Art: The Secret Handshake

My atheist friends are not going to like this, but hey--it was written by an until-recently atheist:

Art is the secret handshake of the children of God, the inside joke among those with souls. The spark that is ignited within us when we are touched by a work of art is a spark of recognition: the artist has brought us a souvenir from our homeland beyond the material world, the place that none of us should know about, but all of us do. To connect with a piece of art is to connect with the artist as a fellow traveler, to realize that you are both walking the same rocky road, and that he is homesick too. And it matters because true art, art that seeks a connection of souls, makes it harder to devalue and dehumanize one another. It reminds us what it means to be human.

There are some great comments, too, including this one:

Interestingly but not surprisingly, the objective beauty of great music had something to do with my husband's conversion. His recognition that there was an objective beauty in the music of Bach or Mozart led him to ask why there couldn't also be objective truth.