Art-Making as Spiritual Practice
A Process-Relational Approach
Art-making is a spiritual practice in its own right. People can be 'religious' or 'not-religious' in their own self-understanding, and nevertheless practice spirituality in their very act of art-making. While the objects created are very important, the focus here is not on the objects created but on the process of art-making. The spirituality, the openness to something more in life, is in the process.
The process itself includes four kinds of experience known to many artists: the enjoyment of creativity, a desire to create something valuable (whether truthful, beautiful, good, or engagingly interesting), a desire to weave fragments into wholes, and a sense of felt connectedness with the world, including the elements that help create the art. The art at issue may be music, poetry, storytelling, visual art, dance, ritual, performance, film-making, or something still different. These four modes of awareness are present in all of these forms.
The four kinds of experience are satisfying in their own right, and they are also forms of knowing: that is, windows into certain kinds of 'ultimacy' that are part of the universe. They reveal and partake of:
I am sure that there are other forms of knowing in the process of making art. The list is not exhaustive. However, these four have a certain metaphysical dimension; they touch depths that are more than the artist.
Or, more accurately, they are ways of being touched by the depths. The four modes are happenings not achievements. They are not outcomes of a blind act of the will or as the outcome of strategic thinking. They emerge as gifts in the very act of art-making - gifts that are received as the self-preoccupied ego gets out of the way. They are forms of grace and require a willingness to listen, to receive, to improvise, to be surprised, and to participate in realities larger than oneself.
As they well up within an artist's life, art-making itself becomes a spiritual practice, but not a practice that is 'practiced' in a spirit of willfulness. Rather a practice that is 'practiced' in a spirit of willingness. This willingness to receive, to cooperate with something more, is at the heart of artistic practice.
At least so I suggest.
This page is prompted by the anthology of essays Art-Making as Spiritual Practice: Rituals of Embodied Understanding, edited by Lexi Eikelboom and David Newheiser, published by Bloomsbury Publishing in 2025. Lexi Eikelboom is a Senior Research Fellow in Religion and Theology at the Australian Catholic University’s Institute for Religion and Critical Inquiry. David Newheiser is Associate Professor of Religion at Florida State University. The volume explores the idea that artistic creation can function as a form of spiritual practice and embodied understanding, inviting readers to think about music, poetry, storytelling, visual art, dance, ritual, and performance not simply as aesthetic activities, but as ways of cultivating attention, meaning, transformation, and relational depth in human life.
The More-Than Side of Knowing
The editors note that there is no single, universally accepted definition of “spirituality.” Nevertheless, the contributors to the volume — many of whom are themselves practicing artists — share the sense that their artistic practices are spiritual in that they involve an encounter with a “more than” dimension of life, amid the very process of art-making itself. This “more than” may be experienced as depth, transcendence, relationality, mystery, presence, transformation, heightened awareness, communion, or participation in realities that exceed the isolated ego. Eikelboom puts it this way in her introduction:
The process itself includes four kinds of experience known to many artists: the enjoyment of creativity, a desire to create something valuable (whether truthful, beautiful, good, or engagingly interesting), a desire to weave fragments into wholes, and a sense of felt connectedness with the world, including the elements that help create the art. The art at issue may be music, poetry, storytelling, visual art, dance, ritual, performance, film-making, or something still different. These four modes of awareness are present in all of these forms.
The four kinds of experience are satisfying in their own right, and they are also forms of knowing: that is, windows into certain kinds of 'ultimacy' that are part of the universe. They reveal and partake of:
- Creativity: A cosmic creativity that is inherent in the very nature of existence, the hills and rivers, trees and stars, plants and animals, atoms and molecules, and, in that larger context, human life.
- Value: An inwardly felt call to add value to the world - a call which is likewise present in the whole of creation, from atoms to galaxies, as a lure to add 'voice' to the rest of the world.
- Weaving: A cosmic weaving which embraces the whole of the universe and is itself the living whole of the universe, understood as a perpetual act of creative synthesis that gathers fragments into wholes.
- Mutual Immanence: the sheer interconnectedness and mutual becoming of all things, such that all finite realities are concrescences of the entire universe.
