Discussing
How art museums can be holy

Just last week I caught up with Museum Hours, a recent movie about a security guard at a museum in Vienna who forms a friendship with a visiting Canadian. The movie not only celebrates the creativity within its walls in much the same way you do here, Caryn, but also opens up to encourage us to see the world at large as art-full. Which, as God's canvas, it certainly is.

Being a self- confessed aesthetic klutz, art is a means of grace which is hard for me to access. However, I experience what you describe in museums in libraries (those other, holy places)... Where words and characters teach me of the human condition, our need for grace, of the beauty in the broken. Thank you for the reminder to have eyes to see the holy, and be formed by it.

I too share the sense of holiness within the walls of art museums and libraries -- I think that's why they're two of my favorite places to go whenever I visit a big city. I think there are a few other reasons. First, they are places full of beauty, both the architecture (usually) and the art on the walls or books on the shelves. Second, they contain what is best about us -- our creative aspirations worked out with the highest level of thought and skill. Third, they are places full of meaning -- every book or work of art tells a story or describes a world or an idea that means something to someone, often to many of us. Finally, they are places full of mystery. Much modern and post-modern art seems deliberately made to puzzle or confound. And even classical or traditional figurative art can evoke great questions. Beauty, excellence, creativity, meaning, mystery -- all qualities of God that he has planted in us and which, even thought they are marred by sin, draw us back to Him.