Finding God in the art studio.

The passage from St. Luke (whose symbol is the winged ox, on which I based my drawing) has long seemed to me the clearest confirmation in the New Testament of the vocation I have always felt to be mine - that of maker of sacred images and symbols. Similarly, Christ's own declaration that his words would "never pass away" first struck me many years ago as establishing the alphabet as one of the gifts of the Holy Spirit, guaranteeing that I, in designing and putting together letter-forms in those self-same words, was working in an enduring medium!

There are numerous passages in the Hebrew Scriptures that confirm the reality of the calling which I have felt from my youngest days to be mine. One of the most powerful occurs in Exodus where God orders Moses to have an image of a saraph serpent made and displayed as a source of healing. In many ways, I see myself as the late twentieth-century counterpart of that long ago craftsperson. Nearer to our own time, St. John Vianney - a pastor! - clearly saw the work of the artist as having spiritual power when he wrote that "sometimes the mere sight of an image is enough to move us and convert us." For my own part, I have always been convinced that a well-designed sacred image, made with the full sense of our utter reliance on God as taught by Christ in the first Beatitude, will bring blessings and healing to the community welcoming it. Only the other day someone I have never met wrote to tell me that she had framed a copy of an illustration of mine that appeared in The Long Island Catholic and sent it to "a very ill dear friend." What made her letter particularly important to me was that she sent it to me "for your information (and for the edification of our God)," thereby seeming to recognize that the artist may be the conduit through whom God can operate, whatever his or her personal faults and made inadequacies.

There is what I think of as a "Trinity experience" in every genuine work of sacred art. The material source of the work's potential life waiting in wood, stone, paper, ink, brushes, and so on, make me think of the First Person of the Trinity. The conception of the work together with its particular form or incarnation brings to mind the Second Person. In the degree and to the depth that these two fuse and become effectively articulated, there comes into being a third reality - what could be called the spirit of the work. It is the presence of this Spirit of Truth which speaks powerfully and lovingly within souls encountering the finished work.

Not until I was thirty-three did I finally muster up enough courage to quit the paid and pensioned security of my job as an art teacher in one of New York City's inner-city schools, determined that I would become an artist for Christ and for his Gospel. When I sought to take up the tradition of the powerful religious artists of earlier times, it did not take me long to discover that in this day and age I must travel almost alone; that the tradition has been generally abandoned or ignored in favor of convention and affectation. I could find little between its degraded forms on the one hand-the kitsch and schlock that were the stock in trade of ...