Canadian artist and writer Michael O’Brien’s letter to fellow writers and artists is all about the creation of art and spiritual practice–in essence, becoming saints.
When You said, “Seek My face,” My heart said to You, “Your face, LORD, I will seek.”
Psalm 27:8
Michael O’Brien is a Canadian writer and iconographer.
O’Brien’s three volume series Father Elijah is a literary thriller about a priest commissioned by the Pope to convert to Catholicism a powerful leader prophesied to be the Antichrist. Where the book could be written as a sensationalistic Christian thriller, it reads much more like Dostoevsky. O’Brien’s iconography is also striking—a melding of ancient and modern form that is unique to his own aesthetic sensibility.
Along with O’Brien’s fiction, there are a number of essays that he has written on Christian spiritual practice and the making of Art. His Letter to Fellow Artists and Writers is an excellent introduction to this way of understanding and practicing creativity.
There is always a mystery regarding each person’s vocation in the works of the Lord. His creation is not a machine but rather a vast work of art. He is the Father-Creator. “We are God’s work of art,” says Saint Paul. Growth in the vocation is usually a series of countless small steps of faith, usually blind steps, because what God wants to accomplish most in us is the increase of absolute trust in Him. Not so much successes, not even successful works done for His Kingdom. Of course, He desires to do this also but I believe His primary will is accomplished and is always more fruitful to the degree that we have agreed to be very little instruments in His hands—like children, toddlers, trueing to the point of rashness in His merciful love.
The work of God in us is for us to grow in our total trust and abandonment in His Love and mercy. This growth can be painful, however, because the work of the artist tends to be purely in and for the ego, for the self. The objective of the artist—the inauthentic objective of the artist—is to make work worthy of the moniker ‘artist’, to be called an artist by others. And not just to be called an artists, but to be a successful artist—to be a recognized artist by producing work that is recognizable.
But to go back to Merton [link], that’s the promethean role of the artist. The real gaol or the authentic goal of the artist is to become more fully human, i.e., to become a saint. To become a saint is simply to become more and more one’s self. And one becomes more and more one’s self by entering into loving union with God-to be like a child in the arms of God which requires true faith and trust. And this is precisely where God wants us because then we are safe, our minds and actions and hearts are one-pointed and that will make the works we do one-pointed as well.
O’Brien continues …
He is the true Father. This means you must go step by step, hand in hand with Him, even when you can’t feel His hand, asking for each day’s graces needed for each of your works.
What happens when you realize that the true objective of your art—see that? “Your art”?—is not to produce successful art at all, but instead to become a saint, to grow in trust in God, to walk hand in hand with Him even when you can’t feel it?
And what happens when that becomes your focus? Will you feel that paralyzing insecurity when you can’t produce what you think is popular to produce?
Will you be envious when someone else is more successful than you?
Will you feel bad if no one reads your books or you get bad reviews, or worse yet met with dull indifference?
Indeed, if the objectives is to grow in loving union with God and not to become famous or loved by others then your deepest failures can become the means of your salvation; can in fact become the medicine you need to become a saint.
Allow Him to expand your heart. Allow Him to create with the material of your life. Allow Him to make you more than you think you are. This long process will contain some sufferings and numerous unexpected joys.
This is the life of putting yourself on autopilot in the hands of God rather than relying on yourself. The suffering is a result of our own self worship and how that impedes the work of grace.
Offer every suffering for the restoration of the Church and for the fruitfulness of your work—fruitfulness in the sense of good for other souls.
The Way of suffering is consistent in Christ the Eternal Tao …
Beneath the brittle surface The vain, self-interested clinging love, The maddening longing, Which only obscures what lies below, There’s a silently flowing river: A river of compassion, bowels of mercy, A feeling of the other’s pain, Flowing into a vast, vast ocean of sorrow. It is the sorrow of a great funeral: The death of sensual self-love Although it is a sorrow, One enters it willingly with joy, For there is such tenderness in its pain. And at last, in this sorrow, There is perfect freedom. This is the Love that never dies, never fails: A proof of immortality. This is the pain that the everlasting Way Embraced willingly, sharing our pain. This is the cross that He asks us to bear. This is the death that He asks us to die, And at last, in this death, There is perfect peace.
The work of art in this instance, in this long process of suffering and numerous unexpected joy, is this death—it is the death of the artist, of the ego, of the self, and the rebirth of the saint; a love that never dies that never fails. And in this death of the artist, this death of the ego, there is perfect peace—the peace that comes with being known and loved by God and a loving union with others and all creation. The purpose of life is thus not to become ‘an artist’, not to produce art, but to love God and neighbour with the redirected energy that was once directed to your ego.
In any labours of the Lord we need to abandon ourselves into His hands, work hard, pray continuously. Anyone can do this. What is needed is not cleverness and worldly connections, but the willingness to give everything, even to the point of complete failure.
