Goethe, surely one of, if not the most revered German writer of all time, perhaps most well known for his Faust, offered some fascinating observations about art.  Art, broadly speaking, that is, art in the sense of a work of the imagination, the birth of human sensibilities beyond materialistic reductionism, the fruit of minds and hearts set loose to think, ponder, and create outside the box, outside the box of conventional structure and form, so much so that in some instances we do not understand it.
     But that's the point.  Art stretches us.  Art challenges us.  Art makes us look at the world in ways we had not thought to before.  So did Goethe say, "Man can find no better retreat from the world than art, and man can find no stronger link with the world than art."
     Though Goethe veers between natural and supernatural in the many pages of Faust, taking us one way and then another, he understands that if art is to be art, it must be a pursuit that allows us to step back and look at life in new ways.  For some, it invokes the spiritual; for others, simply another layer of the material.  Either way, art, whatever we conceive it to be, offers us a window and vantage point into a new dimension of existence.
     At the same time, however, because it is implicit in the human being who lives in the world, art connects to what is.  So did Monet say, "I wish to render what is."  So did he wish to reframe and reimage the world and our perception of it.  From a theological standpoint which, as you know, I seemingly cannot help but wander into (!), art's dual role as absence and presence tells us of the potential depth of our experience of the universe. It reminds us that, as Goethe observed, although we can dance between being in the world and being apart from it, ultimately we realize that we are profoundly creative and imaginative beings who inevitably ponder what is beyond our immediate material ken.
     Hence, we ask ourselves:  why do we, thoroughly material beings, think to venture into what is not?
     Maybe, just maybe it's because whether we know and accept it or not, we live in a world woven by and with a God who, in the revelation of himself in all things, enables it. Otherwise, why would we look beyond what we can see?