Our Hyphenated Existences: When the Studio Becomes the Study
by Maeve Louise Heaney
Maeve Louise Heaney is a lecturer in the School of Theology at Australian Catholic University. She is also an adjunct member of the La Salle Academy for Religious Education, and serves as secretary for the Austrialian Catholic Theological Society.
“I have forced myself to contradict myself in order to avoid conforming to my own taste.”
1 —Marcel Duchamp
In my parents’ house, there were many rooms, each one with a different purpose. My memory of them is probably colored by the years and how I experience myself as life passes on. But there is something about the spaces we inhabit that conditions what we do and who we are. Now, in my own house, the two rooms I use most frequently seem to be the study and the studio. Work from one bleeds into the other, although not always spotlessly! (Blood is a helpful metaphor.) Perhaps working between them is one way in which I try, in Duchamp’s words above, to contradict myself so as avoid being trapped in a narrow identity. But this article is about how they interact, or how I function in them, and what it has to offer an ongoing attempt to work at the intersection of theology and music.
Maeve Louise Heaney is a lecturer in the School of Theology at Australian Catholic University. She is also an adjunct member of the La Salle Academy for Religious Education, and serves as secretary for the Austrialian Catholic Theological Society.
“I have forced myself to contradict myself in order to avoid conforming to my own taste.”
1 —Marcel Duchamp
In my parents’ house, there were many rooms, each one with a different purpose. My memory of them is probably colored by the years and how I experience myself as life passes on. But there is something about the spaces we inhabit that conditions what we do and who we are. Now, in my own house, the two rooms I use most frequently seem to be the study and the studio. Work from one bleeds into the other, although not always spotlessly! (Blood is a helpful metaphor.) Perhaps working between them is one way in which I try, in Duchamp’s words above, to contradict myself so as avoid being trapped in a narrow identity. But this article is about how they interact, or how I function in them, and what it has to offer an ongoing attempt to work at the intersection of theology and music.
These thoughts are, in part, fueled by a recent issue of ARTS in which we were reminded of how a person’s art changes as they grow older, and how there are insights and expressions that emerge as life moves forward that would be impossible beforehand.2 The underlying invitation was to a “poetics of aging,” and it drew me to revisit a small piece of Karl Rahner’s immense library called “God of the Living” from a book entitled Encounters with Silence.3 Paradoxically, this chapter on our living God is a piece on dying, or rather, on what life feels like as you get older and begin to lose those you have journeyed with and loved. He compares his life to walking on a long highway in and accompanied by a column of people marching alongside. Every now and again, and ever more frequently, someone disappears from the group—without warning or saying goodbye—never to be replaced. There are other columns walking ahead of his particular platoon, and others behind, but each group, as well as each and every person within it, has their own place, and their parting leaves a gap that cannot be filled.
The image is evocative, and perhaps explains why that second half of life draws us more fully into the kind of interpretive task on the meaning of life and of our life’s work: as those who are important in life and help define us disappear, we need to rediscover who we are. The Irish proverb holds some truth: “Tell me who you walk with, and I’ll tell you who you are.” As the ranks become thinner, we are forced to stand alone, and somehow rethink the world and our place in it: who were they for me and who will I become (without them)? What is it of them that stays in my memory and signals that something important lies here? For Rahner, it leads to reflection on the nature of human love as truly eternal, as we never really forget those we have loved, and on God’s silence, as it seems to swallow up those who leave this world behind.
I have not yet lost many of those whom I think are in my column, so this may be a little premature; but I have often left them behind to move on to the next stage of my own journey: a new city or country, a different educational system and church culture, the widening or narrowing of research opportunities and demands. And foundational questions always arise: why am I here? What is important? What’s urgent? And are they the same thing? One question is not only a constant in all of these changes, but one that resonates ever stronger: how to situate my work at the intersection between theology and the arts? How to negotiate these two realms? And with it, the realization that the question is not an extrinsic one, but one that (also) runs right through how I understand myself and the work I am meant, even called, to do; right through my life in the study and in the studio.
At the keynote lecture of the 2014 annual meeting of the Society for the Arts in Religious and Theological Studies, Wilson Yates invited those of us who work in this field to a dialogical approach in our interaction with art, lest we “proof-text” our theology with art, similar to the way biblical scholars have long challenged theologians in our use of scripture.4 In the quest to address the issue raised above, I find myself wondering if our first dialogue partner may indeed be within ourselves. The interdisciplinary work he spoke of is not always between two persons or groups; sometimes it is the artist within that must converse with and listen to the theologian within, and vice versa. This process may start with the very process in and through which we work.
Negotiating diverse callings within ourselves is hardly an uncommon scenario. A while ago, I wrote a piece on what at that time I called living “in-between” the Christian and the artistic vocations.5 I suggested that when one felt called to both, it could be difficult to hold them together without sacrificing one to the other, and proposed that the only way forward was not to resolve the tension between the two dimensions of this hyphenated existence—being a Christian artist and/or an artistic Christian—but rather to hold them together, to live “in-between,” allowing one to challenge, pull, soften, or enrich the other. While this holds true and is ongoing as a dynamic of life, since then, it is this other hyphen or “in-between” space that has become the playground and battlefield of my imagination and my daily timetable: life as a musician and life as an academic; life in the studio and life in the study (and classroom). And although there are similarities, it is not the same dilemma: being a Christian and being a theologian are not the same thing. Instead of tension between responding to God and/or the sensibilities and demands of one’s art-form, here the issue is around moving between different creative processes, or ways in which the human mind makes sense of life . . . and faith, surely? In theology’s case, this is within the church, society, academy, and world, to use David Tracy’s delineation of its audiences.6 And in the case of music, is it the church and society, but not the academy? Can we really separate and streamline so clearly these two ways in and through which our faith seeks an understanding of itself?
