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When I was a young child about 6, I happened to see a TV program that gave me a virtual orgasm, I don't know why. It was a live children's program, there was a decal or transparency filling the picture frame with the outline of a person, and then a man stepped into the decal. Nothing more than that and yet shots of joy inside me. Like a mule filling in for a horse, my groin did the work of my heart for me.
And this had little to do with sex or with the mirage object that people call "art", art as a thing to be studied. But had more to do with the way the soul places its consciousness over, under and inside things in order to tease out the reality that is there.
It was the outerness that thrilled me and pleased me. I didn't put that there -- the world is stylized, it just "objectively" is.
In John 12, Mary pours burial balm for a death that hasn't happened but is still present in the room (as Lazarus looks on) and then the people of the story step into the hosanna of Psalm 118 as though the words made the physical shape of the world they live in -- which they do, despite the hesitation of that "as though".
A good, penetrating and sorrowful translation of John could be made by substituting the word "the Christians" every time the given text says "the Jews". That means that the story -- its history, its art, its meaning -- isn't finished but continues to boil, recur and churn. Stepping inside it is exciting and dangerous, because nothing is settled. A word like "art" dodges what is happening.
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That business of stepping in and into. One isn't a person of faith -- no such luck, one is just a person but standing in a place and in that place faith is there, like a color or a garment. At one moment the person is inside wearing the faith and "having" it, the next moment no one and nothing has moved but somehow the person is naked, and yet the realization of nakedness is itself like putting on clothes. So call it art if you want but the realization is the core, no more art than not art.
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