An Objective Offering

This blog post was originally given as a talk after lunch at our Creativity and the Life of Prayer Retreat in April.

We have practiced silence. We have listened for the voice of the Spirit. We have put pen to paper, brush to canvas, spade to soil, knitting needles to yarn. Now what?

This brings us to the next movement in any creative act. We have had our first encounter with the blank page, have engaged the silence of the beginning, and have started to make something. Quickly, we can feel overwhelmed by what I like to call “the first brave beginnings of a draft.” This moment can, at times, feel spiritually, emotionally, or creatively distressing. Who am I, we wonder, if I can’t even make this dang thing? Why is it this hard? Does it really matter if I finish it? What matters? What is life, anyway? And so on.

Makoto Fujimura identifies artists as people who “already live in the abundance of God . . . they hear the music of the spheres and desire to respond; they see a vista beyond the world of gray utility; they desire to paint in color; they dance to the tune of the Maker who leads us beyond restoration into the New World to come.” I know I find this description appealing. I’d like to spend my art-making days humming along to the music of the spheres and seeing technicolor where others see black and white. 

But this aspect of the artist’s gift can be difficult to hold in tension with what we discussed in the previous post in this series: namely that, as every maker knows, making things is hard work. This is true of the moment in which we face the blank page, and it is also true of wrestling the first, unformed version of a piece into place. 

If Fujimura is right, artists are people who—as they attend to the abundance of God—see, inhabit, and seek to express the fruitful tension of reality. Creatives tell the story of God’s justice and compassion to the world. They share about his power to make beauty from ashes, and help deepen how people experience the love of God. This is a high calling, and it deserves the rigor of a disciplined practice.

Thus, we must practice our art-making with a discipline similar to the discipline required for hesychia, and to the discipline modeled in our Benedictine Rule of life. Think of the Daily Offices. When we pray the Daily Offices, we make—as our own Bishop Scarlett describes it—an “objective offering” of ourselves to God. We show up, rain or shine, whether or not we feel like it, whether we’re distracted or engaged, and we give those 20-30 minutes to God. At first, this structure can feel limiting, even a little soulless. But over time, as we persevere in our commitment to give that time to God, the practice itself begins to change us. As we practice again and again the reality that our time is not ours, but a gift to be given back to God, we start to access a new freedom. We have given time back to the One who can hold it for us, to the One who made time and has the power to give it to us. In return, He gives us the strength of His sustaining presence. He enlivens us, deepening our capacity to know Him and making Himself known to us.

Similarly, the creative act flourishes most within the limits of discipline. Some like to claim that art and the imagination are limitless, that they are free-flowing and require nothing but raw genius. But it is foolish to pretend creativity does not need structure, for an artistic practice that has no sense of its own limits will quickly overwhelm and exhaust the artist. By definition, “art” requires “artifice,” or the structure (and therefore the limits) of a practiced craft. If I commit to sit down for the same 30 minutes every day to work on my creative practice, and I actually keep that commitment, eventually my body, mind, and spirit will learn that it is safe to create in that time and space, and will more readily engage the process of imagining and making when I sit down to create.

We might wish art-making was easy, that it required little to no effort, that we could force the abundance and creativity of God into our experience of every moment of our lives—into every brushstroke, stitch in the quilt, or word we type. But we can’t do this, because the abundance of God is something He gives to us. It is a gift. We cannot claim it as something owed to us. Instead, we must practice receiving it as it is given. This is why the attentive quietness of hesychia and the structure of disciplined presence are so important in making anything.

Once we have discerned, accepted, and engaged the limits of the creative process, we learn something unexpected: limits change us in expansive ways. They open us up and help us see better. Actively choosing and submitting to the fact of my finitude requires me to find, acknowledge, and delight in the reality of who I have been uniquely created to be, and what I am actually able to do in this moment. It becomes an opportunity to lean on and find joy in the Father who loves me, the Son who made me, and the Spirit who dwells within me. 

So, as we engage this moment in the creative act—the one in which we are actually struggling with the raw materials of a draft—we begin by discerning the limits of the particular creative act we are engaged in pursuing. We then build a practice that honors those limits, and we let the limits shape how we see.