In my case, the art-form is music. Making music—the creative process involved in composing, performing, arranging and recording; exploring sounds and how they need to be arranged at each step—is one way I make sense of life and of faith. The whole dynamic between them colors how I inhabit the world and understand it. And yet my brain also seeks to grasp and express the source of that meaning and music in ways that speak into and facilitate its comprehension, not only for myself but also for those who walk into my classroom or pick up my writings. I would like to suggest and even attempt in this article a dialogue between the two, or at the very least, a reflection on the need for an interaction between these two ways of working things out: the musical and the theological. I am convinced the exercise could be an important step in theology’s understanding of what art has to offer theological method and creativity. It may not be an easy conversation, but then no authentic dialogue ever is, to begin with, and this particular one has its own conditioning factors in the history of theological investigation. In the conviction that awareness of and reflection on experience is essential to theology, and even a first stage in all human knowledge, I will use a description of my own difficulty in interacting between the two to set the stage.
The Musical and the Theological
As I mediate between the musician and the theologian inside myself, I have a repeated felt experience, somewhat like a recurring dream, that surprises me, paradoxically, each time it occurs. It is as if my system is wired slightly wrong and each time that particular circuit comes around, I adjust and think I have fixed it, only to have it happen all over again—until the realization dawns that it may be a factory fault. Or even feature? If so, resistance is futile and the only way forward is to embrace, explore, and work with it. It is a conundrum. Should not transitioning between studio and study be simple, seamless? And yet, it is my constant, somewhat excruciating experience that these two apparently essential places for the unfolding of my life’s work and calling do not always sit well alongside one another. They fight for their own space and hang on for dear life once they have the spotlight—which needs must pass on. And it is the difficulty of the transition that both disturbs and fascinates me. It takes on two distinct but related forms—one external, the other internal; the external when seeking to “speak” about music in academic forums, the internal within my own consciousness when shifting between the respective creative forums that each require.
Externally, at academic conferences, research seminars or similar forums, when preparing to express the role and potential of music in theological thought, the internal resistance to doing so is usually tremendous. I feel constrained not only by time limits (music, after all, implies taking time to hear it), but also by doubts about the very possibility of explaining what I want to communicate, and this to the extent of questioning why I even try. To continue, I push against this visceral feeling and practically force myself to put into words how music makes sense of human living, religious experience, and Christian theology. Paradoxically, when I manage to do so, it seems to open a door, or rather a window, for those for whom academia is their normal habitat, who express how enriching (if challenging) the surprise of finding music can be in making sense of theological discourse. And although this may sound naïve, I genuinely wonder why I questioned my endeavor in the first place. Until the next time I find myself in a similar situation!
The second dilemma happens within myself, far from the public view of conferences and classrooms, and independently of my interaction with anyone else. It has to do with the creative process that gives birth to music and theology, respectively. When I write for academic purposes, that is to say, when I dive into the thought of a given theologian, philosopher, or aspect of Christian theology, it is usually an intense and very rewarding process. I can be very thorough, devouring all I need to read, or in the words of Ezekiel, “eating the scroll” and swallowing (Ezekiel 3:3). It even tastes like honey to my mind as I come to greater understanding and insight. But then I move out of that space, into my music-making, or performing, and my “center of gravity” moves decidedly from the brain to somewhere in the gut. And my ever curious mind is told politely, but firmly, to wait. Whereupon the insights born of that effort fade into the distance, or the subconscious—so far from my recent memory that it seems strange it was I who wrote. And moving back into that intellectual or academic space implies considerable effort. An image that might describe it is that of someone with multiple personalities who do not know or recognize each other; or a person with long-term memory loss who visits and explores different countries, but once home again cannot recall well what seemed so thoroughly vivid while there. Did I really visit that place? Was it I who wrote that? Do I really know so much about this author or theme?
One possible interpretation of these experiences —indeed my own knee-jerk reaction each time it happens again (for the first time)—is that of appropriating it as a personal dilemma in need of a choice: where do I fit best? Which identity is more important and should therefore win, definitively, center-stage attention and dedication? An extension of that position is to take it a step further and generalize it, separating the processes and nature of these crafts: theology works one way, art another. The best we can do is good interdisciplinary work in which we take into account the various standpoints—one thing is the creative process and another its reception. But how do we situate ourselves when we do have intimate access to the dynamic that brought to birth something artistic, a “text,” a piece that we find ourselves in front of but also inside of? Can a theologian who is also an artist offer more, or at least different, insights? Because the fact is that many of us do have a foot in each camp, or field, and this for many reasons: an inner calling and a gift, a craft, or intelligence that has something to offer the other maneuverings of our creative yet complex brains. Freedom from and towards other interpretations is one essential response, but it is not the full picture. So how can these two dimensions dialogue with one another, and what fruit can be gained from the attempt?