This abandonment and complete failure is brilliantly depicted in Tarkovsky’s epic film of the life of Russian iconography Andrei Rublev. At the end of the film there is a vignette about a boy whose father was a renowned bell master craftsman. He knew the secret to making the most powerful bells. When the leader’s men summoned the man, they met his son who told them that his father had died from the plague. Rather than let the men leave to find another bell master, the boy told them that his father had passed on the secret to him. At first the men were not convinced; but it took only a few moments of insistence to convince the men that he could take on the entire job and guarantee its success.
The boy headed up a large group of workers. He determined the right place to work on the bell, he found the right kind of clay for the bell, he hired and fired people—he was a core part of every aspect of that bell. Finally the day came for the bell to be tested. Rublev had taken a vow of silence and had given up painting after witnessing the brutal attacks at the hands of the Tartars. But he is watching this boy with eagerness and suspicion.
The bell is about to be tested. The leader of the village arrives and all his men. The villagers arrive too, as do the clergy. The boy tries to abscond from the scene, but is halted by the ruler who threatens the boy with death if the bell does not work. Finally the bell resounds with the greatest gong! The whole village and all the workers and clergy celebrate. But instead of celebrating too, the boy runs away and collapses in exhaustion in the mud and begins to weep. Rublev gets down in the mud with him and holds the boy like a father holds his son.
“Why are you crying?” Rublev asks.
The boy continues sobbing … then replies,
“That old brute of mine never shared his secret—took it to his grave …”
The boy didn’t know what he was doing, but threw his entire being into it; his entire being and all of his faith.
Rublev says, “Let’s work together … you’ll be casting bells and I’ll be painting icons … Let’s go to the Trinity …”
In this beautiful and compelling scene, the viewer is shaken by the naive and formidable faith of the boy. He doesn’t flinch, he barely doubts, he casts his entire body, mind, and soul into the bell caring for little else save the successful resound of the bell upon being first struck.
To me, this scene is an example of creative zeal—the faith required to create by casting yourself into the arms of God. O’ to have the zeal of that boy—the courage, the fortitude, the blind passion! And yet that is indeed what is held out to us by the Lord Love Himself. To this point, Michael O’Brien adds transparency …
During the most difficult periods of my life God taught me to trust that He was and is doing something through me and in me—even when it seemed hopeless and radically insecure (which was most of the time) . In fact these are the times when He can bring about the best growth in us, if we continually renew our willingness to under this discipleship of trust.
And here is where creative endeavour becomes ascesis—for how else do you learn that trust but through the hard labour of your soul, during difficulties trials, painful moments—when things seem “hopeless and radically insecure”? We undergo the discipline of trust through choosing it every moment.
So in all of this, my advice for your work and your soul is that you ask for the grace to be perfectly docile to the Holy Spirit, and ask continually for everything you need, both spiritually and materially. Then the doors will open. Not by our will, but His.
I now how to be abased and I know how to abound. Everywhere and in all things I have learned both to be full and to be hungry, both to abound and to suffer need.
—Philippians 4: 12
It’s so easy to rely on yourself—to believe that you can think your way through it, become ‘savvy’, cover all the angles all the way to success. But that’s not the journey. The journey is to become a saint—better yet to become a simple flower that is orientated to the Light from which it receives what it needs for life.
This next point is important as it points to the Eucharist …
When I conceived the idea of my first published novel, Father Elijah, I went to our local parish church and consecrated the ‘impossible, unpublishable’ dream to the will of God. I prayed before the Blessed sacrament everyday during the 8 months I wrote it. I asked daily for the holy Spirit, and for an angel of inspiration … Strange to say, the book was the easiest thing I ever wrote. Usually writing is a hard labour for me.
This really struck me when I first read it before I was baptized into the Orthodox Church. I had never read this emphasis on the Holy Eucharist before in relation to creative work. But the Eucharist because it is the physical partaking of the Body and Blood of Christ, is the Great of Life necessary for one to be renewed in one’s mind and heart and to be given sight: purification, illumination, deification. Again, one’s creative work is an epiphenomenon of the greater life of one in Christ; one of the offshoots of becoming more like Christ and therefore more like your true self.
Through the Eucharist, the authentic Body and Blood of Christ we enter into loving union with God—His ways become our ways; His thoughts our thoughts. and agains, the importance O’Brian places on the Eucharist shows that we are not merely dealing with creativity for its own sake, but rather a spiritual practice of entering into Love Himself, and He entering into you, and entering into union with all creation.
Go to the very source. Go to Christ and ask for all that you need. Ask for growth in skill, for the spirit of perseverance, for faith and courage and love. Ask for a spirit of discernment in order to find your way through the fog of our time. ask for humility and faithfulness, and for the ability to incarnate Truth in beautiful forms. Be a servant to the One who is the source of all Beauty. Be His beloved. Be very little, and trust in this absolutely.
