Beauty and God

It was supposed to be a two hour drive. It was of course a five hour drive to the middle of no-where (somewhere between California and Arizona) through mostly desert. I had planned on sleeping most of the way, but the high-energy girl-power music and loud singing-along-with my friends had engaged in prevented that. With an expensive camera in the back of the car, and four high energy girls, and one sleepy girl in the front, a ford suv was "salvation mountain" bound. Never having been there, not knowing what at all to expect- I finally settled into the adventure once the music changed from Avril to James Taylor and the business of eastern CA cities turned into the quite serenity of the desert. It was about 5 hours down the road, with a few wrong turns included, that we finally reached our destination.


Asked to photograph the whole shendig, four of my best friends, who also happen to be roommates, posed up and down the massive art work that is "salvation mountain". Unless you've ever been to this place, you can never fully understand it. It's a huge hill that has been built upon and painted to portray verses of the bible and an overall sense of God's love and beauty. There are mazes through it, the cars around it are painted, virtually everything in this small area in the middle of a pale desert has brightly coloured depictions of God's character on it's surface. The creator of this place, is a man in his 80's or so who virtually lives in Salvation mountain. He sleeps in a small truckbed, living off of faith and the generosity of others. His mountain is open to all and often hosts various worship nights, and photography shoots. You can't help but feel the presence of something greater when you are there. 


That, my friends, is the answer to the question I have been asking myself for years: how do I integrate faith and art? Faith based art is often scoffed at and stamped as cliche. The church and the art world have  been at odds for years- neither one seeming to accept the other. You can imagine the mental and spiritual manna I figuratively consumed when our Chapel speaker today spoke on just this issue.


I had known for quite some time that faith and beauty often go hand in hand. God created beauty for a purpose, and knew it to be seen as beautiful to our eyes when he created it. Why then, is there such a disconnect from beauty and the church? One seems to fear, even oppose the other.


I'm not sure the definitive answer as to how to successfully integrate art and faith- all I know is salvation mountain would be a listed example under this definition.