When we think of prayer, we probably think of words that we speak, sing, or read. Yet human communication happens as much through nonverbal means as through verbal ones. This article probes the nature and influence of nonverbal communication and argues that it should be intentionally employed in worship.
Not long ago, a well-known magazine carried an article on what happens to Christians who participate in the Eucharist on a regular basis. Its fruits, according to the article, are joy, peace, love, and a sense of union. The editors were surprised to receive letters from many Christians in response to the article reporting that such feelings and participation are often not evoked by the liturgy. The liturgical movement since Vatican II has done much to remedy this situation, yet the problem continues. Today’s Christians are determinedly loyal; many attend worship even though the experience often leads them to frustration, anger, and apathy.
The cause of our frustration lies partially in the way that we are educated. We are the products of a rational, logical, analytic, and scientific culture. Parochial schools, most public schools, and many colleges teach their students to think in only one of two styles of thought. Many people are not even aware of their ability to think and feel in nonverbal ways.
As an art educator, religion teacher, and painter, I have been excited by recent brain research indicating that there are two very different, equally conscious, and cooperative styles of thought in the brain. This research reveals the brain to be two totally conscious, experiencing, expressing halves. The left half, we educate; the right, we don’t. In most people, the left consciousness gets all or most of the educational attention because the brain’s left hemisphere controls our mastery of verbal language, which has often been mistaken as a gauge for intelligence.
Left and Right Hemispheres
Language is a linear, sequential form of expression: one word after another, one sentence after another. It cuts apart whole pictures—for instance, a historical incident—and describes each part one at a time. Isolated sequences are used to describe the people involved, the place, the reasons, the history that led up to the incident, and its results. Chance affairs, perhaps the weather, may have changed things; a book or a certain school may have influenced the participants in earlier years. Family life may have had its effect. In this manner, epic tales of history, philosophy, and theology come to be. To present anything like a whole picture of events and ideas we must build word on word, tome on tome.
The left brain also imagines itself as a detached observer, unclouded by emotion. The left brain is clear and concise, cool and business-like; “business is business” is a typical left-consciousness phrase. The left brain also tends to focus on rules and procedures in its attempt to find cubby-holes for everything and everyone.
The other hemisphere of the brain (usually the right side) is programmed to take in the entire field or “gestalt” of events as they occur. The right brain can absorb the total picture, at once taking in the many influences of a story without dividing the facts or missing important connections. The languages for its fast, detailed, and interconnected grasping have their own styles of expression which are suitable to it and complementary to the other consciousness.
Each half of the brain has direct physical control of the opposite side of the body, coordinating movement and thought through the intimate connections of the bundle of nerves running between them. Until recent times the right side was considered a minor hemisphere because of our cultural bias for verbal language. As it turns out, however, the right hemisphere is programmed for a different operation. In contrast to the sequentially patterned logic of the left brain, the right brain senses shapes, forms, colors, and motions. Its experience in these modes gives rise to the languages we call art.
The right brain’s experiences are sounds, silences, and rhythms. It speaks directly in music. The right brain experiences relationships of the body to other bodies and to tables, chairs, and trees; it speaks in body language and dance. It also experiences emotional relationships. It is imaginative and intuitive, and it can be more spiritually sensitive than its partner, the left hemisphere.
Except in certain areas of the United States, most schools have given short shrift to education in the arts and have played down symbolic, poetic, intuitive styles of thought and action. Yet when it comes to worship, people must cling to natural, holistic styles of expression and to dramatic, symbolic, intuitive, and musical modes. New styles of worship will become more problematic than helpful if art and speech are not equally represented. The acceptance of the vernacular has this danger, that meaning expressed verbally can be represented as more important than being. New understandings of the brain’s native programming and abilities may be able to help Christians appreciate and respond to a more artistic and intuitive worship experience.
Overloading the Verbal
Drawing is a direct expression of the right hemisphere of the brain—one of its many nonverbal languages. Among many adults, it is also an underdeveloped talent. Its repression, a trauma many people experience, has a deep, direct effect on one’s sense of self. For example, if children’s drawings are not accepted as true expressions of their feelings and spirit, they will be disowned. In disowning their own creations, children also lose a sense of their own goodness. It becomes much harder for them really to believe in God’s love and acceptance. Their reactions can’t be put into words; their command of the verbal language is too small.
Adults do not completely express their feelings in words either. There are other languages in our repertory besides the verbal. We have, in fact, overloaded the verbal, powerful as it is. The result is a population with much the same aspect as a stage tree, all leaves and trunk on one side and next to nothing on the other, often needing to be held up by outside structures just to exist.
