The Artist as a Channel of God's Charity

This was the first of three talks given at our Channels of Charity creative retreat on April 27, 2024.

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Today, I wish to consider the self-death necessary to the vocation of the artist.

This is an essential topic for creative people to consider. I suspect an unhealthy self-preoccupation haunts current dialogue around the question of what it means, and why it matters, to be an artist. Many contemporary creatives seem frequently, if not constantly, concerned with using their art to create or define themselves, and often get lauded for this work.

Who am I? What have I suffered, and who needs to know about it? How effective or evocative or new is my work? What do you need to know about me in order for me to feel known?

We can figure it out, we tell ourselves, by making art.

A Christian ethic of making challenges this impulse to self-define and self-celebrate through art. The pattern in which God creates, and after which we are called to pattern our creativity, is typified for us in the Genesis Creation account. God’s first creative acts reflect His identity as a maker, but not through obsessive self-reflection or self-definition. Instead, God’s first creative acts reveal him to be a charitable and communal God: He inaugurates a thriving world of communal beings that exist in creative relationship with each other. This suggests that a rightly ordered creativity is one that moves out toward the other, inviting the creation and other people into wholeness and community. It is a pattern of making that does not accommodate an exclusive, hyper-individualized pursuit of self through art.

We find ourselves challenged by this pattern to look again at some old questions. What makes an artist an artist? Or, more to the point, what makes a Christian artist a Christian artist?

I will add my voice to the chorus of attempts to answer this question, and I would like to keep it simple. I suggest that to be an artist means to be someone who commits to the practice of applying one’s creative abilities to making things out of a chosen medium or mediums. To be a Christian artist is to be someone who engages that practice as a way to be a channel of the generosity of God.

I borrow the phrase “channel of the generosity of God” from The School of Charity, Evelyn Underhill’s book of “Meditations on the Christian Creed.” Underhill writes:

“Only those who are generous up to the limits of self-loss can hope to become channels of the generosity of God. In that crisis the I, the separate self, with its loves and hates, its personal preoccupations, is sacrificed and left behind. And out of this most true and active death to self, the spirit is reborn into the real life: not in some other transcendental world, but in this world, among those who love us and those we love.”

Per Underhill, no generosity can be sustained after the pattern of God’s generosity if it insists on preserving the ingeniousness or specialness of the “separate self.” To become a channel of the generosity of God—that is, to fulfill our Christian vocation on this earth—we must surrender all the things we think of as ours to the “crisis” of self-loss modeled on the Cross.

This includes our artistic talents, passions, even hobbies. Even good things, like creative talents, will fail and become cheapened if we try to name, quantify, and cling to them for our own sake or on our own terms. 1 Corinthians 13 tells us that no matter what we think we have, we have nothing if we do not have Charity. In Underhill’s understanding, such Charity is defined not by happy feelings or fraternal bliss, but instead by our capacity to be “generous up to the limits of self-loss … to become channels of the generosity of God”; to submit to “that crisis” in which “the I, the separate self … is sacrificed and left behind.”

We in this room today are Christians who, I presume, wish to practice the art we love in a holy way. Such holiness requires faithfulness—the regular returning, the regular yes to the necessities of a creative practice. But it also requires us to faithfully submit to, as Underhill puts it, a “true and active death to self.” We cannot think of our art as ultimately useful because it will help us define our life, create ourselves, or capture importance. We must recognize that the gift of an artistic talent is given so it can become a “channel of the generosity of God” to a grieving, lonely world.

We face a temptation to see art as the best way out of suffering or doubt and back to ourselves, but it is prayer that can best guide us through these difficulties. Art can, and in some cases should, serve a therapeutic role in the life of a suffering person. But the model given to us by Christ indicates that any endeavor undertaken solely for the sake of claiming ourselves and prioritizing our own interests is doomed from its beginning. Even art engaged for therapeutic purposes must have an end beyond the maker in sight—that is, to help the maker become capable of loving self, others, and God more freely.

Christians are concerned with the practice of submitting every gift we’re ever given—of talent, insight, energy, resources—to the project of becoming united with God so He might use us to further His purposes in the world. Only through the death involved in this submission, this absolute giving over to God, can we be made empty enough of self to receive the Charity of God and then offer it back to Him and to the world.

Sometimes, for the artist, self-death means letting God heal an experience of suffering we have come to identify with because the experience makes us feel special, or simply because it feels easier to make art about suffering than about joy or grace. Artists are perhaps especially prone to resisting this call. We can tend to want to stay stuck in our wounds, where we nurse the fear, nostalgia, longing, or sense of identity that comes with those wounds because it makes us feel like we have something meaningful to make art about. We might fear that without our suffering our art cannot exist.

But if we ever hope to have our creative selves resurrected, uplifted through and past those places of death in our souls into a generative, eternally-minded creative life, we must give that suffering to God, and with it give Him the artistry or sense of self we have constructed around it.

Regardless of the gift we must make to God, to give that gift is often, as Underhill terms it, a crisis. I must die to my understanding of myself, that sense of identity I am already familiar and comfortable with; even to the creativity I understand and feel I can manage. I must open myself entirely to the way the Spirit would have with me and my art—which, again, often feels like a death. This moment of self-death is one where we must trust God to bring us back to life.

Artists must here trust God in a unique way. We must trust that even if our moment of self-surrender is followed by a period in which we lack inspiration, God has a plan for our creativity and will resurrect it into a renewed, generous, and self-emptied inspiration.

I challenge each of us to examine what motivates our creative practice. Why do I make art? Do I make art to more fully express, realize, define, or possess myself? Do I make art to pin down healing on my terms? To prove something? To make sure others know exactly how and why I have suffered? Defend my behavior? Tell the story my way? Do I make art solely to make money? Do I make it because I consider it an actual extension of myself, and fear there is nothing left of me if I stop?

Or do I make art out of a movement of Eucharistic, self-emptied gratitude? Do I make art to seek God, to discover where He has met and upheld me in my suffering, to celebrate His charity and offer it back to Him, and then pour it out upon the suffering world? Making art can be a way to make an offering to God out of the things I don’t understand—my suffering, loss, fear—and ask Him to redeem them into an expansive, hospitable charity for other people, society, and the natural world. Am I open to letting Him do this?

I am making an implicit claim here that the mature artist, the one who has given his artistic vocation up to the Charity of God, is one who has died to his own plans for his art and abandoned it to the purposes of God. This process of abandonment is Underhill’s “crisis” of the loss of the “separate self” and its concerns.

It is a death.

It can feel terrifying.

But let us face this crisis head-on. Let us ask God: What are You asking of me and my art? How can I abandon my creativity to Your hand, that I might become a channel of your Charity to the world?