sacred and profane. Why would we have been given the gift of sight if we were not intended to use it as powerfully as our other senses? hymns and music appeal to some people more than others and the same is true of visual arts.

I am a youth mentor at my church and am currently engaged in leading the kids in a straw weaving project. I have previously led a women's group at church in a similar project and we created a tapestry entitled "Ages of Woman". I encouraged all the women, whether they regarded themselves as artistically gifted or not, good at handwork or not, to just do this process and re-create their lives as a piece of fiber art. The process was amazing and we ended up with a tapestry which is colorful, rich in content, meaning and beautiful. I regard this as a sacred image. Something we give back to God, expressing our life journeys and our community.

Any creative endeavor, visual or aural or written, is equally valid and important. We are each given different gifts and it is wonderful to redress the imbalance in the Anglican Church, which has historically mistrusted visual images. There is much we need to recover from our past, for example the feminine expression of the divine in the world. Maybe reinstating visual arts within the Church is part of this process

Message received 9 June from artist Nancy Chinn:

I respond to many sorts of information. „Words, well crafted into a thoughtful poem move me. „So do words of conversation, of teaching, of prayer. „Yet there can be too many words, and the words can be so specific that the life is squeezed from them.

I love beautiful music. „The soaring chords of a choir, the improvisation of the organ, or of jazz, the durge of dixie funeral bands, the charm of a child humming quietly. „And yes, sometimes the music faulters, and becomes noise. „

And I love images. „I just finished an interesting painting that holds layers of meaning visually like metaphors, full of mystery, strong images, seductive color. „Yet the work would offend many: its meaning is not orthodox and does not conform to comfortable places above couches or altars. Yet it holds vision, and suggests new ideas. „But it cannot do that in every environment. „ It would make a terrible banner.

I am glad that many sorts of art move me. „I am glad I can respond with passion and with reason to what I experience with these aesthetic choices. „I am glad for the diversity and challenge that choices outside of my taste offer me to try, for the new ways to understand. „I am especially grateful that no one art form can contain the fullness and mystery of our religious imagination.

Why would anyone presume that words are more important than music, or than image, or dance, or any other form of expression? „Surely God is present in it all, and it speaks more to me of a failure of imagination of the censoring body to hear images carry less or no significance for the worship experience.

Message received 10 June from Peter Menkin, Mill Valley, California

I am a visual person, and my own work is relatively minor. Nonetheless, I enjoy the religious and spiritual exercise, the expression, and the participation with others in the visual arts by practice as well as entering into the experience of images and the visual testament. I have enjoyed and spent time reading the stained glass in churches, collecting from the internet various icons and pictures, including paintings, and looking for the expression of God's presence in the world in works of art. There is a beauty to the church setting, even to the lighting of the candles before the service begins. There is a lovely pleasure in the regularity of the trip and what goes on during it, including what is seen, before and after church. This on the way to and from. I think and have observed that there is much of beauty in worship, and in prayer life. There is the beauty of holiness.

I've spent some time with my Sony digital camera taking snapshots of things, people, places, designs and even churches as an expression of the holy or sacred, and to find some abstract way of meeting the eternal that is Christ.

The freedom that the artist represents by the breadth of their work, and the inner gift of the spirit that the artist holds, brings a breathless pleasure to me many times. Often this in sculpture, and certainly in painting. I think that I have a natural desire for color and the fascination with seeing that comes with being a human being. Some people have a better sense and ability to discriminate color and things of beauty, than I. Nonetheless, I share in this willingness to see represented in images and through the human imagination what it is that is this Triune God. I find it enlightening, and broadening, to see what artists have captured about Christ and the world, including their look at the church and its members through their work. Some things are an enjoyment, and as well bring a delight to life that enlarges one. My own practices help me to do this, and I find myself moved to an aesthetic appreciation of the Almighty, too, when Christian artists allow their work to be seen. I am so willing to go to a web site and search on a museum collection with key words like Christ, or Christian, or God and see what the people who catalog such things have come up with as statements. Many of them are very interesting, and show a part of life. But for the Biblical representation, I do enjoy so much of what I have seen in stained glass in various churches or on web sites. I hope to have my own sense of these things enlarged through your dialogues. That is one reason I am writing this long note to add to the conversation.

Some of the work that I have enjoyed has been displayed at the Flora Lamson Hewlett Library at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, California.

I was glad to discover your web pages on the visual arts, hoping to enlarge my own sense of God and man, worship and prayer, through visiting your pages. I have taken the chance of adding my voice to your list, and I look forward to„reading further„some of the comments by artists and others.