Insights from Lonergan
One approach that helps me navigate through this maze is that of twentieth-century Canadian Jesuit Bernard Lonergan. This is surprising for some, as his writings are known more for their dry and somewhat mathematical precision than their creative expression, and he speaks little of art. But true to his own style—and style may be as significant in theological writing as it is in our interactions with art—what he says is lucid and challenging. Above all, he pays a lot of attention to how the human mind works, and his clarity has something to offer those of us who struggle with hyphenated or multi-layered thinking processes.
A useful category Lonergan explores is that of the diversity of patterns of experience or consciousness in and through which we experience and make sense of life.7 He identifies various modes: common sense, biological, intellectual/theoretical, aesthetic, artistic, and dramatic.8 Whether the list is comprehensive or there are others is a question for another moment. He calls this polymorphism, and like much of his thought, it is currently drawing the attention of others who, taking his approach as a framework, are developing it further.9 The theory is that the mind works in different ways. It has a diversity of patterns, rules, and ways of making sense of the world we live in that can, one imagines, lead to habits and areas of expertise. This is not a completely new notion. It resonates with Howard Gardner’s well known theory of multiple intelligences.
Gardner explored the notion that we have a variety of ways in which we take on tasks and aim to achieve goals, calling them “intelligences,” which he defined as “the ability to find and solve genuine problems or difficulties, or to create products, that are valued within one or more cultural settings.”10 He too identified various of these operations or dynamics of the human mind: “linguistic, musical, logical-mathematical, visual-spatial, bodily-kinesthetic, personal (interpersonal and intrapersonal) intelligences. While a comprehensive presentation of their similarities and differences is neither possible nor of interest here, it is significant that both theories identify a diversity of ways in which our consciousness approaches and unfolds in its interaction with the world around it, and both see them as key to some aspect of human learning and knowledge. Lonergan goes as far as to propose the polymorphism of consciousness as “the only solution to philosophy”!11 In a Catholic framework—which was Lonergan’s own as a Jesuit—that is tantamount to saying the same about theology. Furthermore, his explorations in philosophy and epistemology had the transformation of theological method as their ultimate and explicit end.
So what of their impact and effect on disciplines that intersect with the arts? Gardner’s work has had immense influence in the field of education—leading to explorations in a diversity of learning and teaching modes that have transformed the panorama of the early stages of education wherever it has been implemented. His work, however, never really perforated the worlds of philosophy and theology—understandable perhaps, given his scholarly perspective, but lamentable, as one of his initial motivations was precisely the lack of mention of the arts in developmental and cognitive psychology in the 1960s.12
Lonergan’s thought is slowly influencing theological method, but the field of art has not often been explored. Again, this is not surprising, as his interest in the world of art was minimal. His one full writing on art was given as part of a seminar on education and must be understood within the overriding concern of all his work: our knowledge of truth and its transmission.13 But it is precisely this concern that led him to explore how the human mind relates to the world and comes to know (things, others, truth, God . . . ), and to postulate this notion of our diversely patterned ways of approaching and apprehending reality, and even to try and describe them. The artistic pattern of experience, for example, is described as involving the tasting and re-tasting of what he calls elemental meaning, without or before allowing understanding and reflection to get their hands on it. As such, he says, it is potentially liberating at the deepest level—of our human awareness of life and the world around us. In his words, the artist “beholds, inspects, dissects, enjoys and repeats” a pattern of experience in order to “objectify, unfold and make it explicit” in a work of art, abstracting the form, not conceptually, but by doing—poiesis.14 One could debate what he means by this, and there is a need to discern whether or not this is actually how artists experience and understand what they are doing, but the clarity with which he relates artistic creativity to human meaning-making is at the very least compelling. It resonates, at least to some degree, with how I experience composing—at its most intense and when it feels most productive.
His language is dry. Lonergan was a scientist, and approached theology with that kind of logic. His kind of analysis and clarity attracts some and repels others, and perhaps needs translating to still others, but it gives us words to articulate things—specifically the conversation this article is trying to initiate. It seems obvious that theology, in western culture at least, has evolved mainly in and through the theoretical (intellectual, linguistic) pattern of experience. Perhaps this is as it should be. Or rather, perhaps this was the only way to express what was being thought in the cultural setting in which theology developed in the past. But it is not enough now. Meaning is transmitted in different ways. Once again, Lonergan’s categories here are useful. With a tremendous sense of the history of theology—where it had come from and the direction it needed to take—he suggests that the history of humanity’s making sense of reality has passed through different “stages of meaning”: common sense, theory, and the third in which we now find ourselves—interiority. It is not that one completely supersedes the other—there is a need for common sense and theory in a world that understands itself in terms of interiority—but the shifts are radical and affect our whole worldview.
The current challenge for theology, it would appear, is that of transitioning, without impoverishing itself, from theory to interiority. In this process, given the challenge of speaking about truth in the shifting paradigms of modernity’s turn to the subject and postmodernity’s suspicion, he sets as foundational the self-appropriation and awareness of the person of the theologian, of his or her horizons of meaning. He calls this awareness of the person of the theologian “in conversion.” The layering of meanings he develops in relation to conversion—amongst which we find religious, moral, intellectual, and psychic—is beyond the scope of this article, but the common denominator is the call to a critical awareness of the theologian to the processes in and through which she apprehends and comes to an understanding of the realities of Christian faith.
