"Don't get it? What do I need to do? Draw you a picture?"

This classic putdown contains not only a mountain of truth but also my job description.

I was recently hired by the University of San Francisco to help design a fine and performing arts program for its undergraduate students. As I was unpacking books and notes in my office, a 35mm slide fell out of an envelope. The image of a Chinese vase full of perfect peonies, painted in the first half of the eighteenth century by an Italian Jesuit at the court of the emperor of China, is now taped to my window. Giuseppe Castiglione, SJ, known as Lang Shih-ning, got it right. He taught what he knew, captured the imagination of the court, and discreetly preached what was in his heart in a language more persuasive and precise than verbal expression. He drew a picture.

Castiglione was by no means an isolated piece of flotsam bobbing on the history of art. Rather, he sailed at the center of a broad incarnational current in the Catholic tradition that spans the banks between St. Augustine and Fr. Andrew Greeley. That stream, characterized by theologian David Tracy as the "analogical imagination," accepts that the revelation of the presence and action of God in the world happens through artistic expression, through humanity's sharing in the godlike activity of creation. In the beginning God created; Word took flesh and transformed everything that was made and will be made.

We paint pictures, sing songs, find forms in stone or movement because the stuff of the world and the stuff of our imagination are, as the Jesuit poet Gerard Manley Hopkins put it, "charged with the grandeur of God." That grandeur shines forth in every creative human act: making a baby, making a sonnet or a sculpture, making a just law, making merry or mourning are all ways of celebrating the indwelling of God, ways we set the divine spark ablaze in the here and now.

Ignatius understood and trusted the power of the human imagination. He shaped his Spiritual Exercises around its careful and attentive use as a means of finding God in all things. Moreover, he saw the products of the imagination as vehicles that transport us to an understanding and experience of higher realities in ways that linear discourse cannot carry us. He loved music, built and restored beautiful churches, and allowed and even encouraged the performance of plays in his schools. Jesuit schools and institutions became flourishing artistic centers in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in Europe and also in far- flung Jesuit missions around the world. The origins of modern ballet can be traced to the stage of the Jesuit College of Louis- le-Grand in Paris. "There is no one like the Jesuits for doing pirouettes," one Baroque commentator remarked dryly.

The challenge that the University of San Francisco and I face is how to adapt this tradition to the needs of a modern university and modern culture. In an arts program, we have to teach young men and women how to do more than just draw pictures, although that skill in itself is an accomplishment. As a resident of a global village nurtured by TV, our students need to achieve "visual literacy" in the dominant tradition we inhabit--a process that requires both historical study and critique of contemporary media's use of traditional images and symbols. That new kind of literacy is an absolute prerequisite for those who wish to change the structures that increasingly shape our consciousness and manipulate our subconscious lives.

The multicultural situation of an urban college on the Pacific Rim--our student population is less than 50 percent Catholic--is qualitatively different from the homogeneous community of seventeenth-century Paris. The sheer volume of knowledge has increased, and the rate of change has accelerated dramatically in the past three centuries. Computer-aided design, the hottest course in most art programs today, didn't exist even twenty years ago. One day, not long ago, without leaving my desk I traveled through cyberspace to consult an archive in Paris.

Still, there are similarities between Baroque Paris and postmodern San Francisco. They are cities at cultural crossroads, where new technologies emerge and new artistic and cultural syntheses are attempted. Both take their histories seriously but look more to the present and future than to the past.

As we begin to develop an arts program here in San Francisco, I look to the Jesuit tradition for inspiration more than for solutions. Castiglione was successful in China because he met the Chinese on their own terms. He learned their idioms, both linguistic and artistic, and so was able to operate from within the system rather than imposing his own categories from outside. Developing an arts program at the University of San Francisco will demand a similar openness to contemporary culture present in this complicated cityscape and a willingness to address respectfully and engage the diverse cultures of the Pacific Rim-- Mesoamerican and Native American, Oriental, Filipino, and Oceanic, to name a few.

While it is clearly no longer appropriate to present Western art as our sole paradigm, its presentation needs to be professional and balanced. At a Catholic and Jesuit institution, the Western tradition is ours in a special way because our religious history and ritual played such an important role in shaping it. We need to claim that.

The Baroque Ballet of the Collège Louis-le-Grand was highly successful not only because it was artful but also because it was technically sophisticated, up-to-the-minute. Lists of the special effects used in the Paris productions go on for pages, rivaling Industrial Light and Magic's wildest fancies. An important measure of our success will be how well we manage to incorporate state-of-the-art technology in our new program, especially in the area of design. In the world of modern academia, we cannot expect to attract talented students unless we offer the best that the new technologies offer as well as a grounding in traditional theory, history, and media. In doing so, we are firmly rooted in our Jesuit tradition.

These reflections are only the most preliminary sketch of what a fine arts program for the new century might seek to accomplish in a Jesuit university. Over the course of the coming year we will continue to dream and sketch, revise the form, experiment with materials, weigh alternatives, and study bottom lines. We'll keep drawing until we get it right.

Fr. Thomas Lucas, SJ, director of fine and performing arts at USF, designed and directed the recent restoration of the rooms of Ignatius in Rome and curated a major exhibition on early Jesuit architecture at the Vatican library.

A liturgical designer as well as an art historian, he has recently designed and executed 200 square feet of stained-glass windows for the Chapel of St. Robert Bellarmine at Fordham University in the Bronx (illustrated above).