Centuries ago, the creation of art was a sacred act. While some religions embraced the arts, western Christianity’s relationship with them has been rocky since the Reformation. Protestant denominations such as the Congregationalists rejected stained-glass windows, paintings that detailed the life of Jesus and crucifixes showing Christ nailed to the cross. Unadorned white Congo churches dot Maine’s cities, towns and countryside.

In Castine, a Roman Catholic nun and a Protestant minister have joined forces to bring modern sacred art into a Protestant church. The work of Nancy Earle is on display mornings through Tuesday, Oct. 8, at the Trinitarian Parish Church on Main Street. The exhibit is one more step by the pastor to make the arts an integral part of the worship experience for members of his congregation and the community.

“I want to take people out of a world filled with tragedy and terror and offer them a loving, caring, sacred space where they can pray, meditate, look at art and find some inner strength for themselves,” said the Rev. William Friederich, sitting in the well-lit church basement, surrounded by the paintings of Nancy Earle, a Franciscan sister.

Earle’s artistic and spiritual paths merged early in life. A graduate of Trinity College in Burlington, Vt., she spent a year studying art at the University of Vermont. She earned her master’s degree in art from Montclair College in New Jersey in 1972.

In the 1960s, while still in her 20s, Earle spent a summer studying art in Mexico. While there she visited an orphanage run by Franciscan nuns and decided to join the Franciscan order. But as she formed her vocation and took her vows, another path became apparent.

“This art is what I do,” she said while pointing to the acrylic paintings gracing the church vestry. “As Franciscans, we do whatever our talents call us to do.”

It was the solitude of her tiny cloistered studio in rural Maine that enabled Earle to discover the symbols and images that are a major focus of her work. Through the use of figures as well as patterns, associations and symbols, the artist maps out stories around events in life as well as reflections on nature, she wrote in a statement about the Castine show.

“Such images as the moon, sun, water, mountains, pots, vessels, cross, tree, etc. convey archetypes,” she said. “Using symbolic images such as these help to dissolve barriers between cultures and spiritualities. This, in turn, allows patterns of connectedness and wholeness to be revealed.”

Earle also weaves these images into more personal themes in order to create other ways of looking at the familiar so that experiences in life such as healing, celebration, suffering, death and birth retain their deeper meaning. Central to much of her work is the mandala, a symbolic, often sacred circle from Eastern religions such as the yin-yang symbol.

“The mandala is very inclusive and, like the Earth, it’s round,” she said. “It’s an attractive shape for me. But, my work comes from my reading, experience and reflection.”

The nun’s painting “Awakening” is her interpretation of the tree of life. The trunk fills the center of the canvas, but its branches become the vibrant, violet feathers of a bird. The halves of a green pod filled with tiny seeds lies open in either side of the tree. A white circle containing the sun and the moon is superimposed on the trunk where it becomes the bird, and a pink serpent, its forked tongue, extended, encircles the tree trunk as if offering a hug.

“I see this as a holistic view of life showing symbolically what can happen when we integrate our lives,” she said. “The sun represents the male; the moon, the female. The bird is our freedom of spirit. And, rather than the serpent being a negative symbol, I made it regenerative and positive.”

Some of her work is political, pointing out dilemmas in the natural world or conflicts in the Third World – all of them caused by the actions of human beings. “Where Have All the Songbirds Gone?” shows four sets of binoculars trained on a tiny yellow bird. Earle said she painted it in response to studies showing the decline of that species of songbirds.

Another shows a cracked pot at its center with smokestacks spewing black fumes behind it and a gun in the foreground. The tenements in the painting become ballistic missiles as a woman covers her face and a young boy clings to her skirts. Another painting illustrates the starvation suffered by the people of Somalia and other African nations.

“These paintings ask, ‘Between war and drought, what are we leaving the children?” observed Earle.

Earle moved to Maine in 1979 to the H.O.M.E. Coop in Orland founded by fellow nun Lucy Poulin. By 1985 she had left there to live with Dr. Miriam Devlin, a physician who is also a Franciscan nun, and to paint full time.

“While it may have been unusual 30 or 40 years ago for nuns to live like this, it’s not unusual any more,” said Earle. “Most of us live in twos and threes, scattered throughout the country. The nuns who live in large communities are mostly retired.”

One of the greatest influences on Earle’s work has been the work of her father, painter Edwin Earle. He lived among the Hopi Indians in the 1930s in northeastern Arizona and illustrated the book “Hopi Kachinas,” a major resource on the tribe’s ceremonial life.

Earle visited there herself in the 1960s and learned how much the Earth and nature are incorporated into the Hopis’ spirituality. Rather than discovering what separated American Indian spirituality from Christianity, the artist saw them as “a more integrated experience.”

While most of the paintings in the current exhibit blend symbols from Eastern, Western and American Indian spirituality, some are distinctly Christian. “Table of Blessing” represents a gathering of all cultures at a meal. “In Remembrance of Me” is a painting of the bread and wine that is transformed into the body and blood of Christ every day at Masses around the world.

“Nancy’s work touches more than the mind,” said Friederich, who has been pastor at the church for about 15 months. “Integrating the arts into the worship experience or exhibiting it in the church is as powerful and effective as any preaching I do. The experience of this congregation, especially the young people, shows that this kind of art enhances their own spiritual journeys.”

Friederich, a percussionist who often performs with Blue Hill composer and pianist Paul Sullivan, said one of his major goals is to integrate the visual and performing arts into his ministry. To that end, he’s conducted services with jazz musicians rather than the church organist providing the music. This summer, the church offered a theater program for children that included the performance of a short, original musical.

Earle wholeheartedly endorsed his approach.

“The arts allows young people to figure out what their gift is,” she said. “It gives them a way to develop a language – a way to speak. There are a variety of ways of to communicate. … The arts open everything up to being holy.”