This position opens a world of possibilities for the role of art, and the artist, in theology. It is somehow obvious that many people, including those at work in theological scholarship, find in artistic creativity a worthy expression of their experience of faith and ongoing understanding of the world—but what is at work there that theology cannot only respect but learn from? What could a theologian at work in an artistic pattern of consciousness mediate us into? Because one way of understanding some of the problems facing research into theology and the arts is that the former has been hijacked by the intellectual pattern of consciousness, and has lost touch with and perhaps even the capacity to open to and understand other patterns, especially those the arts inhabit—the aesthetic and the artistic. And these could be an essential part of this shift of our theological terms into those recognizable by a culture that no longer works solely in theoretical terms.
I know this is a frequent insight I have as I explore with colleagues my theological research into music. That music is important is never questioned. Nor is it questioned that music could enrich or help “in the classroom,” given the rapidly changing cultural movement we face and the difficulty our students have in grasping the language we speak. But creating a space in their minds and understanding to learn to think through music so as to see what it has to offer conceptual understanding, both in its reception (aesthetic pattern) and composition (artistic pattern) is as yet often one stretch too far. It is still on the margins of serious thought, relegated to whatever free time remains when real thought needs a break. And this external marginalization is so very easily interiorized into how we understand our own work. So moving between spheres becomes arduous. Precisely because that is the case, one way forward in overcoming this challenge has to be through those who inhabit both spaces and create in both patterns: the intellectual and the artistic. Perhaps this conversation or befriending between the theologian and the artist within ourselves is the foundational dialogue between religious studies and theology and the arts that would ground and make fruitful all the rest.
Let’s return to Karl Rahner and his thoughts on life as he moves closer to death. To reflect on artistic creativity through the lens of a piece on death is not random. Art and death have affinities, not least because art reminds us of our own contingent existence. Art is free; it can exist, or not exist, as it is as fragile as we are. This chapter on aging, besides being reflective and insightful, is also poignant, poetic and prayerful. It is, in fact, “a prayer” in its entirety: explicitly directed to God in the second person: a conversation. A theologian “in conversion”; writing in and from an awareness of God’s presence, in a genre not usually identified as theological. I know of only one other writing in which he does the same, and it is a brief ode to creativity called “Prayer for Creative Thinkers” that has long been the manifesto of my best moments.15 In it, Rahner prays to God to “raise up . . . persons endowed with creative powers, thinkers, poets, artists.” He lifts up creative persons praying they receive the courage to express without fear or censure the breadth of human experience, in its lights and its shadows. Why? Because “we have need of them.”16 He is not only speaking here of theological creativity, but he does extend it elsewhere: asking what became of the times when theologians also wrote hymns. “Has theology become more perfect because theologians have become prosaic?”17
In truth, Karl Rahner, the most systematic of all systematic theologians, is arguably at his most eloquent when he touches on this theme (and he does so frequently18), but even here, he does not offer us an explanation of how and why he chooses to write as he does. And I find myself wanting just that: a reflection from one of the greatest theologians of recent times on his own thought processes, on how and why he wrote as he did, and how he experienced the movement between his various forms of writing. What was the link between experience, conversion, poetic inspiration, and theological thinking for Karl Rahner? Admittedly, his main movement or transition is not between art and theology, but he does venture into new fields, and some awareness had to have brought him to write on the need for creative theology. Was there a price to pay for so much theoretical thinking? And what would it have looked like, had he acted more on his own challenge to write as priest and poet?
As I write, two friends are battling through their final moments of creative living—both of them theologians, both of them artists. One of them, faced with the option of finishing a book or a CD, chose the latter.19 The other has walked like few I know that thin line of faithfulness to the creative self while still responding to the academic forum. I pray in gratitude for both of these creative thinkers. And maybe that is one of the keys, and why Rahner turns to prayer: perhaps the memory, or the mind that can hold these two spaces and patterns together, is not ours, but God’s. This implies, I am convinced, challenging the ideal of academic life that has been presented to us, and risking others ways of expressing and exploring.
On that note, and with Rahner’s presumed blessing, I shall finish making sense of what I have said through music. Dancing in our Minds is a song that began to emerge while participating in an exceptionally good theological conference, which nonetheless led me to this insight: we dance in our minds, too often out of step with those who need to grasp what we have to say. And sometimes the lost audience is one side of our own selves.
The image is evocative, and perhaps explains why that second half of life draws us more fully into the kind of interpretive task on the meaning of life and of our life’s work: as those who are important in life and help define us disappear, we need to rediscover who we are. The Irish proverb holds some truth: “Tell me who you walk with, and I’ll tell you who you are.” As the ranks become thinner, we are forced to stand alone, and somehow rethink the world and our place in it: who were they for me and who will I become (without them)? What is it of them that stays in my memory and signals that something important lies here? For Rahner, it leads to reflection on the nature of human love as truly eternal, as we never really forget those we have loved, and on God’s silence, as it seems to swallow up those who leave this world behind.
I have not yet lost many of those whom I think are in my column, so this may be a little premature; but I have often left them behind to move on to the next stage of my own journey: a new city or country, a different educational system and church culture, the widening or narrowing of research opportunities and demands. And foundational questions always arise: why am I here? What is important? What’s urgent? And are they the same thing? One question is not only a constant in all of these changes, but one that resonates ever stronger: how to situate my work at the intersection between theology and the arts? How to negotiate these two realms? And with it, the realization that the question is not an extrinsic one, but one that (also) runs right through how I understand myself and the work I am meant, even called, to do; right through my life in the study and in the studio.
