Art & Creativity Quote by Julie Harris

Julie Harris is doing something quietly radical here: she’s reframing art not as decoration, prestige, or “content,” but as a visitation. When she says God comes to us in theater, she’s not making a doctrinal claim so much as elevating the live encounter - bodies in a room, voices crossing air - into a kind of secular sacrament. Theater becomes less an industry than a practice of attention, the place where people risk being legible to one another.

The line works because it smuggles a big spiritual argument inside a list that feels generously inclusive. She starts with theater, then widens the frame to a symphony, ballet, painting, a play: high art categories, yes, but also different languages of feeling. The subtext is that “communication” isn’t limited to words or information; it’s communion, the messy effort of translating interior life into a form someone else can receive. That’s what makes the “God” claim persuasive even for skeptics: it’s really an argument about presence. In live performance especially, meaning is made in real time, between performer and audience, and that relationship can feel bigger than either party.

Context matters: Harris came up in an American theater culture that treated the stage as moral training ground - not preachy, but bracingly human. Her phrasing carries that mid-century faith in the arts as civic glue. “Expressing our humanity” lands as both celebration and warning: if we stop making rooms for this kind of shared expression, we don’t just lose entertainment; we lose a key method for recognizing each other as fully alive.