Season: God is an artist, and so are we

Speaker: Jonny Rashid

Location: 2007 Frankford Ave.

About Talk: We can use visual art to deepen ourselves and connect to God. Jonny relays how he grew up in a tradition that didn’t value art at all, sometimes even calling it idolatrous, iconography that showed God was in violation of the commandment that said not to make graven images of God. Somehow that tradition never articulated that systematic theology, which certainly depicted God in a certain way, wasn’t equally idolatrous. Nevertheless, that’s certainly how Jonny learned his faith—intellectual, cerebral, didactic. But it took about a decade of doing the same liturgy with the same art to realize, no, there’s actually something spiritual and evocative happening here that deepens. It’s more than just ideas. It’s the something that can’t quite be expressed, and because, for Jonny anyway, it’s using a grammar that he's not used to. So it takes a while, it takes some time. Jonny's suggestion for you might be to sit with some art this week, maybe alone, maybe in your cell, and write about, pray about it, feel about it. Maybe you can move to freeing yourself to create some art to and see what you experience and learn that way.