Often we do not fathom the depth of injury that a one-sided education does to our culture. But many adults now truly believe that they are not artistic. Often in conversation, they will point to some overbearing teacher or older child, even a parent, who strongly criticized or painfully ridiculed their artistic creations. This rejection usually happens at about the third or fourth grade, an age at which children are especially vulnerable.
One person told of painting the mountains she had seen from the sea as she sailed in from her mother’s home island where she had lived all her life. The teacher ridiculed her drawings because her mountains, the only ones she had ever seen, were brown, rounded, and mostly all the same height. Apparently, the teacher imagined that all mountains were snow-covered peaks resembling the Alps or the Rockies. This woman never dared to paint again, although she needed this medium desperately to express some of the later experiences of her life.
A man in early middle age showed me a scar across his right knuckle; the art teacher had used the metal edge of a ruler to register profound disapproval of his drawing of a tree. Both tales are violent, although most of us only recognize the violence in the second one. We often seem not to recognize spiritual and emotional violence.
A wide range of acceptable behavior characterizes our use of art, music, dance, and symbolic imagery, and confidence in these abilities has become imperative for human and spiritual growth. We must gently, but definitely, move away from the overly verbal, logical, and analytical modes of thought—no matter how much we in Western cultures have been steeped in these.
Liturgy is a spiritual experience that comes to us largely through these languages of the right hemisphere: solemn ritual, music, color, poetry, and story. The liturgy calls us to experience a deeply intuitive and personal response to the revelation of God whose word is Jesus Christ. Vestments, banners, and stained glass, the affective and physical poetry of the Psalms and dance, the parables, and stories of salvation history require a response from whole persons. A one-sided emphasis on logical-analytical thought styles can make it difficult for us to feel this involvement. Didactic or doctrinaire styles of preaching and teaching will not help us. Neither will complaints from highly educated and dissatisfied musicians. Unworthy music is a symptom rather than a cause of the problem.
Unless Christians can grow in artistic, intuitive, imaginative, and symbolic styles of thought, participation in the liturgy will fall off and we will once more find ourselves sitting in the back pews watching experts perform the liturgy.
Remedial Measures
Here are a few basic ideas, guidelines, and suggestions that may help us to remedy this need. First, we may want to consider sponsoring a parish program for art education. The arts are the natural basis for spiritual experience. Visual art, poetry, dramatic movement, and music can be more expressive of God’s presence in one’s life than the mere effort to capture this presence in prose. In fact, faith will be more naturally and joyfully articulated as we learn to respond to Christ’s presence in more visual ways. With self-acceptance in a world of colors, shapes, and forms comes an outpouring of joy that is already close to prayer. Thus a parish program for art education will be a program for liturgical renewal as well.
Second, just as we have many names for the Holy One, so there are a variety of artistic styles that express our experience in worship. For many people being good at art means producing a photographic image, but such images are rather the product of machines called cameras. Other kinds of images are possible for the magnificently complicated sensing, responding organism that is the human being. Childlike, impressionistic, and symbolic images may also be good art. We must recognize, therefore, our need for education specialists in the arts. If the parish has a school, or other educational facility or program, it should have no difficulty finding an art teacher for a reasonable salary. Good art teachers do more than conduct classes; they also help us discover the art that is part of daily parish life.
Third, music and harmonious movement are also valuable expressions of spiritual truth. Certainly, music, as well as art, needs to be taught, recognized, and affirmed as a part of daily life. Too often we concentrate so hard on concert performers that children who are not musically gifted are neglected. Then, just as the visual and musical art media are natural tools for comfortable expression in everyday life, so is the body a natural medium for direct expression. Some excellent dance or movement therapists and teachers live in large parishes. If teachers are not available locally, perhaps some of the music, dance, drama, or art teachers in the public schools can be invited in for some experimental sessions.
All teachers, whether they are parishioners or visitors, will need some materials on the liturgy. If they are good at their work and sensitive, they will be able to put liturgy and art together with their own knowledge and skills to help fulfill the needs of the worship assembly. Art educators and music educators are aware of the naturalness of these expressions.
Whether the programs focus on visual art, music, or motion, teachers and students will need to recognize the self-critical, self-conscious fears of most people. Whatever our expertise in other areas—we may be engineers, counselors, mechanics, nurses, priests or parents—rejection of the right hemisphere’s natural use is endemic to our modern American culture. Perhaps the rush of the young to loud, overwhelming music, drugs, and alcohol reflects the extent of our problem. The back-to-basics movement and our current romance with science, computers, and budget resolutions must not be allowed to make matters worse. We must be careful not to present the arts as second-rate.
The sacramental life is a long series of actions and symbols, a combination of the verbal and nonverbal expressions of a community’s spiritual experience. The arts can help us to be more easily and joyfully attuned to the rituals that open us to this presence of God in the life of the church.