Unless we are rooted in God, and rooted in the only sure way of listening to God -- namely, silence -- then we are doomed to spend our lives standing at the window of life and watching the world go by... It strikes me that most of the first part of our lives is spent filling our heads with information. The last part -- and the most important part -- is spent emptying our heads of all the trivia so that our hearts may be free to learn wisdom -- in silence.
Art enables us to find ourselves and lose ourselves at the same time. The mind that responds to the intellectual and spiritual values that lie hidden in a poem, a painting, or a piece of music, discovers a spiritual vitality that lifts it above itself, takes it out of itself, and makes it present to itself on a level of being that it did not know it could ever achieve.