At the keynote lecture of the 2014 annual meeting of the Society for the Arts in Religious and Theological Studies, Wilson Yates invited those of us who work in this field to a dialogical approach in our interaction with art, lest we “proof-text” our theology with art, similar to the way biblical scholars have long challenged theologians in our use of scripture.4 In the quest to address the issue raised above, I find myself wondering if our first dialogue partner may indeed be within ourselves. The interdisciplinary work he spoke of is not always between two persons or groups; sometimes it is the artist within that must converse with and listen to the theologian within, and vice versa. This process may start with the very process in and through which we work.
Negotiating diverse callings within ourselves is hardly an uncommon scenario. A while ago, I wrote a piece on what at that time I called living “in-between” the Christian and the artistic vocations.5 I suggested that when one felt called to both, it could be difficult to hold them together without sacrificing one to the other, and proposed that the only way forward was not to resolve the tension between the two dimensions of this hyphenated existence—being a Christian artist and/or an artistic Christian—but rather to hold them together, to live “in-between,” allowing one to challenge, pull, soften, or enrich the other. While this holds true and is ongoing as a dynamic of life, since then, it is this other hyphen or “in-between” space that has become the playground and battlefield of my imagination and my daily timetable: life as a musician and life as an academic; life in the studio and life in the study (and classroom). And although there are similarities, it is not the same dilemma: being a Christian and being a theologian are not the same thing. Instead of tension between responding to God and/or the sensibilities and demands of one’s art-form, here the issue is around moving between different creative processes, or ways in which the human mind makes sense of life . . . and faith, surely? In theology’s case, this is within the church, society, academy, and world, to use David Tracy’s delineation of its audiences.6 And in the case of music, is it the church and society, but not the academy? Can we really separate and streamline so clearly these two ways in and through which our faith seeks an understanding of itself?
In my case, the art-form is music. Making music—the creative process involved in composing, performing, arranging and recording; exploring sounds and how they need to be arranged at each step—is one way I make sense of life and of faith. The whole dynamic between them colors how I inhabit the world and understand it. And yet my brain also seeks to grasp and express the source of that meaning and music in ways that speak into and facilitate its comprehension, not only for myself but also for those who walk into my classroom or pick up my writings. I would like to suggest and even attempt in this article a dialogue between the two, or at the very least, a reflection on the need for an interaction between these two ways of working things out: the musical and the theological. I am convinced the exercise could be an important step in theology’s understanding of what art has to offer theological method and creativity. It may not be an easy conversation, but then no authentic dialogue ever is, to begin with, and this particular one has its own conditioning factors in the history of theological investigation. In the conviction that awareness of and reflection on experience is essential to theology, and even a first stage in all human knowledge, I will use a description of my own difficulty in interacting between the two to set the stage.
The Musical and the Theological
As I mediate between the musician and the theologian inside myself, I have a repeated felt experience, somewhat like a recurring dream, that surprises me, paradoxically, each time it occurs. It is as if my system is wired slightly wrong and each time that particular circuit comes around, I adjust and think I have fixed it, only to have it happen all over again—until the realization dawns that it may be a factory fault. Or even feature? If so, resistance is futile and the only way forward is to embrace, explore, and work with it. It is a conundrum. Should not transitioning between studio and study be simple, seamless? And yet, it is my constant, somewhat excruciating experience that these two apparently essential places for the unfolding of my life’s work and calling do not always sit well alongside one another. They fight for their own space and hang on for dear life once they have the spotlight—which needs must pass on. And it is the difficulty of the transition that both disturbs and fascinates me. It takes on two distinct but related forms—one external, the other internal; the external when seeking to “speak” about music in academic forums, the internal within my own consciousness when shifting between the respective creative forums that each require.
Externally, at academic conferences, research seminars or similar forums, when preparing to express the role and potential of music in theological thought, the internal resistance to doing so is usually tremendous. I feel constrained not only by time limits (music, after all, implies taking time to hear it), but also by doubts about the very possibility of explaining what I want to communicate, and this to the extent of questioning why I even try. To continue, I push against this visceral feeling and practically force myself to put into words how music makes sense of human living, religious experience, and Christian theology. Paradoxically, when I manage to do so, it seems to open a door, or rather a window, for those for whom academia is their normal habitat, who express how enriching (if challenging) the surprise of finding music can be in making sense of theological discourse. And although this may sound naïve, I genuinely wonder why I questioned my endeavor in the first place. Until the next time I find myself in a similar situation!
The second dilemma happens within myself, far from the public view of conferences and classrooms, and independently of my interaction with anyone else. It has to do with the creative process that gives birth to music and theology, respectively. When I write for academic purposes, that is to say, when I dive into the thought of a given theologian, philosopher, or aspect of Christian theology, it is usually an intense and very rewarding process. I can be very thorough, devouring all I need to read, or in the words of Ezekiel, “eating the scroll” and swallowing (Ezekiel 3:3). It even tastes like honey to my mind as I come to greater understanding and insight. But then I move out of that space, into my music-making, or performing, and my “center of gravity” moves decidedly from the brain to somewhere in the gut. And my ever curious mind is told politely, but firmly, to wait. Whereupon the insights born of that effort fade into the distance, or the subconscious—so far from my recent memory that it seems strange it was I who wrote. And moving back into that intellectual or academic space implies considerable effort. An image that might describe it is that of someone with multiple personalities who do not know or recognize each other; or a person with long-term memory loss who visits and explores different countries, but once home again cannot recall well what seemed so thoroughly vivid while there. Did I really visit that place? Was it I who wrote that? Do I really know so much about this author or theme?
