Art as Prayer in a Burning Building
October 2026 Written by Levi S Nelson
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“There are beautiful, gleaming beetles that feed on feces.” - Anna Kamienska
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The word “gleaming” strung together with “feces”. The contrast sets up a clarifying tension. An image with low contrast, like a day in thick fog speaks in whispers behind doors. Sometimes, in order to be heard, you must define unpleasant shapes.
Where we want beauty to reside, the fences we build around the perimeter of heaven fail to keep heaven inside. You cannot police an intrusive God who insists upon becoming flesh and carrying scars like stolen jewelry. Heaven intrudes. When we pray, “Your kingdom come, on earth as it is in heaven” It's recalibration. We’re predisposed to think more of heaven as a shining kingdom, ignoring the earth and its lowly, stooped inhabitants. We want gold streets, not a kingdom composed of the dust in our bones. We want transcendence, not to be more present in the same room.
In a recent horror series about a cursed town a character quoted a line from Tennessee Williams, “The world is violent and mercurial – it will have its way with you. We are saved only by love – love for each other and the love we pour into the art we feel compelled to share: being a parent; being a writer; being a painter; being a friend. We live in a perpetually burning building, and what we must save from it all the time, is love.”
The language is made poignant by the words “burning building”. When we focus on only sunsets, we train people to neglect every non-sunset, and since much of life is a non-sunset we convey that life is mostly disposable. It’s not freedom to flee unprettiness every time you encounter it in your heart and in the world. The unprettiness and losses are unifying, they connect you to every little kid who wasn’t invited to the sleepover. Unnamed pain is a burden which grows heavier in isolation.
When we’re granted a precise name for a hard emotion and can share that feeling with another, it psychologically becomes less of a threat. To convey loneliness to another is to alleviate some of the sting of loneliness. When the Bible speaks of setting the oppressed free, I believe loneliness is a state of captivity. In a culture of performance, the need to appear predictable and reliable is suffocating. A theology of the cross understands some of the most rich work of God is born in suffering and failure. Art can help name pain or grief rather than neglecting it.
A pigment, iron oxide, was developed because someone paid attention to the color of rust. Beauty was attributed to a source of corrosion. Holy attention doesn’t seek beauty only where expected. It attributes beauty to the specific places where we can only see failure. It holds up what was forgotten and defamiliaries the familiar so we’re granted space to feel deeply. Catharsis is connected to the idea of medical cleansing. Treating a wound with dignity.
The place Jesus said it should be safe to be human is often horrified by humanity. In late 2025, the #1 Christian musician was Solomon Ray, an AI bot designed to churn out what was defined as, “Theologically sound” music. It’s music prioritizing efficiency, rather than the living mercy of a living God who comes alive in the messiness of a real life, lived-out, wildly fluctuating relationship. So often phrasing like “Theologically sound” means something closer to a God custom-built to my specifications who would never make me uncomfortable because they are me. Control is about fear, not love. Risk is horrifying because it demands loss of control. Risk is unavoidable in art.
In Jeremiah the prophet tells God, “You are to me like a deceptive brook, like a spring that fails.” This is a prayer God answers, but it’s wound raw in a way a church may find uncomfortable. Job asks God, "Why did I not perish at birth, and die from the womb as I came forth? When we skip this, we build narratives in which personal capacity to choose God, and not God, delivers. The Bible is a work of art because it’s saturated with recognizable, fallible humanity. We often strip verses from prophets out of context to escape not only the mental illness they seem to be wrestling with, but the way their examinations of the failings in their own culture mirror our own. Who benefits from editing? Certainly not someone feeling lonely or deep in a season of grief.
Art is compelling to the extent that it’s reflective of a dynamic relationship. The materials and themes we circle around because of who we are and the questions we have for God. Every prayer doesn’t get to be refined so why would art be different? Why would we demand that every artist paint a sunset? Is God more present in a sunset than in the vibrant orange of rust wrapping around a forgotten chain?
I’ve been thinking lately about the relationship between art and prayer and I’m starting to lose the edge on where one begins and the other starts. When texting with a former Christos member I casually mentioned I work kneeling on the floor. Maybe, somewhere in my subconscious, my heart has known what I’ve been doing all along, but it was something I never noticed until I was explaining it to someone else.
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Discussion Questions for Artists
How do you relate to this? Does this feel familiar or strange?
What is a question or idea that haunts your work? Something you return to over and over again? Is your question a question for God, a question for the viewer, or a question for both?
Do the themes you’re addressing benefit from the way you’re approaching them? Are there places where clarity or the need to cling to representational images may be hindering you? Are there places where your work needs a connection to representation? Are you leaving space for risk?
Do the materials you currently use feel cohesive with the ideas you’re exploring? Would a change of materials benefit the ideas in your work? How willing are you to fail in your process to learn something new?
Observe a personal limitation you have as an artist. Is there a way to rethink this weakness as a strength and to treat it more as a feature and less like a problem?
How often do you know what you’re doing when you start a piece and how often does it change in the process? Do you leave space and time in your process for disruption? Do you dream ideas? Do you pay attention to the words people use in relation to your work and let this feed it? Do you seek help in your process?