I am sure that there are other forms of knowing in the process of making art. The list is not exhaustive. However, these four have a certain metaphysical dimension; they touch depths that are more than the artist.
Or, more accurately, they are ways of being touched by the depths. The four modes are happenings not achievements. They are not outcomes of a blind act of the will or as the outcome of strategic thinking. They emerge as gifts in the very act of art-making - gifts that are received as the self-preoccupied ego gets out of the way. They are forms of grace and require a willingness to listen, to receive, to improvise, to be surprised, and to participate in realities larger than oneself.
As they well up within an artist's life, art-making itself becomes a spiritual practice, but not a practice that is 'practiced' in a spirit of willfulness. Rather a practice that is 'practiced' in a spirit of willingness. This willingness to receive, to cooperate with something more, is at the heart of artistic practice.
At least so I suggest.
This page is prompted by the anthology of essays Art-Making as Spiritual Practice: Rituals of Embodied Understanding, edited by Lexi Eikelboom and David Newheiser, published by Bloomsbury Publishing in 2025. Lexi Eikelboom is a Senior Research Fellow in Religion and Theology at the Australian Catholic University’s Institute for Religion and Critical Inquiry. David Newheiser is Associate Professor of Religion at Florida State University. The volume explores the idea that artistic creation can function as a form of spiritual practice and embodied understanding, inviting readers to think about music, poetry, storytelling, visual art, dance, ritual, and performance not simply as aesthetic activities, but as ways of cultivating attention, meaning, transformation, and relational depth in human life.
The More-Than Side of Knowing
The editors note that there is no single, universally accepted definition of “spirituality.” Nevertheless, the contributors to the volume — many of whom are themselves practicing artists — share the sense that their artistic practices are spiritual in that they involve an encounter with a “more than” dimension of life, amid the very process of art-making itself. This “more than” may be experienced as depth, transcendence, relationality, mystery, presence, transformation, heightened awareness, communion, or participation in realities that exceed the isolated ego. Eikelboom puts it this way in her introduction:
To designate this way of knowing a “spiritual practice” is to indicate something about the significance of this embodied way of knowing as a practice that seeks to know what we might simply call a “more than.” For some, the spiritual refers to more than that which we can empirically see and measure. For others, it is more than an atomistic perspective, or an egoistic focus on self, which recognizes the interconnectedness of all things. It may be used to refer to that which is in excess of the principles, routines, or experiences of everyday life, or that which cannot be captured by the principles of finance or material progress. It is typically described in terms of either a “beyond” or as a “depth,” suggesting, either way, something that exceeds that which is most immediate and familiar to us. Thus, different art-making practices might aim at different “more-thans,” so to speak.
The entire book is available free online. This page offers excerpts from the Introduction to the book, written by Eikelboom, and from the Epilogue, written by Newheiser. It also includes the publisher’s description of the book and its table of contents.
A Whiteheadian Appreciation of the Spiritual
In what follows, I offer a process-relational response to the idea that art-making can be a spiritual practice, provisionally adumbrated above. I suggest that the "more thans" of life can be understood as (1) a creativity which is not only in the life of the artist but also in all things as a cosmological energy of which all things are expression, as (2) a divine lure to add something of value to the world, as (3) as the living whole of the universe itself, understood as a perpetual weaving of finite events into meaningful wholes, and (4) as the mutual Immanence of all things, such that all things are present within one another.
These four modes of moreness are found in the act of art-making, by which I mean that the act of art-making is a window into the moreness of creativity, the divine lure toward value, divine weaving, and mutual becoming. In this sense, art-making is itself a metaphysical disclosure: a disclosure which need not be named in a verbal way, but which is nevertheless disclosive.
Creativity
First, moreness can be understood as Creativity itself, understood in the Whiteheadian sense as the ontological ground of the universe expressed in the “creative advance into novelty” of the universe as a whole and the spontaneous self-creativity present within each moment of experience. Here Creativity is incarnate, moment by moment, as an open-ended universe in which the future is not yet determined and nothing is completely controlled, not even by God. The act of art-making is thus an act of participating in and embodying this Creativity in the immediacy of the creative process itself.