One possible interpretation of these experiences —indeed my own knee-jerk reaction each time it happens again (for the first time)—is that of appropriating it as a personal dilemma in need of a choice: where do I fit best? Which identity is more important and should therefore win, definitively, center-stage attention and dedication? An extension of that position is to take it a step further and generalize it, separating the processes and nature of these crafts: theology works one way, art another. The best we can do is good interdisciplinary work in which we take into account the various standpoints—one thing is the creative process and another its reception. But how do we situate ourselves when we do have intimate access to the dynamic that brought to birth something artistic, a “text,” a piece that we find ourselves in front of but also inside of? Can a theologian who is also an artist offer more, or at least different, insights? Because the fact is that many of us do have a foot in each camp, or field, and this for many reasons: an inner calling and a gift, a craft, or intelligence that has something to offer the other maneuverings of our creative yet complex brains. Freedom from and towards other interpretations is one essential response, but it is not the full picture. So how can these two dimensions dialogue with one another, and what fruit can be gained from the attempt?
Insights from Lonergan
One approach that helps me navigate through this maze is that of twentieth-century Canadian Jesuit Bernard Lonergan. This is surprising for some, as his writings are known more for their dry and somewhat mathematical precision than their creative expression, and he speaks little of art. But true to his own style—and style may be as significant in theological writing as it is in our interactions with art—what he says is lucid and challenging. Above all, he pays a lot of attention to how the human mind works, and his clarity has something to offer those of us who struggle with hyphenated or multi-layered thinking processes.
A useful category Lonergan explores is that of the diversity of patterns of experience or consciousness in and through which we experience and make sense of life.7 He identifies various modes: common sense, biological, intellectual/theoretical, aesthetic, artistic, and dramatic.8 Whether the list is comprehensive or there are others is a question for another moment. He calls this polymorphism, and like much of his thought, it is currently drawing the attention of others who, taking his approach as a framework, are developing it further.9 The theory is that the mind works in different ways. It has a diversity of patterns, rules, and ways of making sense of the world we live in that can, one imagines, lead to habits and areas of expertise. This is not a completely new notion. It resonates with Howard Gardner’s well known theory of multiple intelligences.
Gardner explored the notion that we have a variety of ways in which we take on tasks and aim to achieve goals, calling them “intelligences,” which he defined as “the ability to find and solve genuine problems or difficulties, or to create products, that are valued within one or more cultural settings.”10 He too identified various of these operations or dynamics of the human mind: “linguistic, musical, logical-mathematical, visual-spatial, bodily-kinesthetic, personal (interpersonal and intrapersonal) intelligences. While a comprehensive presentation of their similarities and differences is neither possible nor of interest here, it is significant that both theories identify a diversity of ways in which our consciousness approaches and unfolds in its interaction with the world around it, and both see them as key to some aspect of human learning and knowledge. Lonergan goes as far as to propose the polymorphism of consciousness as “the only solution to philosophy”!11 In a Catholic framework—which was Lonergan’s own as a Jesuit—that is tantamount to saying the same about theology. Furthermore, his explorations in philosophy and epistemology had the transformation of theological method as their ultimate and explicit end.
So what of their impact and effect on disciplines that intersect with the arts? Gardner’s work has had immense influence in the field of education—leading to explorations in a diversity of learning and teaching modes that have transformed the panorama of the early stages of education wherever it has been implemented. His work, however, never really perforated the worlds of philosophy and theology—understandable perhaps, given his scholarly perspective, but lamentable, as one of his initial motivations was precisely the lack of mention of the arts in developmental and cognitive psychology in the 1960s.12
Lonergan’s thought is slowly influencing theological method, but the field of art has not often been explored. Again, this is not surprising, as his interest in the world of art was minimal. His one full writing on art was given as part of a seminar on education and must be understood within the overriding concern of all his work: our knowledge of truth and its transmission.13 But it is precisely this concern that led him to explore how the human mind relates to the world and comes to know (things, others, truth, God . . . ), and to postulate this notion of our diversely patterned ways of approaching and apprehending reality, and even to try and describe them. The artistic pattern of experience, for example, is described as involving the tasting and re-tasting of what he calls elemental meaning, without or before allowing understanding and reflection to get their hands on it. As such, he says, it is potentially liberating at the deepest level—of our human awareness of life and the world around us. In his words, the artist “beholds, inspects, dissects, enjoys and repeats” a pattern of experience in order to “objectify, unfold and make it explicit” in a work of art, abstracting the form, not conceptually, but by doing—poiesis.14 One could debate what he means by this, and there is a need to discern whether or not this is actually how artists experience and understand what they are doing, but the clarity with which he relates artistic creativity to human meaning-making is at the very least compelling. It resonates, at least to some degree, with how I experience composing—at its most intense and when it feels most productive.
