There are many, many ways of achieving this. Poetry is one. Emily Dickinson once wrote: "If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that it is poetry." Poetry teaches us to see the world in a new way. Consider the simple poem Joseph Hutchinson wrote about artichokes: O heart weighed down by so many wings! Ted Kooser, in the Poetry Repair Manual, asks us if, after reading this, we could ever think of an artichoke the same way.
Art is another way. I recently took a drawing class and, while I was never very good, I had a moment where it occurred to me that to see artistically is different than normal "seeing." It's about transcending what your mind tells you - this is an apple, this is a chair, this is a face - and instead to see line and shadow, shape and color. My teacher was fond of reminding us not to think of it as drawing an apple, because then we will draw simply what our minds imagine that an apple should look like. The trick was to look at the apple anew - to have no expectations of it, as though we did not have any conception of how an apple ought to appear. Only with those renewed eyes could we see the apple for what it really was, and draw it as such.
Reading is another way. In Shadowlands C.S. Lewis says: We read to know we are not alone. Reading stretches our mind, allows us to grow in empathy, to go beyond ourselves and consider the world from another's point of view. Even drama and film can achieve this.
I think that the measure of great art - whether that art be poetry or painting or fiction or drama - is its ability to stretch our minds, to achieve a metanoia in us - a conversion that leaves us seeing the world in a new way.
Think of your encounter with God as an encounter with a great work of art. We do, after all, call it the "drama of salvation," and most of Scripture comes to us in literary, narrative form. Often we read a poem or see a piece of art and we don't "get it." There are layers and layers of meaning that can't be grasped on the first try. Yet the images in the art, the story it tells, haunts us. We come back to it again and again, and we find more and more to learn.
I've been meditating lately on T.S. Eliot's Ash Wednesday, written after his conversion to Anglicanism. It's a beautiful poem, full of ambivalence and longing for the things he's sacrificed for the sake of his conversion. I don't "understand" the poem fully and I don't think I'm meant to; but what sticks with me are the images: the lady in the white gown, the white leopards, the white bones, the demon on the stairs, the veiled sister between the yews. And then there are the feelings these images evoke: a desperate longing amid a quiet death, a feeling of the soul being torn in two, beyond hope and despair.
The experience of trying to interpret poetry, art, music, literature and so on is the same experience of theologians trying to interpret God: our words can explain, can elucidate and clarify and analyze - yet something will always be missing, that intimate and personal experience of encountering beauty and standing in awe of it. Yet we keep returning and returning to it, haunted by the beauty of it, unable to escape its pull.
Art moves us beyond ourselves - and that is why it is a work of empathy, and of love. The reason love is the fruit of conversion is precisely because conversion means to go beyond your own mind - to enter the mind of another - and this act of uniting your mind and heart and will with someone else's is precisely what love is.
In a manner of speaking we can say that God Himself experienced such a conversion, when He became man and, willingly divesting Himself of divinity, took on the mind of humankind. God did this not because He had any need to - naturally our minds always existed in Him to begin with - but to show us what conversion meant, what love means. It means the willingness to stretch our minds and hearts towards another.
Practice the art of conversion. Look at a piece of art, read a poem, watch a film. Take a walk in nature and try to see things with a poet's eyes, an artist's eyes - ever new, as though you had never seen it before. Convert the way you see the world around you.
Then: meet up with a friend, or strike up a conversation with a stranger. Listen to what they have to say. Enter into their subjectivity, ask yourself what you would do or how you would feel if you walked around in their shoes, as Atticus Finch would say. When someone is happy, share their joy as if it is your joy. When someone is annoying you or making you angry, stop and think about the world from their point of view: ask yourself if they are tired, or hungry, or perhaps they're just having a bad day. Convert the way you see others.
Then: pray. Read the Scriptures with fresh eyes - not as stale stories you learned as a child that no longer have relevance, but as though you had never heard them before. Convert the way you see God: consider the story of Scripture from His perspective. What is He trying to teach, how is He trying to show His love for His people? Listen to what Scripture has to say, not what you think you remember it says. Convert your heart to God.
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