Such participation combines skill and spontaneity: skill in working with inherited forms, materials, techniques, rhythms, languages, colors, sounds, movements, and traditions; and spontaneity in responding creatively to possibilities emerging from those materials which can be adapted in the moment itself. The spontaneity has a kind of freedom in it; a playfulness that cannot be reduced to technique, prediction, or control.
This spontaneity also includes a non-discursive or intuitive form of affective knowing: a felt awareness of possibilities emerging within the creative act itself and an openness to novelty, surprise, and emergence in the artistic act itself. Inasmuch as this knowing includes a felt recognition of what exceeds control, it is also, in its own way, an “unknowing” — that is, a recognition that the future cannot be fully “known” in the present and that the ground of this unknowability, Creativity itself, is not a “thing” to be grasped as an object among objects, but rather a fathomless activity expressed in, yet also exceeding, all particular forms. The natural response to this is humility and awe.
The Divine Lure toward Create Something Valuable
Second, the “something more” that is sensed in art-making can be understood as a cosmic lure toward the creation of something valuable, something both good and beautiful. By "value" I mean a host of qualities that contribute to the well-being of the world: truthfulness, intensity, harmony, tenderness, honesty, playfulness, variety, and love, for example, along with forms of value that deepen aliveness, relational richness, and meaningful participation in life. Value thus understood can be shocking, challenging, surprising, and unsettling, as well as healing, comforting, playful, joyous, tender, and peace-giving. It need not soothe in order to matter. Sometimes goodness awakens, disturbs, provokes honesty, or discloses hidden truths that call for transformation.
From a Whiteheadian perspective, this lure toward value is not a human projection or invention; it is part of the very make-up of the universe. The cosmic lure toward value is within each person, not artists alone, and it is one way that the Mind of the universe — God — is present in human life. It is also present throughout the more-than-human world in the astonishing variety of living forms and patterns of relation that constitute the ongoing life of the earth and cosmos: the spiral geometry of a nautilus shell, the murmuration of starlings moving as if with a shared intelligence, mycelial networks quietly linking forests beneath the soil, the shifting colors of octopus skin, the songs of whales echoing through oceans, the improvisational movement of jazz-like birdsong at dawn, the branching structures of rivers and lightning, the evolving shapes of clouds and nebulae, the cooperative life of coral reefs, the migration patterns of monarch butterflies, and the unfolding diversity of galaxies scattered across expanding space. All of these afe embodied value. The practice of art-making is one of adding something to a world of already-existing value. It is a way of collaborating with the value of the more-than-human world.
This collaboration with nature is also a collaboration with God. The cosmic Mind with its lure toward value is not Creativity as such; finite creatures, too, in their subjectivity and agency, are expressions of Creativity. They, too, create value and, for that matter, they misfire as well, creating tragedy. But the cosmic Mind with its lure toward productive value is the supreme expression of Creativity: its healing, whole-making, and life-nourishing embodiment within the universe itself. In this sense, art-making is a way of cooperating with and participating in the divine life itself: a responsive collaboration with a sacred presence that seeks not domination, but the flourishing of the world.
Participation in the Weaving
There is still another side to the cosmic Mind that is related to art-making. It is the side that Whitehead calls “the consequent nature of God.” It is not so much a lure toward value as it is a receptacle of all that exists: a living remembrance in which what has come to be remains forever woven into the ongoing life of the divine Mind itself. In this dimension of divine life, nothing is simply lost. Every joy, sorrow, struggle, beauty, act of tenderness, and fragment of experience is received, felt, preserved, and harmonized within the divine experience of the universe.
From this perspective, art-making is not only an act of creating something new. It is also an act of gathering, remembering, and transforming what has already been lived. Artists draw upon memories, wounds, landscapes, relationships, dreams, cultural inheritances, bodily feelings, political realities, and fleeting moments of experience. The painter gathers fragments of the world into a new form, just as the consequent nature of God gathers the multiplicity of the universe into a living unity. Art thus mirrors, in finite form, the receptive and relational activity of the divine life itself.
