I recently spent two weeks living with the Community of the Lamb at their “mother house” of St. Pierre, in lovely l’Aude, southwest France. It was a time of retreat, of discovery, of thinking-too-much-about-my-life-and-what-I-shall-someday-become (the usual), surrounded by so many species of butterflies, moths, long grasses, tiny wild orchids, magnificent 9pm sunsets, all day long birdsong, hidden enclosures among the trees, and sweeping views of hilly farmland. One morning I opened the door of my cell to go to the bathroom, and the first thing I saw was two cottontail bunnies playing among the trees opposite. The path down to Mass every day was a fifteen minute walk past two ponds full of night-partying frogs, a “garden of olives,” and a prairie full of wildflowers. About midway through my time there, I (having searched long and hard for some phone service) sent messages to two of the closest people to me to say that, even surrounded by so much beauty, I was having a deeply difficult time, spiritually, emotionally, physically. They both replied, “That sounds great! Can’t wait to hear about it!”
This is a perfect illustration of the path that my life has taken in the last seven or so months. To put it slightly more bluntly (but not more briefly) : when I was a kiddo, I used to listen to the large amount of stuff my Dad said about God with a wrinkled, nostril-scrunched sort of face. His incomprehensible bookshelves full of books about nothing but the spiritual life drove me insane, on principle. I died of boredom at the dinner table for hours with all the much loved but long-winded family friends who had stories to tell about, I don’t know, Margaret’s cousin’s husband’s sister who went away for two weeks to Medjugorje and experienced an inner healing that changed the whole family. On many occasions, I swore that my future self would be far cooler, for ever and always, foreseeing an adult life that would be brilliant because it would revolve around having the money and freedom to buy all the video games.
So, it is with some surprise that I now find myself on the far side of two weeks spent doing nothing but paying attention to my spiritual life : to prayer and to song, to spiritual texts, to simplicity, to working alongside others in silence, to listening to a wise old owl – Frère Jean-Claude – teach over breakfast. And even more surprised than I was to find that this sort of immersion in your spiritual life is, on some level, quite distressing, I am even more astonished to find that I am nothing but joyful and deeply grateful to have experienced it.
I’ve spent the last week wanting to write down so many things, and not knowing where to begin. I don’t know what subject to begin with, and I don’t know which words to choose to express the subjects, and this breakdown of writing ability all seems to be tied up with a feeling I had the other night in the kitchen, chatting with my housemate. I was sitting at the table, leaning against the wood-paneled wall, and she was busying her long frame about, putting things away and boiling water, or something. First I said – I don’t know why it came to mind – that I find Deconstructionist literary analysis very depressing, on principle, along with a lot of contemporary academic thought. And then something else came out, too. From my lips. The same fast-talking-in-case-I-don’t-get-to-finish lips that have argued with my father about the value of modern art for as long as I’ve been old enough to look at a thing and identify a feeling in relation to it. I announced that I find modern art very tragic, and that it somehow seems to me to signify that we human beings have ceased to aspire.
What?
There have been a lot of phases over the last twelve years of my life. There have been wardrobes full of black clothes turned to wardrobes full of sundresses, there has been devastatingly bad poetry turned to confusedly devastating poetry, obsessive cake-making turned to obsessive cake-avoiding, angry journal entries written in caps about the state of the world’s hungry turned to general apathy for all human bullshit and then back again, solid weeks spent playing Elder Scrolls turned to weeks spent excited for the next hike up a real mountain. But I have never ever not once not been in awe and in love with the human impulse to express and create in whatever bizarro means necessary. The search for the perfect word. The ideal medium. The transmission of that thing, the thing that has no word, the fifty-year story told in a single greyscale photograph, the sentence that fills the mind with yellow and makes the tongue water, the smear of red and purple on a canvas and the miles of nuance between and behind them. The glorious marriage of concept and expression, of intellect and design. This stuff really gets me going, as you can see. But then, suddenly, the other night, I looked at it all and it made me sad.
Perhaps it has to do with my definition of art, which is perhaps way more my own definition than anybody else’s, but I have always understood a close connection between art and suffering. Part of what has always been beautiful to me in art is how often it involves the transformation of something distressing and incomprehensible into something exterior, tangible, often beautiful, and hopefully relateable. A lot of the time there is a movement from something deeply individual into something that can be acknowledged and carried by a community. I don’t think this the same definition my housemate has, and I know it isn’t the same definition my Dad has, and I don’t think it’s the same definition the Catholic Church has, but it’s been my understanding. We know that mental illness and artistic genius have high rates of concurrence, and that makes sense to me. And I think that modern art, since the early 20th century, has been primarily about this sort of connection. A multiformed, multicoloured, multigenerational, very-wounded screaming of the question : “Who are we?” I think that as the need for the response has gotten more urgent, the question has been steadily losing the need for beauty or for sense, and this divides people’s opinions on the subject.
And so, over the last year and a half, something has been changing in my perception of people and of the world. A something that reached a, I don’t know, a transformational apex, while I was lost in that short but somehow eternal time of abandon to prayer and routine. You know that final moment of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, when Jen Yu throws herself off a mountain? And I cry rivers of tears every time, because it’s very sad and what about poor lovestruck Lo?, but mostly because of how much beautiful truth is in that gesture of abandon. One morning at St. Pierre, I expressed a thought to Frère Jean-Claude about how I hadn’t understood this certain aspect of our faith, and he talked to me about it for a few moments. I didn’t come away with a better understanding of what it was I was missing, but what marked me was a moment when he put his hands out in front of him, palms upward, and said to me something like, “we have to come to Jesus like this. We have to.” A gesture of surrender, and one of receptivity.
