The Way of Christ, and the life of the Christian, is the true Art of letting go. It is a life of surrender to Christ.
One thing I ask from the LORD, this only do I seek: that I may dwell in the house of the LORD all the days of my life, to gaze on the beauty of the LORD and to seek him in his temple.
Psalm 27:4
Life Moves Too Fast …
I was talking to a friend this week. He and his wife are both writers, along with having busy professional lives and all the effort that goes into tending to the growth and development of children. We talked about how difficult parenting is, but then the subject quickly shifted to writing.
“There’s just not enough time,” he said. “I work, I get home, and I’m with the family—which is great, but by the time the kids are in bed it’s 10 o’clock and I’m too exhausted to write. And I ask myself, “Do I just push it, or accept that I won’t be writing that day?”
“I get it,” I replied. “It’s the same with me for many years. Now the children are older, but there were many days when I felt that same way.”
“It’s like …” he began, “it’s like life is moving way too fast, and I can’t get a handle on it, and there’s just no time to pursue creative work. And I don’t know what to do. Writing takes so much time—the thinking about it, the writing itself, editing, rewriting … I just don’t know when I’ll ever have a chance to do it again. Life is just so fast. And it’s not just me—I know a lot of people who are in despair because they need more time to do creative work, and there simply isn’t more time in the day.”
I didn’t want to get into the details of what he was saying; I didn’t want to press him about his daily routine and what he schedules time for. I’m obsessed about the daily routines of writers and artists. What strikes me about them is how they have maintained this same routine over decades: they get up at the same time, they have their coffee at the same time, go for a walk at the same time, eat at the same time, work from this hour to that hour, take their walks or exercise, have leisure time in the same sequence of activities day after day week after week year after year.
But I know that’s not what he was talking about. He was going deeper—he’s a writer with a great deal of depth and perspective, rooted in his Christian faith.
“You know,” I began, “I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about this very thing, about slowing down and entering deeper into art. And this slowing down is the same slowing down that one must find in the heart. For what I have read about and learned in my own life is that art comes from the heart; and it is when our hearts are cultivated with good things, with prayer and silence, good things come out of our writing.”
“I absolutely agree,” he replied. “But it’s so hard to slow down the heart. It’s hard not to go faster to keep up and to write faster and work faster and try to get something done hastily because the clock keeps ticking and I don’t want my life to end before I’ve got certain things done!”
The Art of Slow
This way, this slowing down of the heart, this way of solitude and silence and prayer is the life of the artist. It goes back to what St Porphyrios said that every Christian must have a poetic heart. They must have a quietness of heart to see the world as it truly is, and then capture it on the page. The writer’s work is his silence, and his silence is his work. And that silence involves the quieting of the heart—resisting the vices that creep in when we are struggling to do something beautiful: the voices of judgment, the envy of other’s, the despair of having no time. All of these vices are those attached to a fast-paced unreflective ‘life-style’ of freneticism, resentment, competition, envy, and greed—another way of putting it is the pursuit of mammon.
Take delight in all things that surround us. All things teach us and lead us to God. All things around us are droplets of the love of God–both things animate and inanimate, the plants and the animals, the birds and the mountains, the sea and the sunset and the starry sky. They are little loves through which we attain to the great Love that is Christ. … For a person to become a Christian he must have a poetic soul. He must become a poet. Christ does not wish insensitive souls in His company. A Christian, albeit only when he loves, is a poet and lives amid poetry. Poetic hearts embrace love and sense it deeply.
St Porphyrios, Wounded by Love, 218.
And this is why I believe there are great attacks on the artist, particularly despair, and the desire to somehow ‘fit into’ the world. There is the temptation to make oneself ‘relevant’ to the market forces and preoccupations that shape and drive the ‘mechanical world’ with its “fake plastic trees.” There is an attack on authenticity of the person created in the image of God. For the enemy knows that if artists become depressed and degraded, then less people will be able to perceive and partake of Beauty.
Sometimes Making Art is Just Sitting and Doing Nothing
But sometimes the time we take to write or create is not the time to create at all; rather it is time we need to sit quietly with God, to slow down our ambitions, to make time (kairos time, not mechanical chronological time) to slow down. This in itself is so difficult, because we even want to rush through that to somehow steal its spiritual rewards and move on to what is ‘practical’—to hurry and rush even through our prayers!
Father Joseph Shryver, in his book The Gift of Oneself, describes this as “spiritual gluttony.”
Therefore it is necessary to go to one’s spiritual exercises with a disengaged heart, to avoid all hurry, all over-eagerness, as well as all cowardice, laziness, and routine. … The soul which is prey to [spiritual gluttony] shows clearly that she has not yet understood the consoling doctrine of self-surrender. She despises to give herself to God, to abandon herself to His providence, but in her own way. … She seems to … wish to enable [God] to hasten the work of her sanctification.
The Gift of Oneself, 89-90
And this gets to the heart of the matter of producing art, and just living in the world: trusting God for all things.
The True Art of Letting Go
There is a book “The Art of Letting Go.” It’s about producing art. But letting go to whom or what? Letting go of what?
The Way of Christ, and the life of the Christian, is the true Art of letting go. It is a life of surrendering everything to Christ. It’s hard to get over the cliche of this term that everyone who has grown up in church has heard—or like that country song “Jesus Take the Wheel.” But if you really think about it, this art of letting go, it’s immensely difficult and completely counter-cultural. Our society favours almost exclusively what Ralph Waldo Emerson called “the life of the mind.” We favour rationality, calculation, cost benefit analysis. We think about our careers, we stew over the smallest decisions, we are terrified of making ‘the wrong move’, we pride ourselves in the ‘good moves’ we’ve made. But that is not the art of letting go, the life of surrendering all to God. For as St James writes
My brethren, count it all joy when you fall into various trials, knowing that the testing of your faith produces patience. But let patience have its perfect work, that you may be perfect and complete, lacking nothing. If any of you lacks wisdom, let him ask God, who gives to all liberally and without reproach, and it will be given to him.
James 1:2-6
Our trials as people, and as artists and writers, can make us stronger, can build patience when we surrender ourselves to God and lack nothing. And whatever we lack—wisdom, insight, strength, courage—we can ask God who “gives liberally and without reproach.” He is our Creator, and we are His children; and He loves us and gives liberally to us. Hence,
No spiritual exercise is profitable to the soul if it is made without the guidance of God. The soul’s constant care ought to be to surrender herself entirely to God, then to take, one by one, the means which God gives her, under the respective forms He gives them, with the circumstances with which He surrounds them, and during the time He allots to them.
The Gift of Oneself, 89-90
This Way of the Artist, of the poet, of the human being, this Way of letting go, is the true Way, it is Christ Himself Who condescended to become man, and surrendered Himself even to death for the life of the world. And we too are called to become this Way