This may help explain why art can carry sorrow as well as beauty, grief as well as delight. The artist is not required to deny suffering or erase fragmentation. Rather, art can become a way of holding brokenness within patterns of meaning, intensity, contrast, and relation. In Whitehead’s language, the divine life continually weaves the world into what he calls a “Harmony of Harmonies,” not by eliminating tragedy but by receiving it into a wider beauty. Art-making participates in this receptive activity whenever it transforms lived experience into forms that can be shared, felt, remembered, and reimagined by others.
The Mutual Immanence of All Things
In addition to creativity as the ultimate reality and God as a lure toward value and a receptacle of all that happens, there is still another feature of Alfred North Whitehead’s philosophy which bears upon the practice of art-making. He calls it the principle of relativity. It is the idea that all actual entities in the universe are present within one another even as they transcend one another, which is to say that they are mutually immanent even as they are mutually transcendent. Nothing ever exists in absolute isolation. All things are relative to and dependent upon all other things, not unlike the way, in Buddhism, the universe can be compared to Indra’s net of jewels, with each jewel mirroring all the others.
The practice of art-making often presupposes and expresses this deep relationality. The artist never creates from nowhere. She works with inherited languages, symbols, techniques, memories, sounds, stories, colors, gestures, landscapes, bodies, and histories that already inhabit her experience. A jazz musician improvises in response to fellow musicians and inherited musical traditions. A poet writes within a language shaped by centuries of usage and emotional resonance. A painter responds not only to the canvas but also to light, texture, memory, political realities, natural forms, and the history of painting itself. Even solitary art is relational through and through.
Art also reveals how entities can be internally related without losing their uniqueness. In a painting, colors modify one another by proximity. In music, notes gain meaning through relation to other notes. In dance, movements arise through responsiveness to space, rhythm, gravity, and fellow bodies. In storytelling, characters become intelligible through their relationships and contexts. Art embodies the principle that things become what they are through their relations.
From a spiritual perspective, this relationality has profound implications. If all beings are internally related, then creativity itself is communal and ecological before it is individual. The artist participates in networks of influence that extend through human communities, the natural world, ancestral inheritances, and the cosmos itself. Art-making can thus become an act of awakening to interdependence: a practice of feeling the presence of others within oneself and oneself within a larger whole. In this respect, art does not merely represent relationality. It enacts it.
(Tentative) Conclusions
In offering this Whiteheadian way of understanding the spiritual side of art-making, I do not want to suggests that practicing artists need to see things this way or that the languate I use is appropriate to all. I suspect that for most artists the four realities I have named above - Creativity, the Lure of God, the divine Receptable, and the Mutual immanence of all things - are all woven together, such that these distinctions may not make sense. I also realize that, for some, the word "God" is offputting, even as it is deeply attractive for others; and that for some, what is most important is not a lure toward the actualization of something valuable, but simply the Creativity as such. Still, it seems to me that all four are implicitly present in much art-making, and that it has a 'spiritual' side in this sense, implicit if not explicit.
This spiritual side need not be connected with institutional religion in order to be “spiritual,” and yet in some cases the wisdom traditions of the world can enrich an artist’s capacity to creativity, responsiveness to the lure toward beauty, a weaving of fragments into wholes, and a sense of the inter-becoming of all things The essays in Art-Making as Spiritual Practice: Rituals of Embodied Understanding seek to connect the spiritual side of art-making with ritual, all the while distinguishing ritual studies from explorations of spirituality. This is a wise distinction, but also a wise pairing. For it is often through embodied rituals — communal, personal, artistic, liturgical, or everyday — that deeper forms of embodied knowing emerge in people’s lives, even among those who would not think of themselves as artists.
And the ultimate aim of the anthology, I suspect, is not simply to affirm that art-making among artists is a spiritual practice with an integrity of its own, but also to suggest that, at some level, we are all artists. We all partake, in one way or another, of a fourfold movement: creativity, responsiveness to the lure toward value, a weaving of fragments into wholes, and a sense of the inter-becoming of all things. In Process and Reality, Whitehead speaks of God as “the poet of the world.” At some level, I am sure, we, too, are poets of the world. The aim of Art-Making as Spiritual Practice is, in part, to help us realize this
