There is a powerful stage of spiritual growth where longing for the Friend, the Beloved, is a consuming passion, a burning. And there is another place where personal longing for God gets pushed over into a vast Silence.
Any work of art is ultimately an entry-point into the transcendent, revelatory of not
only subtle, but celestial beauty and power; and if the given work is not so, it cannot
properly be called art at all...All works of art, in other words, are religious, sacred, or
nothing.
~ from THE EGYPTIAN MYSTERIES BY Arthur Versluis