There's a story about Michaelangelo: He was making a tremendous racket in the middle of the night. A disgruntled neighbor rushed into his studio. What on Earth might he be doing at such an ungodly hour? The sculptor looked up from the gigantic block of marble he was straddling, chisel in hand. "There's an angel trapped in here," he replied, "and I'm trying to get him out."

Art and religion have a long and intimate history that can be traced to the origins of both. Shamans who painted on cave walls are thought to have been requesting a good and bountiful hunt from the gods, or placing thanks for a dinner well-received. The Babylonian architectural masterpiece, the ziggurat, was quite literally considered a "stairway to heaven." The Ancient Greek rendering of ideal beauty was steeped in the philosophical urge to render the divine archetype of Beauty itself.

Visual arts along with music, dance and writing have served as conduits, mirrors, explications and elaborations of theology and spiritual beliefs. The magnetic pull between the two disciplines reveals much about the underpinnings of both.

"Religious beliefs of all sorts contain powerful metaphors of desire, fear, and aspiration that are profoundly revealing of human nature," observes Chicago-based painter Daniel Barber. "Really, the ecstatic visions of Hildegard Von Bingen or the synesthesia of Kandinsky aren't much different, nor is Van Gogh's practice of squeezing his viscera out with colors too distant from John's Apocalypse."

Like art, religion gets at who we are and what we want. It gives voice to our anxieties, preoccupations, and, perhaps most potent of all, the questions we cannot answer any other way. Like religion, art attempts to express the inexpressible, to get at the mysteries residing in the corners and cracks of our lives.

"The artist who finds what is beautiful, whether it's pretty or not, and forms it so it's visible to others is just bringing to light an epiphany of God," says Carla DeSola, author of Spirit Moves and founder of the Omega Dance Company in New York City, who is known worldwide as a pioneer of liturgical dance.

It is the process of bringing-to-light that most mystifies artists. For many, accessing their creative powers necessitates entering a meditative rapture beyond words. Rumi, the monumental 13th century Sufi teacher, may have said it best:

In your light I learn how to love. In your beauty, how to make poems. You dance inside my chest, where no one sees you, But sometimes I do, and that sight becomes this art.

Many artists regard themselves as mere vehicles for something quite ineffable. "All I need to do is open my mouth and the sound is there," says Rachel Bagby, vocalist and author of Divine Daughters: Liberating the Power and Passion of Women's Voices. "It's as though the music pre-exists before mouth and teeth and tongue and larynx, and there's this partnership with the wind of life blowing through [me, as the] instrument."

Renowned poet and author Marge Piercy observes, "There are times when one experiences a certain flow of imagery. And it simply picks you up and uses you."

Occasionally one hears of profound moments of overwhelming inspiration. "I don't know what it is, but it's that thing that wakes you up at 2 in the morning and forces you to write," says rapper MC Serch of the platinum-selling hip-hop music group Third Bass.

But those Force-driven smacks on the head are relatively rare. More often, artists are likely to describe the process as Bagby says, "returning again and again to the well." Keeping the creative muscles strong requires rigorous discipline.

"Art doesn't just grow," says sculptor Sandy Shannonhouse. "If you're making sculpture or computer art, or whatever, you have to do it and go through it for there to be growth. If you're making something that comes out of your being, you're peeling away layers [to] get to something that's uniquely yours."

Just as someone who sits daily in the Buddhist practice of zazen, or davens daily in Jewish minyan, cannot help but be altered by a routine return to a place of holiness, for Shannonhouse "the daily practice of making art is so spiritual, and that carries into the rest of my life."

In her long-celebrated book Writing Down the Bones, Natalie Goldberg recounts a encounter with Katagiri Roshi, in which the Buddhist teacher asks, "Why do you come to sit meditation? Why don't you make writing your practice? If you go deep enough in writing, it will take you everyplace." Why wouldn't Goldberg simply perform sit meditation, and not make herself crazy trying to "be a writer?" Like other artistic pursuits, writing often entails financial compromise, tenuous success, and endless amounts of personal frustration? Why create?

Many for whom artmaking is an integral part of their lives voice a similar sentiment: At some point, you do it because you have to, because you're compelled to free the angel from the stone. The alternative, Daniel Barber says, "smells a lot like death."

"I think the artist's job is to pay homage by questioning," says MC Serch. He sees his work firmly rooted in his Jewish tradition: "The Talmud is basically a bunch of rabbis questioning what is truth and what is not truth. I do know that if I feel like I need to make a record on Passover, I'll do it before fasting. Hashem gave me the ability to speak to people, and my love for music sometimes takes over any other love I have within me."

That love can be communicated to the people who see, hear, watch, or read. Most people can recount an experience of hearing a musician whose passion was infectious, or of seeing a work of art that almost allowed them to feel the artist's emotions. But transmitting that feeling takes a special kind of talent. For, as DeSola asserts, "the deeper the performer is in their own spirit, [the deeper] they will bring the audience. When they're working on an insecure level to please people, or show off, or whatever, they become a barrier. The more exterior the level, the more of a barrier you will become to the spirituality of the audience. If you are deeply concentrated, even if people can't follow your movement, if you know deeply your intention, you will carry people into that."

Bagby takes the performer-audience relationship even a step further, to a place where the viewer/ listener/ participant dichotomy basically falls away. She sees her work not as an invitation for the audience to partake of her spiritual life, but rather a joint celebration of that life. In this way, the audience becomes the artist; the demarcations between self and other blurs.

Art and spirituality aren't the same thing, but they're certainly vehicles for each other. Art can be used to access one's deepest spiritual beliefs, just as religion can be a means of connecting with the stuff of one's creative self. One doesn't have to be a career artist in order to hear it, either. Anything counts, from writing in a journal, to drumming in a band, to shaking your booty at the dance club. What's important, most of all, is the process of dipping into the self and seeing what comes out.

Sandy Shannonhouse is convinced that "the world would be a lot better place to live if more people were involved in some kind of creative work on a daily basis. Because [creative work] is so life-giving; it's so positive, even if you're dealing with tough issues." Like religion, art gives people a way to manage the demons; to be, as Shannonhouse says, "a creator, not a destroyer."

In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. In comparison, perhaps a sonnet or a charcoal drawing doesn't seem so hard to knock off after all.