There is a magic in children that we grownups have lost: children often know things imaginally, aesthetically, and harmoniously before they know them rationally or conceptually. They learn about life experientially in the same way that mythology does: it makes us see life as poetry and our self participating in it.
As long as humans have existed, we have turned to art to express the inexpressible. Even in archaic and folk cultures that lack any philosophical system and vocabulary, the function of sacred art was the same: it translated religious experience and a metaphysical conception of the world and of human existence into a concrete, representational form. This translation was not considered entirely the work of man; the divine also participated by revealing himself to man and allowing himself to be perceived in form or figure.
We do not need reason for art. Beauty is for beauty’s sake. Art and music are not simply objects, but an experience of us opening to mystical awareness. Perhaps the profound pleasure we sometimes experience from listening to Bach or Mozart is not a distraction from that process of attuning, but is actually, in itself, a tuning in. If the whole of creation groans and travails in pain together (Romans 8:22), does it not also leap for joy together, in us?
Romans 8:20-23 “But with eager hope, the creation looks forward to the day when it will join God’s children in glorious freedom from death and decay. For we know that all creation has been groaning as in the pains of childbirth right up to the present time. And we believers also groan, even though we have the Holy Spirit within us as a foretaste of future glory.”
