Notes from Retreat
Reflections adapted from a week at Mount Saviour Monastery, Elmira NY
The purpose of spiritual exercises is for us to admit the truth about ourselves.
The artistic vocation brings a very great responsibility to incarnate Beauty so that it serves others.
—JPII
Listen with the ear of your heart.
—Benedictine motto
The familiar rhythms of arrival. The honeymoon—the shock of new surroundings, the overwhelm of beauty, the ring of bells, golden hour washing across the summer valley. The crush of new people, faces, names, the easy first conversations, when all the low-hanging fruit is still available, polite deferrals, sizing each other up.
The life of screens and stress and anxious futures falling away. Silence that is not quiet but an almost unbearable fullness. The first liturgies, the old liturgies heard anew, in a new place, and you forget that for them this is the stuff of daily bread.
The inevitable collapse: of the fantasy-realm, the perfection-dream: this is just life, and all of your wounds, and the woundedness of the world, have followed you here. Were here, waiting for you.
Once you start writing you can write forever. Often in circles. You know yourself well enough to know this. And so you hold off. As if in trepidation. As if, once begun, the act of writing will expand to fill and consume your life here even before you can live it. The map overtaking the territory like floodwaters inexorably eating a town.
In only a few hours, more life is lived than can fill many notebooks. Is our art then a futile task? A bailing of the ocean with thimbles? Even an idol?
For you it has been at times, if not an idol, then at least a false talisman. Something merely useful. A charm wielded to protect you from your loneliness, to seek attention or to ward it off, to win friends or slough them off, to court success or tell it to fuck off.
And yet the Saint exhorts that our arts must be useful. “…to incarnate Beauty so that it serves others.”
You want to serve others. But mostly as a doorway to serving yourself. You want recognition because you fear that you are No-One. You want to disappear for the same reason. Too often you want to share God’s beauty with others not because you overflow with Him but because you crave approval, the ultimate approval.
“To admit the truth about ourselves.” Yes.
But then, what hard truths are not poisoned by the false comfort of self-hatred, whose real purpose is to justify dereliction of the duty to love, to trust, and to praise. Another lie dressed up like morality, the worst kind.
The truth? The truth is you don’t know the truth about yourself. Perhaps because you don’t want to know. Because it is too painful, or simply because it will mean change, and change means loss.
N says that we artists inhabit a zone of safety, whose borders are not visible from the outside, but which we feel as certainly as if they were electrified fence. We carry out our work in this zone.
Perhaps it is good work. But it is limited, circumscribed by what we already think we know, what we think we can imagine, which pales beside the vastness and fecundity of the Mind of God. What were our supports become our cage. If we are praised for what we produce in this zone, all the more difficult to risk something new.
Our Lord is a God of surprises, inversions—of growth. To let Him do His work on us, is terrifying. We must admit that the future is not ours. That we are not ours. We speak sweet words of God but do we trust Him to change us—to break us?
This, too, is the meaning of the Cross for the artist.
On this journey the visible world is no more than a distraction. For blind men and for all men. Ultimately we know we can’t see the good Lord. We can only listen. Do you understand me, young man? We must listen.
—McCarthy, The Crossing
Silence that is not quiet but a creative confrontation with Reality.
What does God want you to do with your feelings of hopelessness, of suffocation, of confusion, right now, in this moment? Feelings which are so unnervingly mingled with awe, gratitude, and grief. Laced with the contented rustling of the sheep-fold. With the periwinkle sky deepening into electric cobalt and running its heavy blue hand over all fearful and trembling things.
He wants you to look, to love, and to be not afraid.
N speaks of the assurances of Providence. That “all of you are the right ones to be here.” That our being together, in the precise and unrepeatable configuration which providence has ordained, will bring surprises, serendipity, intercessions as yet undreamed of. That this tree, in the acceptable time, will bear fruit.
The prayer of Rilke: “Help me, in saying it, to understand it.”
'The things we want are transformative, and we don't know or only think we know what is on the other side of that transformation. Love, wisdom, grace, inspiration - how do you go about finding these things that are in some ways about extending the boundaries of the self into unknown territory, about becoming someone else? Certainly for artists of all stripes, the unknown, the idea or the form or the tale that has not yet arrived, is what must be found. It is the job of the artists to open doors and invite in prophesies, the unknown, the unfamiliar; it's where their work comes from, although its arrival signals the beginning of the long disciplined process of making it their own. Scientists too, as J. Robert Oppenheimer once remarked, "live always at the 'edge of mystery' - the boundary of the unknown." But they transform the unknown into the known, haul it in like fishermen; artists get you out into that dark sea.' - Rebecca Solnit (A Field Guide for Getting Lost)
Beautiful. thank you. I'm glad we got to meet in person on Saturday.