It takes faith to believe you’re loved enough and good enough to ask God to grant you growth in skill, for the spirt of perseverance, and for faith and courage and love. And yet only Good can grant those things to us. it really takes knowing and believing you are loved, for otherwise you wouldn’t be asking God for those things; you wouldn’t feel worthy enough. I’m not talking bout to feeling worth y from a place of humility, but rathe r from a place of believing you’re no good and therefore unworthy to be blessed way God reared to your art. And it takes courage to choose to be small in a society that seems to admire and follow those who are top dogs. But you don’t have to be that. You can be small and quiet and humble—this is the Way.
Avoid at all cost anything in your thoughts or impulses that tend in the direction of ambition even disguised as ambition “for the sake of God’s Kingdom”), self-promotion, manipulation, climbing the ladder of success. “Success” in worldly terms may or may not be what God has in mind for your life, but He surely desires the we each be blessed with the only real success, which is to bear the fruit He desires us to bear. it is not your task to make it in worldly terms. It is your task to respond to grace and to make works of art that will enrich and bless the lives of others. He will do the rest according to his holy will.
While this sounds good o paper, it is really hard to put in practice. But whether it’s in the context of making art or just living creatively from day today, we all have our ego, and that ego seeks honour and praise that is only due to our Lord.
Ambition bites the nails of success.
Bono
That’s a line from U2’s song The Fly from the Achtung Baby album. I found a t-shirt when the album first came out in 1991 that had that line on the back of it. it was one of my favourite lines Bono had eve written. I thought that if only I would have the right level of ambition, then I would be successful and thus happy—I didn’t quite factor in the nail-biting that comes along with ambition: the stress, the pressure.
A friend of mine is a developer who makes deals in the hundreds of millions of dollars. He told me that the key to being successful ant negotiating such large deals is handling the pressure—the bite of ambition on the nails of success.
But ambition and “docility to the Holy Spirit” are not synonymous terms. And then there’s the ambition for God’s sake. Is it about us or about Him Are we trying to decrease so He may increase, or ware we using Christianity as a mere moniker to prop up our egos, our self image? Does ‘Christian’ simply become another bandage we wrap around ourselves?
The real success is to bear the fruit He wants us to bear, which may or may not include becoming a renowned or even widely read writer or respected artist. In our Christian faith, ‘ding nothing’ before God can be greater than all the ambitious action in the world. We instead of seeking our ambition, our success, our name or myriad books or painting s or music albums, seek God Himself; seek to enter into loving union with Him and allow Him to create through us. He will do the rest for us according to His will and great love for us.
Do not bow before the spirit of this world, no matter how benevolently and reasonably it presents itself to you. Over the years I have watched so many gifted young people lose their gifts when they succumbed to the false success-failure scenario. Their intentions were good, but they did not understand the nature of this struggle.
And then O’Brien goes on to show the kind of work one can be inspired by over against the shallowness of modern culture: Dostoevsky, Bloy and Flannery O’Connor, Rachmaninoff and Gorecki and Bach; see the films of Andrei Tarkovsky and Ermanno Olmi; gaze upon the icons of Andrei Rublev and the post-Renaissance epiphanies of painters like Rembrandt and Roualt.
Learn from them, humbly, obediently, submissively (submissio, within the mission). This list is inexhaustible. Go ahead, explore!
Reconnect with the holy hierarchy of being, with the flow of time’s continuity, find your true position in the great unfolding drama. Be a success in God’s eyes.
This can be difficult to learn from the masters of writing and art and music and film—especially these days when our attention is fragmented by technology. try to work through the Brothers Karamazov, or, as featured above, Rublev’s three hour movie about Andrei Rublev. And not just experience them, but learn from them, which requires watching or reading or listening to them over and over. The stillness and openness demanded of you to learn from them might set you up for the second part: Reconnecting with God, the host of angels, the choir of the saints.
How?
Through prayer and stillness—work at it. It’s really hard, but when it becomes part of your daily life it will become part of your creative life too.
[We] have a grave responsibility before God and mankind. The arts can give visible form to aspects of reality including our faith, that are invisible. If an artist is steadily growing in skill united to God’s grace, then new visual ‘words’ can evolve truths in the human heart …
Did you catch that last part? All it takes is for one to “grow steadily” in skill united to God’s grace—then new visual words can speak to the human heart. In essence, steadily becoming a saint by becoming who we are by ‘becoming’ more like He is.
He took from what is ours and gave us what is His …
And this next line of O’Brien can be an inspiration to all of us, namely to write overtly Christian works that edify and “reveal the glory of creation and the immensity of the Good News of revelation. For,
In a historical era that overwhelmingly denies the sacredness of life at every turn, that seeks to ‘decapitate’ creation … authentic art can point the way to a true restoration.
We use our art to reveal the Truth of our Lord Jesus Christ and His Good News of liberation from sin and death and becoming one with Him through His death and resurrection, and the grace of the Holy Eucharist that Christ freely offers us through His immense Love. As we chant during the Bright 50 …
Christ is risen from the dead Trampling down death by death And to those in the tombs Bestowing Life!
That’s the direction, that’s the vision, that’s the focus.
May the Lord grant us His grace and the courage to ever turn our gaze towards Him and seek Him and the blessing He proffers to us through struggle and toil and zeal for His great Love.
