Having talked about Amy Winehouse and her soulful music and torturous life yesterday, I write today about the artist Nick Cage.  I'm thinking about Cage's vision of participatory art, art as something we put on or do.  Cage creates clothes, shelters, and other life appurtenances to encourage people to not only admire art visually but to step into and experience it.  If, as the saying goes, life imitates art and vice versa, then Cage understands us very well.  And, whether he knows it or not, he understands God.
     

           
                     (one of Cave's "Soundsuits")

     If we picture God as the ultimate artist, the one who, be through his word or natural agency, shaped and fashioned the entirety of the cosmos, then we can look at this world (and the universe as well) as a work of art into which we are constantly stepping and continuously exploring, every moment of every day.  We can also see our life as a work of art, a work which we are given as well as a work which we create.  We bask in the artistry of our creator.
     And the creator basks in ours.  God didn't make us robots; he made us to explore and create, to search out the most complex intricacies of the universe.  Though he knows that, as do we, we will never know about everything we see, God has granted us the capacity to roam, with insight and understanding, through the world he made.  We revel in what we can discover and know.
     Yet God also wishes for us to explore and come to grasp what is in truth the most fundamental (and, from his standpoint, the most evident) thing about us and our world: at one point, a long ago point in time, he became, in the person of Jesus, like one of us. He enlightens us, he guides us, he saves us.
     God became the artist he made.