Art Responds to the Bible

Quakers have not been handicapped in their relation to art because they don't have "religious" art in their Meeting Houses. Their custom may have been an enormous advantage: it has kept the general run of bad "religious" art out of their worship experience. I strongly favor the traditional simplicity of the Meeting House. By temperament each person needs to find his own spiritual relatives in the world of visual arts, and his needs change as he grows. But Meetings can help their members come to recognize this need.

I suspect that Quakers rejected the visual arts because they saw nothing in the popular works of their time which could equal their deep religious experience.

Parts of the Bible that are integral to my life cou1dn't be included in this small work. I wish I could have shared my revelation to the Psalms and the Beatitudes--so deeply related to each other for me--along with art works which make both of these more concrete and vivid. From Archibald MacLeish's JB and from Blake's prints, I have acquired evolving images of Job that have prompted my meditation in many a Friends meeting--and especially Job's response to God as he pulls himself out of the ashes, not because God has answered his questions, but in spite of everything. Regardless of these and other omissions, I say "Godspeed" to what has been gathered here, hoping it may reach those to whom it can mean most.