His language is dry. Lonergan was a scientist, and approached theology with that kind of logic. His kind of analysis and clarity attracts some and repels others, and perhaps needs translating to still others, but it gives us words to articulate things—specifically the conversation this article is trying to initiate. It seems obvious that theology, in western culture at least, has evolved mainly in and through the theoretical (intellectual, linguistic) pattern of experience. Perhaps this is as it should be. Or rather, perhaps this was the only way to express what was being thought in the cultural setting in which theology developed in the past. But it is not enough now. Meaning is transmitted in different ways. Once again, Lonergan’s categories here are useful. With a tremendous sense of the history of theology—where it had come from and the direction it needed to take—he suggests that the history of humanity’s making sense of reality has passed through different “stages of meaning”: common sense, theory, and the third in which we now find ourselves—interiority. It is not that one completely supersedes the other—there is a need for common sense and theory in a world that understands itself in terms of interiority—but the shifts are radical and affect our whole worldview.
The current challenge for theology, it would appear, is that of transitioning, without impoverishing itself, from theory to interiority. In this process, given the challenge of speaking about truth in the shifting paradigms of modernity’s turn to the subject and postmodernity’s suspicion, he sets as foundational the self-appropriation and awareness of the person of the theologian, of his or her horizons of meaning. He calls this awareness of the person of the theologian “in conversion.” The layering of meanings he develops in relation to conversion—amongst which we find religious, moral, intellectual, and psychic—is beyond the scope of this article, but the common denominator is the call to a critical awareness of the theologian to the processes in and through which she apprehends and comes to an understanding of the realities of Christian faith.
This position opens a world of possibilities for the role of art, and the artist, in theology. It is somehow obvious that many people, including those at work in theological scholarship, find in artistic creativity a worthy expression of their experience of faith and ongoing understanding of the world—but what is at work there that theology cannot only respect but learn from? What could a theologian at work in an artistic pattern of consciousness mediate us into? Because one way of understanding some of the problems facing research into theology and the arts is that the former has been hijacked by the intellectual pattern of consciousness, and has lost touch with and perhaps even the capacity to open to and understand other patterns, especially those the arts inhabit—the aesthetic and the artistic. And these could be an essential part of this shift of our theological terms into those recognizable by a culture that no longer works solely in theoretical terms.
I know this is a frequent insight I have as I explore with colleagues my theological research into music. That music is important is never questioned. Nor is it questioned that music could enrich or help “in the classroom,” given the rapidly changing cultural movement we face and the difficulty our students have in grasping the language we speak. But creating a space in their minds and understanding to learn to think through music so as to see what it has to offer conceptual understanding, both in its reception (aesthetic pattern) and composition (artistic pattern) is as yet often one stretch too far. It is still on the margins of serious thought, relegated to whatever free time remains when real thought needs a break. And this external marginalization is so very easily interiorized into how we understand our own work. So moving between spheres becomes arduous. Precisely because that is the case, one way forward in overcoming this challenge has to be through those who inhabit both spaces and create in both patterns: the intellectual and the artistic. Perhaps this conversation or befriending between the theologian and the artist within ourselves is the foundational dialogue between religious studies and theology and the arts that would ground and make fruitful all the rest.
Let’s return to Karl Rahner and his thoughts on life as he moves closer to death. To reflect on artistic creativity through the lens of a piece on death is not random. Art and death have affinities, not least because art reminds us of our own contingent existence. Art is free; it can exist, or not exist, as it is as fragile as we are. This chapter on aging, besides being reflective and insightful, is also poignant, poetic and prayerful. It is, in fact, “a prayer” in its entirety: explicitly directed to God in the second person: a conversation. A theologian “in conversion”; writing in and from an awareness of God’s presence, in a genre not usually identified as theological. I know of only one other writing in which he does the same, and it is a brief ode to creativity called “Prayer for Creative Thinkers” that has long been the manifesto of my best moments.15 In it, Rahner prays to God to “raise up . . . persons endowed with creative powers, thinkers, poets, artists.” He lifts up creative persons praying they receive the courage to express without fear or censure the breadth of human experience, in its lights and its shadows. Why? Because “we have need of them.”16 He is not only speaking here of theological creativity, but he does extend it elsewhere: asking what became of the times when theologians also wrote hymns. “Has theology become more perfect because theologians have become prosaic?”17
In truth, Karl Rahner, the most systematic of all systematic theologians, is arguably at his most eloquent when he touches on this theme (and he does so frequently18), but even here, he does not offer us an explanation of how and why he chooses to write as he does. And I find myself wanting just that: a reflection from one of the greatest theologians of recent times on his own thought processes, on how and why he wrote as he did, and how he experienced the movement between his various forms of writing. What was the link between experience, conversion, poetic inspiration, and theological thinking for Karl Rahner? Admittedly, his main movement or transition is not between art and theology, but he does venture into new fields, and some awareness had to have brought him to write on the need for creative theology. Was there a price to pay for so much theoretical thinking? And what would it have looked like, had he acted more on his own challenge to write as priest and poet?
