"Prayer is not asking: it is a longing of the soul."
--Gandhi

"My faith is the grand drama of my life. I’m a believer, so I sing words of God to those who have no faith. I give bird songs to those who dwell in cities and have never heard them, make rhythms for those who know only military marches or jazz, and paint colours for those who see none."
--Olivier Messiaen, 20th century French composer 

It occurs to me that faith is a creative process, like painting or writing or dancing. We don't think about faith that way, and we suffer for it. We think of faith as a thing you have, or maybe a thing that you do, a set of choices that you make. These are both true, in a way, but there's something higher than that, something better than either one of those things that embodies all that faith is.

There are so many reasons to want to create--a desire to communicate, the wish to enact in reality the contents of our imagination, but there is also embedded in this a deep sense of longing. If you've ever experienced this, then you know what I'm talking about. There is a longing that is beyond words, beyond the language to express it, and this is the thing that we try to encode and speak out to the world at large. Everyone has their own special way of doing this; it isn't just those things that we typically think of as "art": sculpture, poetry, ballet. Almost any human activity can be informed by creative energy.

I know a woman whose art lies in making other people feel comfortable. When she encounters you, she locks eyes with you. She smiles. She lets you know how important and how special you are to her, often without words. I wonder, does this expression answer the same longing in her that my scribblings attempt to contain within me?

And so it is with faith. Faith isn't simply a belief in something; it is a mode of expression unto itself. Faith is a dance performed for an audience of One. The words of a prayer can become brittle and crack on the tongue, but an act of kindness performed in love can obviate it. A worship service can seem empty and contrived, but a flicker of light through a stained-glass window can sometimes be all the sermon we need. Faith is our way of expressing wordless knowledge to a listener who is understood only in part. All of our prayers and sacraments and icons are a means to that end, props in the play, instruments in the orchestra.

Faith expressed in these terms is also a response to deep longing. The life in all of us longs to connect to the source of all life. It's perfectly natural; it only sounds abstruse and hermetic because we spend so much time disconnected from this source. Many have even come to believe that no such source exists. The ability to arouse this sense of connectedness is the hallmark of great art, both religious and secular. When you see a painting that leaves you breathless, hear a piece of music that makes your heart skip a beat, you have been drawn into that great well of longing by someone who knew the way.

 I take it as a given that everyone has some of this longing inside. We experience it differently, though. For some, it's a deep yearning, a powerful hunger, a need that strives in the breast and colors everything around them. For others, it's an insatiable curiosity. For others still, it's a lifelong commitment or passion for some cause or goal. That's the fuel that drives our creative impulses. That's the coin of creativity.

I believe that deep down all of this longing is a longing for God. I don't think it's a coincidence that some of the most breathtaking works of art ever made grew directly out of this longing: Bach's "Sleepers Awaken," Rembrandt's "Return of the Prodigal Son," the poetry of Rumi, the scultpure of Michelangelo. Some of us long for God directly, with burning hearts, while others channel their longing into investigations and passions that seem to have little to do with the Divine. But the need for the divine underlies and suffuses every creative act that human beings perform. I believe this because I believe that to a large extent the space that exists between human beings, that allows them to know each other in ways beyond the surface, is a place where God's presence is often felt. Those who have a deep faith understand intuitively what Jesus meant when he said, "Where two or more are gathered in my name, I will be there," even if they are not Christian.

Faith is an artform with a vast repertoire of instruments and methods. Its finished pieces are sometimes solid objects, sometimes only memories, sometimes known only to God. The work of Mother Teresa was a great composition that lasted a lifetime and whose materials were the poor and unclean souls of Calcutta and of the sisters who worked with her and of everyone whose life she ever touched, even tangentially. Somewhere out there right now is someone whose name we will never know, whose masterpiece is her own quiet humility and grace, who lives in joy and peace and who spreads these things quietly behind her everywhere she goes. In such a person I like to think that the longing is finally fulfilled, that God comes in and fills the empty space that creates the longing. Maybe we were created for this very reason: to redeem our own longing and our own sense of solitude and confusion by filling that space with love and music and faith.

But it is not a solo performance. This is music that God creates with us, this music of faith. God pushes and we pull. God sways and we bow. Every act of faith is a duet between a single life and Life itself. There is a Jewish prayer that goes "Blessed art thou, Lord God, ruler of the Universe, who brings forth bread from the ground." What a beautiful ode to that very collaboration: God provides the seeds and the sun and the rain; we provide the toil and the art. Without both of us participating, there is no bread at all.

Think of it: your clay is before you. The wheel spins softly underneath. Your hands are wet. What will you make? What shape will come of it? I wonder if God even knows? I like to think that God waits as breathlessly as the rest of us. Even more breathlessly than us, perhaps, for this is what God has been waiting for, since the day God knit you together in your mother's womb, sculpting you into a new thing capable of surprising even its creator.