In the epilogue of her book, The Case for God, Karen Armstrong states, “We have become used to thinking that religion should provide us with information.  Is there a God?  How did the world come into being?”  But that, she claims, is the work of human reason.  Religion has a different task which she says is closely allied to that of art.  Religion is to help us to live creatively, peacefully, and even joyously with realities for which there are no easy explanations and problems that we cannot solve.  Here she identifies “mortality, pain, grief, despair, and outrage at the injustice and cruelty of life.” (p.318)

She offers this stark example.  “Scientific rationality can tell us why we have cancer; it can even cure us of our disease.  But it cannot assuage the terror, disappointment, and sorrow that come with the diagnosis, nor can it help us to die well.”  That is the work of religion, but religion will not work if it is “facile, false, idolatrous, or self-indulgent.”

Religion is more like art than logic.  Religion cannot be unreasonable, of course.  In our beloved “Wesleyan Quadrilateral” reason is right there with scripture, tradition, and experience as avenues by which we approach faithful decision-making.  But, religion cannot be restricted to logic alone.

In the description of the day of Pentecost from Acts 2 we read that the disciples heard the rush of a mighty wind and saw tongues of fire coming down and resting upon them.  And when they began to tell the crowds what had happened they discovered that they were able to communicate in a variety of languages that the Spirit of God was alive among them.  The many languages of believing . . . not so much to explain things but to experience life. 

Early in her book Armstrong says that the concept of the Trinity -- Father, Son, Holy Spirit, three in one and one in three -- was not adopted by the Church in order to explain God but rather artfully to represent the elusiveness of God.  Ponder the Trinity, become enmeshed in its complexity, and you will sense God, but not understand God.  We get ourselves into trouble when we assert that the Trinity is a dogmatic principle to which everyone must conform rather than offering it as a piece of art meant to provoke. 

Our son told me last week that I was being vilified on a blog site written by a biology professor at the University of Minnesota.  The blogger picked up on the newspaper article a few weeks ago in which I commented on the difficult parking issues in the Loop, hardly relevant to a biologist.  But his fury over Christians who try to prove God’s existence and character through science, the Creationists and Intelligent Design folks, bled over to him assuming that I was demanding special parking privileges for churchgoers, which I was not.  In fact, if he were to ask me, I would agree with his critique of efforts by some to use science to prove the reality of God mainly because every time devout people stake their claim on a particular phenomenon revealing God’s presence science comes up with another explanation.  And then, God gets smaller and smaller.

Religion’s task is not to provide information but to help us to live creatively, peacefully, and even joyously in the face of things we cannot explain.  It is more a matter of art than logic, the art of believing.  It is a categorical error to use science to prove anything about God.

Art gives us a way of seeing things in a new way.  Photography can sharpen our view of the world.  We see a great cathedral, let us say Chartres Cathedral, with its majestic façade and two towers, not identical but intentionally asymmetrical.  So, we take the obligatory postcard photo face-on.  Maybe we can include a couple of elderly women sitting on a bench to the left in their regional lace bonnets.  But then, we look down and we see that same magnificent structure reflected in a puddle left over from the morning rain.  The cathedral there in the puddle . . . the marvelous framed by the mundane, the time-honored captured in the momentary, the huge encompassed by the small, we see the reality of the cathedral no longer directly, but upon reflection.  Seeing is believing in a new way.

What great work of art does that for you?  On our church-sponsored trip to Italy a few years ago we went to Milan and saw da Vinci’s “Last Supper.”  It is a fresco painted high on a wall at the end of the refectory, the dining hall of a church, this being the only wall of the church not destroyed by our bombers in World War II.  When I walked into the room and looked to my right and first saw the painting, I heard someone gasp, “Oh, my God!”  I looked around; I was the only person there.  I am not given to such exclamations, but there it was  . . . enormous, beautiful, iconic. 

Now, seeing it, what new understanding did I have about my belief?  That all of the disciples really gathered on the same side of the table in order to be better portrayed by an artist?  That they conveniently clustered themselves in groups of three for dramatic effect?  That there really were Italian hills outside the window of the upper room in Jerusalem?  No, not the facts to understand, but the overwhelming depiction of Christ’s hospitality in the face of betrayal and death to fathom.  The grand scale of forgiveness.  That will not come through by studying technique or composition, but there it was spread out across the wall for all to experience.  The art of believing.

Not only seeing, the Pentecostal tongues of fire resting upon the disciples, but also hearing the rushing wind of the Holy Spirit.  Music has the power to confirm our faith where arguments fall short.  The first two measures of Faure’s “Agnus Dei” in his Requiem, are there more beautiful notes than these?  (music is played)  When our group was in London last month, “stranded” because of the volcanic ash, we went to hear Faure’s Requiem in what once was a church bombed in the war and now reclaimed as a concert hall.  And here came those notes (music is played), and beyond that the choir sang, “O Lamb of God, that takest away the sins of the world, grant them rest.”  He composed this in 1888 after the death of his mother, and he wanted it to be gentle and loving. 

We can debate the meaning of death and describe in gory detail the many ways in which people die.  But to express the beauty of a belief that death can be “a welcome deliverance, an aspiration towards happiness above,” as Faure said, that only can be expressed melodically. 

I have a friend who is a minister in Nassau.  On a visit there I rode with him as he drove us over a toll bridge from the mainland to Paradise Island.  When we got to the gate the sign read, “Toll - $2.”  Philip said to the woman, “That will be fifty cents, won’t it?”  She answered, “Yes.”  So, he gave here fifty cents and drove on through.

I said, “Philip, what just happened back there?  The sign read, ‘Toll - $2,’ you said, ‘That will be fifty cents, won’t it?’  She said, ‘Yes.’  And you drove through.”  He said to me, “In the Bahamas sometimes life is more a matter of poetry than precision.”  Life is more a matter of poetry than precision.  It might also have been helpful to know that the toll keeper was his aunt!  Nevertheless, the perspective is helpful on any road to paradise, and it is in harmony with Karen Armstrong’s assertion.  Religion’s task is closely allied to that of art, which is to help us to live creatively, peacefully, even joyously with realities for which there are no easy explanations and problems that we cannot solve.

The art of belief . . . hearing and seeing the Holy Spirit in a multitude of “languages,” that is the Pentecostal gift from God.  Amen.