The Intersection of Arts and Spirituality: A Journey Beyond the Self

The mystical state of consciousness experienced by staring into the intricate brush strokes of a painting or listening to the rhythmic tones of a musical composition, watching mesmerizing movement in dance, or reading the lyric verse from poetic writing can transport us to deeper places where inner-spiritual experience flows freely. But more than lines on the canvas, notes on paper, words on a page, or the movement of the human body on a stage, art’s evocative expressions become symbolic road maps to possibilities of transcendence beyond oneself.

“To what degree do the arts open us to religion and spirituality? To what degree is creativity part and parcel of spirituality and religion? We didn’t invent those questions,” said Charles Stang, Director of the Center for the Study of World Religions and Professor of Early Christian Thought at the Harvard Divinity School. “But what we do here is create the conditions where we can model the intersection of spirituality and the arts, not just talk about it, but actually do it and support it.”

Spirituality and the arts at the Center for the Study of World Religions at Harvard Divinity School (CSWR) is part of a larger initiative exploring religious and spiritual traditions and practices that nurture transcendence to alternative states of being that can effect change in individuals, communities, and societies. Throughout the academic year, the Center offers a selection of events, including poetry readings, musical offerings, art displays, and musical workshops, to explore the connections between artistic expression and the contemplation of self and spirituality.

Visiting Scholar Carole M. Cusack, Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Sydney, Australia, is partnering with the Center to host an international conference on G.I. Gurdjieff’s life and teachings in December. She also leads a biweekly reading group on Gurdjieff, a philosopher, mystic, spiritual teacher, composer, and dance teacher who led an international movement in the early twentieth century to awaken people to higher consciousness, which continues today. 

The G.I. Gurdjieff Conference commemorates the centennial of Gurdjieff’s visit and “Movements” performance at Harvard in 1924. It will bring together scholars and practitioners, including the Gurdjieff Society of Massachusetts, in a large forum to discuss and reflect on Gurdjieff’s spiritual and scientific influences, cultural contributions, and embodied practices to reach higher states of consciousness. The Center is also offering a series of Gurdjieff’s Movements workshops this fall. 

“The basic teaching of Gurdjieff is that human beings are essentially nothing. Machines, they have no soul. They have nothing that survives death. But if you practice this particular tradition, you can grow a soul,” said Cusack. “This work is compatible with a number of the programs at the Center; there are aspects of transcendence and transformation. You could very easily write a position paper about Gurdjieff’s ideas and practices under those two rubrics because that’s sort of the whole idea of trying to shift from being an unconscious machine to being a conscious person who will survive the death of the body.”

Visiting Scholar Andrew Shenton, PhD ’98, musician and faculty member at Boston University, is exploring the hallucinogenic qualities of music. He is a tenured Professor of Music, the James R. Houghton Scholar of Sacred Music, the director of the Boston University Messiaen Project, and the director of the Theology and Arts Initiative. His work at the CSWR is focused on arts-based spiritual healthcare, specifically using Estonian composer Arvo Pärt’s music in therapy. 

Pärt’s musical style, developed in the mid-1970s, is minimalist and based on chant music, a slow and meditative tempo where two lines intertwine to form a tonic triad. “Pärt is the most performed living classical composer in the world [from 2012 to 2018],” Shenton said, who is planning a free organ recital of Pärt’s music at Harvard’s Busch Hall on November 21. 

“We know that music does good things to the brain. It's a drug; it releases endorphins, and it lowers your blood pressure. Somehow, Pärt got to something more fundamentally human, so it seems to resonate with many people,” he said. “I see that there could be more use of his music in palliative care and grief care. So, I’m working on an article that describes a Pärt playlist, essentially a grief playlist.”

Sherah Bloor is the editor-in-chief of Peripheries, the CSWR’s literary and arts journal, and organizes the Peripheries Poetry Series at the Center. She is also a poet and poetry translator, completing a doctorate in philosophy of religion at Harvard’s Committee on the Study of Religion. Poetry, she said, cultivates sensory awareness.

“We are more comfortable in a fantastical world of abstractions than in the actual material world. We are actually not good at taste, smell, and feel,” said Bloor. “But poetry opens us to an encounter with the sensory. And perhaps, paradoxically or dialectically, this can be ecstatic—take us outside of ourselves, too.”

Stang said support of the arts was a guiding mandate in the CSWR’s founding mission statement and remains a prominent element of the Center’s focus today. 

“What I have understood the Center to be doing since its inception is creating spaces for people to do creative work and reflect on it,” Stang said. “But for my part, I think the arts are an extremely potent portal to, let’s just call it, other layers of reality.”