What’s the Point of the Artist’s Self-Death?
This was the second of three talks given at our Channels of Charity creative retreat on April 27, 2024.
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We’ve considered the necessity of self-death through Christ in the life of the Christian artist. What’s next? What is the point of this self-death? Where does it go? Does my story, my particular identity, matter at all in my artistic practice?
The short answer is yes. Just as only Christ—in His particular personality, body, time, and place—could make the ultimate act of loving self-sacrifice on the Cross, so only the particular artist can make the specific art she is called to make. But Christ did not die on the Cross so He could better articulate and claim his identity for the sake of feeling happier and self-actualized. He died so He could make a gift of His own life to the entirety of creation. He died and rose to pour His Charity over the world.
To claim the label of artist is to claim a vocation. As with any vocational calling, those who accept this call are required to make an oblation of themselves and their work. An artist has a responsibility to steward her calling for the purposes of God. She must give precisely herself and her talents to the call to Charity God has placed upon her. This can take many different forms, but always comes with all the spiritual, emotional, and relational demands a vocation requires.
As Underhill writes in another passage, “The whole life made an oblation from the first—placed on the altar, and lived right through as a reasonable sacrifice from beginning to end—this is the pattern put before us. Only thus can humanity use to the full its strange power of embodying eternal realities; and uniting the extremes of mystery and homeliness.”
As we live in and love the world, as we remain grounded in its necessities, those of us who practice art in the spirit of our “reasonable sacrifice” find ourselves compelled to express the “strange power” of humanity to “[embody] eternal realities; and [unite] the extremes of mystery and homeliness” in our art. All Christians are called to do this, but artists are perhaps called to do so in a particular way. We are called to help others see these things—to make these eternal realities, the extremes of mystery and homeliness united—evident to the world in ways it cannot deny or avoid; in ways that induct or compel other creatures into attentive communion with and surrender to the Charity of God.
An artistic practice that tries to lift the artist up and away from the particular realities of her life, relationships, and external circumstances—perhaps especially if it tries to do so by declaring easy Christian answers to life’s problems—will always produce tepid, empty, or false fruit. (Think of the God’s Not Dead movie franchise or your least favorite, sickly sweet pop worship songs.) Art like this is in denial of reality, of the real situation of this broken, bleeding world. In submitting her art to God’s purposes, a mature Christian artist enters the world’s suffering with her creativity, meeting those who suffer as they truly are and ministering Charity to them exactly there.
If we wish to embody Christ’s Charity in our lives and our art, we cannot get away with dismissing the world, with trying to avoid its annoying and difficult mundanities. All of us are bound to the necessity and circularity of doing the dishes, changing the next diaper, loving a difficult neighbor, eating another meal, weeding the garden, caring for our bodies, working out how to communicate with each other, engaging with suffering as it comes. We are stewards of these necessities. As artists, we are called to cultivate an intimate relationship with them, and so work out a creative, redemptive attention to human life. We perceive and then give expression to the way God makes His love known in and through the things humans actually experience.
Evelyn Underhill meditates on this idea again at another place in her book:
“The Light of the World enters our life to show us reality; and forces us to accept the fact that it is the whole of that life, not some supposed spiritual part of it, which is involved in our response to God, and must be self-given to the mysterious purposes of Charity. Christianity is a religion which concerns us as we are here and now, creatures of body and soul. We do not ‘follow the footsteps of His most holy life’ by the exercise of a trained religious imagination; but by treading the firm rough earth, up hill and down dale, on the mountain, by the lake-side, in garden, temple, street, or up the strait way to Calvary. The whole physical scene counts and is of vital importance to Christians; it can and does test us, save us or break us. So, to dismiss the pressures, limitations and crucial problems of practical life, bodily sufferings and self-denials, or even the most childlike and crude devotional exercises, as merely material, merely external, and so on, witnesses to a cheap and fundamentally unchristian attitude of mind; a complete misunderstanding of our real situation and the many-leveled richness of God’s revelation within life.”
Again we come up against this hard necessity of giving our entire life—giving everything it involves, including the mundane, daily necessities we cannot escape—to God. Only through such self-sacrifice can we most fully see and delight in the gift of the circumstances God has given us to inhabit. Without the necessity of self-sacrifice, we might be prone to spurn the world as it is and declare ourselves little gods, people who know better than God and who, through our art, can improve upon the boring or inconvenient world He has made. This is a sin of pride.
Our willingness to die to self opens the way for God to enter our art and use it to minister His self-giving love to the world. Artists are prevailed upon, as we live in community with ourselves and the world, to perceive how God’s love for His creation endows all that exists—no matter how broken—with dignity, and draws it toward eternity.
We work this out first in prayer. Our artistic practice must find its source and life and being in prayer offered for the sake of union with and attention to God. Underhill writes, “Christ seems to have thought of prayer as, above all, a way in which our little spirits may become more and more accessible to the life of that Eternal Spirit.” Though union with God is the wellspring of all joy and peace, it is important to note that Underhill’s definition of prayer is not focused on making us feel happier. She suggests the point of prayer is to become accessible to God so He can accomplish His work through us.
Regardless of the cost to our personal preferences, artists are called to rigorously attend to and shed light on the cracks in this present reality, those places of suffering, fear, or personal repentance—or even overwhelming joy—that we don’t want to face, really would like to run from forever if we could, but which the “pressure of God” is upon us to let Him enter and make new. We are called to illuminate these things and then, with the beauty, rigor, tenderness, and unflinching honesty of our art, help people face reality so God’s Charity can meet them there; can slip through the cracks their suffering rends in time and give them His life. Think of the Psalmists—those ancient poets and musicians who faced every part of human experience and, as they offered both joy and grief to God, were enabled by the Spirit to create poetry that invites people into prayer and illuminates the Charity of God working in human life to hold, dignify, and rescue us.
Thus our art must seek to be as honest as it is grateful. It must present reality as it is, not as we wish it to be. And it must be made by us, generated in and through the particular circumstances and identities God has given to us as gifts. The vocation of the Christian artist is not to make “Christian art,” per say—it is to enter the crucible of self-loss after the pattern of the Cross, and in doing so become a specific channel of the generous, suffering, joyful Charity of God as He pours His life out upon all that exists.
Underhill again:
“[In the New Testament] we find a suffering and love twined so closely together that we cannot wrench them apart: and if we try to do so, the love is maimed in the process—loses its creative power—and the suffering remains, but without its aureole of willing sacrifice.”
Love for God; love for others; love for the world; and a willingness to be consumed in the creative flame of that love, to become what God’s Charity wills to make us, and to body forth His creativity in the vocation He wills for us to take—that is the price and the joy of every Christian’s commitment to the Cross. As artists, we must not flinch from submitting our art to such sacrifice, lest the love that gives our art life “[lose] its creative power.”