Art appreciation is a contemplative practice. Artists are the first to depend on intuition. Musicians lack full understanding before writing a piece of music and painters before they start painting. They trust their intuition; something engineers and scientists are not trained to do, they only proceed by evidence.
When Jesus used “the reign of God” as a metaphor for Reality, He was trying to tell us that there is a place where we can live connected to the Real and to the Eternal. A place beyond thought, but is simply here-and-now, which somehow feels like “nowhere” (now-here) – but it is where everything always happens!
Divine Indwelling is always everywhere. “I can never get away from your presence! If I go up to heaven, you are there; if I go down to the grave, you are there. (Psalm 139:7–10).
The early Church theologians saw incarnation and divine indwelling occurring as a metaphysical union with nature as a whole. Each creature is a unique aspect of the infinite Mystery of God; and until we experience each thing in its specific “being,” as artists so often do, we will not experience the joy and freedom of Divine Presence.
Through the doctrine of “being” we come to the universal meaning of each creation deeply through the concrete, the specific, and the ordinary. By meeting it in its precise and irreplaceable “being” and honoring it there.
The principle of God being here and everywhere is this “we can go deep in any one place and we will meet all places.”
Colossians 1:16 “For through him God created everything in the heavenly realms and on earth. He made the things we can see and the things we can’t see—such as thrones, kingdoms, rulers, and authorities in the unseen world. Everything was created through him and for him.”
