Presence in Writing

As a writer, grappling with the writing process every day, I often come across comments like this, “…the work itself – the practice of the craft of writing – must be its own reward”(Dennis Palumbo, Writing from the Inside Out, 53). Over the years such statements have paled, and in fact, become a source of discouragement for me. Because oftentimes writing isn’t its own reward. Such phrases – art for art’s sake – actually became statements of disillusionment and abandonment. 


Recently I intentionally re-read Mark Batterson’s book, The Circle Maker, because I want to grow in prayer and faith. I was surprised to find that much of the same material that applied to me as a spiritual person also spoke to me as a writer. And then it hit me. When I see the word, “prayer,” it’s a word of relationship. When I pray, I’m entering into a relationship with Christ. I’m not alone. But when I utter the word, “writing,” I’m alone. It is no secret that aloneness and loneliness is a “right of passage” every writer must accept. Naturally, then, it would also become core to the writer’s identity. 


As a Christian, maybe this is something that needs to be questioned and reassessed. Writing, like prayer, is not only about the inner being, the self, but it’s also about communicating and interacting with the world (evangelium). It’s about finding relationship through the craft. It’s also about being in a relationship with Jesus. When I sit down at my desk, turn on the computer, and look at the blank page – forced to confront myself – it can be terrifying. I realized that much like the effects of prayer, I want Jesus to be waiting there on the other side. I need to know that he’s waiting there. 


It’s about entering presence. When I conceive of it that way, I’m not abandoned to figure it out on my own. I’m not begging the blank stare of art for art’s sake to fulfill me. Instead, I’m stepping into glory. 
It’s still a struggle, for the daily discipline of writing often feels harsh and unrelenting. But if it is your call, your work, then like prayer, it can also be a conduit into Christ’s presence. Then the raw discipline, the craft, the monotonous constancy isn’t the end in itself. Rather, the reward is an invitation into his presence. It’s an investment and cultivation into something eternal. It’s a journey home. 

Thinking, Oil and Wallpaper

--Anita Kobayashi Sung
Anita is one of the many talented artists that participated in our seven-week faith and art study, In the Living Room, this past spring.  Anita and her husband David are both graduates from Gordon-Conwell Seminary and will soon start a church in Manhattan. 


Come to InterArts Fellowship this Monday Night at the W83 Ministry Center as we examine how Eternal Life shapes the present lives of artists. Featuring works by The James Hall Quintet, Anna Hillengas Troester, Maria Fee and guest speaker Cherith Fee Nordling. Artists reception to follow program.

Wiggle Room

Indeed, there are times when artists lament how job pressures keep them from true creativity. We don’t always possess the luxury of pursuing interests, concerns, or longings. Instead we are given assignments, commissions, and roles to embody. We must pay bills, make deadlines. Therefore, reality spurs motivating factors besides predilection to rouse artistic action. But does this really make the work any less creative?

In Shop Class As Soulcraft, Matthew Crawford disputes the romantic concept that freedom or “the unleashing of the self” engenders creativeness. Crawford maintains that creativity is actually a by-product of being present. It takes discipline, “the mastery… cultivated through long practice,” to shape good work. In other words, it’s really submission to given materials that allow artists to be inventive, effective, and authentic. For Crawford one must “dwell” in given tasks to gain any credence in it.

Along this line of thought my writer friend, Garnette, introduced a creative concept he employs which he calls wiggle room. We witness wiggle room every time an actor sparkles despite vacuous B-movie material. Wiggle room utilizes inventiveness and imagination within our specified perimeters and shortcomings. Artists are called to access what Crawford calls “patterns of experience;” the knowledge gained from “confrontation with real things.” Our embodied experiences, no matter how low or mundane, become foundational for good work. We must rely on experience to make our projects ring true. Here is where Crawford connects work with philosophy. While philosophy seeks the good—a way to live life; it is our work that become the context to employ the good. For Crawford we must make use of philosophy, “the desire to know” and examine, in order to embrace and propagate good work.

Perhaps, then, our real problem with creativity is submission. Do we really want to surrender our time and energy on a seemingly unworthy project? Jesus seems to think so when he took on the disastrous human project. Surprisingly, because of the taint, few are interested in investing in his mission to redeem humanity. In The Death of Adam, Marilynne Robinson, bewails how we lost our ability to take pleasure in human presence. She writes “we ceased to enjoy human act and gesture, which civilization has always before found to be beautiful even when it as also grievous or terrible.” Despite the circumstances of sin, Christian artists need to employ wiggle room. We need to be hands on with the work given no matter how inconsequential it seems. Christ came to redeem humanity by becoming present, therefore, calls us to also be substantial, to confront real things, in real time.

Artists, let’s make wiggle room a redemptive part of our work.

--Maria

New City

In the book of Revelation John is shown the bride of the Lamb exemplified as a brilliant city coming down from heaven. This is not a city fabricated from steel and poured concrete. Instead we find purified gold, excavated stones, cut jasper, emerald, and sapphire. Its gates are colossal pearls plucked from the deep. This city holds an overwhelming material presence and bids us to use all of our senses.

Why this solid, tactile description? Are we, the bride, the Holy City, called to be a magnificent material presence— beckoning touch to ascertain its reality? Like John, let’s be carried away by the Spirit to behold such a visceral image of what we are to become. For in our present state we are raw material in need of being purified, excavated, cut, purged and plucked. Our rough surfaces and extraneous burrs must be smoothed away to reveal true beauty.

As Christians, and as artists, we do not disregard the material despite its flaws; we view possibilities. We wrestle, almost battle, to materially manifest ideas, distill insights. Jesus comprehends the painful process of creating, the exertion needed to dig up what must come to light. What makes the city in the book of Revelation a work of art is its thoroughly worked-over presence.

Artists, as we watch the horrors of Japan unfold, let us be reminded of John’s vision. It was the angel who held the seven bowls of plagues that took John by the hand to show him the New Jerusalem. It takes pain and process to make us more real, more solid, more beautiful. This is the nature of both Christianity and art.

--Maria