As I write, two friends are battling through their final moments of creative living—both of them theologians, both of them artists. One of them, faced with the option of finishing a book or a CD, chose the latter.19 The other has walked like few I know that thin line of faithfulness to the creative self while still responding to the academic forum. I pray in gratitude for both of these creative thinkers. And maybe that is one of the keys, and why Rahner turns to prayer: perhaps the memory, or the mind that can hold these two spaces and patterns together, is not ours, but God’s. This implies, I am convinced, challenging the ideal of academic life that has been presented to us, and risking others ways of expressing and exploring.
On that note, and with Rahner’s presumed blessing, I shall finish making sense of what I have said through music. Dancing in our Minds is a song that began to emerge while participating in an exceptionally good theological conference, which nonetheless led me to this insight: we dance in our minds, too often out of step with those who need to grasp what we have to say. And sometimes the lost audience is one side of our own selves.
Dancing in our Minds20
Out of time, out of tune with the rhythm that passes us by, as we hide in the thoughts of old times: Dancing in our minds…
Out of place, in this space there’s no moving around what you’ve found: it is now, that you give or you take: Dancing in our, dancing in our minds…
And the world is alive with moving grace.
Hold my hand in your side, ‘til
Touching You, feeling You, tasting You,
breathing You
Knowing your life is within my reach . . . ,
Touching You, healing me,
tasting You, breathing me
Flowing . . . your life’s running through my veins.
And the Word became human,
and Eternity entered time
Tasting the sound of your voice in mine . . .
Love interrupts and it hurts if you let yourself move
with the truth as it cuts in and opens your mind . . .
Dancing through our lives . . .
But to live is to grow in the newness
you hold in your hands;
Will you stand for a future unknown?
Dancing through our . . .
dancing through our lives!
© 2015, Maeve Heaney, all rights reserved.
Out of time, out of tune with the rhythm that passes us by, as we hide in the thoughts of old times: Dancing in our minds…
Out of place, in this space there’s no moving around what you’ve found: it is now, that you give or you take: Dancing in our, dancing in our minds…
And the world is alive with moving grace.
Hold my hand in your side, ‘til
Touching You, feeling You, tasting You,
breathing You
Knowing your life is within my reach . . . ,
Touching You, healing me,
tasting You, breathing me
Flowing . . . your life’s running through my veins.
And the Word became human,
and Eternity entered time
Tasting the sound of your voice in mine . . .
Love interrupts and it hurts if you let yourself move
with the truth as it cuts in and opens your mind . . .
Dancing through our lives . . .
But to live is to grow in the newness
you hold in your hands;
Will you stand for a future unknown?
Dancing through our . . .
dancing through our lives!
© 2015, Maeve Heaney, all rights reserved.
NOTES
- Quoted in Susie Hodge, 50 Art Ideas You Really Need to Know (London: Quercus, 2011), 119.
- Peter L. Doebler, “The Art of Patience: Reading Late Life with Rembrandt” ARTS 26.3 (2016), 7-16.
- Karl Rahner, Encounters with Silence (Maryland: Newman Press, 1966), 53-60.
- Wilson Yates, “Theology and the Arts after Seventy Years: Towards a Dialogical Approach," ARTS 26.3 (2016), 35-42.
- Maeve Louise Heaney, “Ascending Grace: A Movement Back Into the World,” in ARTS online edition, 25.2 (2014); http://societyarts.org/arts-journal/online-edition/129-online-edition-vol-25-no-2/308-ascending-grace-a-movement-back-into-the-world.
- David Tracy, The Analogical Imagination: Christian Theology and the Culture of Pluralism (New York: Crossroad, 1981), 5.
- Bernard Lonergan, “Insight: A Study of Human Understanding,” in F. E. Crowe, R. M. Doran, ed., Collected Works of Bernard Lonergan S.J., Vol. 3 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1992), chapters 6 and 14.
- Ibid., 207-209.
- For example, cf. Gerard Walmsley, Lonergan on Philosophical Pluralism: The Polymorphism of Consciousness as the Key to Philosophy (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2008).
- Howard Gardner, Frames of Mind: The Theory of Multiple Intelligences (New York: Basic Books, 2011), xxviii. While there has been much debate around many aspects of Gardner’s work, the underlying insight remains: there are different ways in which the human mind interacts with, grasps, and understands the world we live in. Intelligence is not mono-color.
- Lonergan, Insight, 452.
- Gardner, Frames of Mind, ix.
- Bernard Lonergan, “Art” in R. M. Doran, F. E. Crowe, ed., Collected Works of Bernard Lonergan, Vol. 10: Topics in Education (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1993), 208-232.
- Ibid., 219.
- Karl Rahner, “Prayer for Creative Thinkers,” in Theological Investigations VIII (London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 1971), 130-132.
- Ibid., 130.
- Karl Rahner, “Priest and Poet,” in Theological Investigations III (London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 1974), 316.
- Karl Rahner, “Poetry and the Christian,” in Theological Investigations IV (London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 1974), 357-367; “Priest and Poet” in Theological Investigations III, 294-317; “The Task of the Writer in Relation to Christian Living” in Theological Investigations VIII, 112-129.
- I am deeply indebted to Brother James Maher, MSC, for insights and conversations on this theme. James is a musician who has also felt drawn to understanding in theological terms what is at work and at stake in a Christian songwriter’s attempt to express the experience of God. The thesis of this fine thinker, through thoughts and music, can be found at http://repository.divinity.edu.au/1368/.
- https://soundcloud.com/theologicalexplorations/dancing-in-our-minds.