It’s not so much that I don’t find the urgency and the ardency of modern art beautiful anymore. I’m still romanticized by it. I love it. I love us, and the stupid shit we come up with, and I love the poetry of the circles we turn ourselves in while looking at the ground, because it hasn’t occurred to us that there might be something up above. I especially love all of the brilliant, beautiful things we do without believing we have had any help from grace or any kind of deity. I also don’t want to say that no piece of modern art is beautiful, because that isn’t true either. And it’s not so much that it’s because I believe I’ve found some part of the answer to the question that I have less interest in how we try to work our way to the answer. It’s just that, somehow, by grace if not by effort, I’ve let go of the question. My heart has stepped outside of the sphere.
There is a Catholic tradition of praying a part of Psalm 141 in the evening, at the beginning of Vespers :
Let my prayer be set forth before thee as incense; / and the lifting up of my hands as the evening sacrifice.
It is traditional too, to physically raise your hands upward while praying or singing this, in a gesture not only of praise, but of trust. And it does something. I can’t explain why, but it feels vulnerable and exhilarating to put your hands out like that, sensitive side exposed – a faint echo of what it must be like to fling yourself from a mountain, in faith that you will reach a more perfect place.
I distinctly remember, before and after making the very me-oriented decision to try God on for size, being afraid of what would happen to my appreciation for the human tragic. I mean, I didn’t put those words on it, but I had a certain way of approaching my life that I was comfortable with. Many many deeply melancholy moments shaped me to make the most of sadness, and to continue to express and to search throughout it. I found value there, a true value. I found friends there, I found an identity there, and I resigned myself to making the most of the hardest experiences as poetically as I could manage. The thought of something bigger than that, something that could put the melancholy in its place as a part of life, rather than an encompassing force, was not only unlikely, but it was frightening. The overwhelming experience of the Void, as my housemate calls it, of long nights spent staring at the darkened ceiling, mind full of anxious thoughts and deep emotions – these were artistic inspiration, and all I knew to measure myself by.
I spent a long time trying to find Catholic literature on this subject of art and human experience, and I couldn’t find anything that spoke to me, where I was. Nothing was comforting. Everything had to do with how art is meant to raise us up, to be beautiful, to glorify, to aspire to Sistine Chapel heights or nothing. It took a few hops of faith at the beginning, to be honest, to let this question lie and to admit that maybe it wasn’t the most important thing. That in the realm of things there are to know, I know basically nothing, and that’s part of the point. (But still, if anybody has any interesting literature on the subject, really, please do tell me).
About seven or eight months ago, when I left for Europe, this question began to stop burning a hole in my head, I think because of a new environment and a lot of distracting things, and, frankly, less-frequent occurrences of melancholy / torment / fuel for the fire. In fact, other than a conversation about art a few months ago, I haven’t thought about it at all, until Monday night when I announced, without premeditation, a position that I didn’t know I suddenly had. This new awareness that on some level, though it is admirable, our desire to explain ourselves is also futile. That though it is sometimes beautiful, it often takes an ugly appearance that is so content in itself to be ugly that it loses, in my opinion, any redemption for having a concept behind it. That we have lost something of the great aspiration behind works of art from antiquity til about 1900, which is to say the aspiration to create a thing of beauty. The sort of aspiration you can see behind this Earth – if indeed you believe it is a creation – while watching a crimson sun slip slowly past the world, beyond dusky green hills, as distant frogs begin to sing.
So, maybe it is in part the importance of beauty, then, that has so changed my view of art and of why and how we humans choose to create. At St. Pierre, they live a very simple life. The charism of this community focuses particularly on poverty – on our spiritual poverty before God, first of all, and our poverty in relation to one another in fraternal life. But just as at the very heart of Catholicism is a meeting of the theological and the tangible, they also choose to live a life of material poverty. They have no showers or running hot water. Everything they receive to eat is given to them through providence, and they spend long days building their own simple furniture. After only a few days living so simply, in such a poor but deeply dignified way, I began to see how truly valuable are the things we receive for free in this life. Things both as simple and as magnificently complex as the planet we live on. As our song – is there anything else on Earth as simultaneously beautiful and ordered as human song? (Sidenote : If we were a species of animal underneath the scrutiny of some highly intelligent race of, say, penguins, I think they would make a big deal out of our singing.) The love of one human for another. Putting those two together – the ability of one person to sing to another. And finally, though this will be more contested, though I firmly believe the other things I’ve thought of point to it, the love of God for his creation, for us.
So, what do art, suffering, a larger appreciation for beauty, and the terrifying exhilaration of surrender have to do with one another, in this meandering tributary stemming from my two weeks in the countryside, you may well be asking, if you have, in fact, made it this far?
I believe that by surrendering to a simpler life, we gain access to the knowledge of what we have already. And I think that what have already is so incredible that it fills all sorts of the voids and gaps and holes that keep our heads down and prevent us from seeing glory for what it is. A range of experiences, hurts, ponderings, desires that keep us aspiring to touch a ceiling, when we don’t realise there is a whole wide sky above the house. Once you’ve caught a glimpse of the sky, though, the activities going on in the room seem a little less important – and I think that’s where I am now. It takes courage, though, to allow that perhaps your way of experiencing life is not the best way – though it might be the most comfortable – and to stare it down, to cause yourself some pain, so that afterward you can breathe a fresher air.
For me, the catalyst of this experience was a prayer for humility, and a surrender of myself to God’s love for me. So far, I’ve written all of this as though I climbed up onto the roof of the house and saw the sky for myself. In reality, it’s more like I was afraid to go out the front door and so I stayed inside and shut my eyes, and months later when I opened them, it turned out God had removed the whole building from around me. There’s a whole story of grace, and what work God does inside your heart when you’re not paying attention. I’m making sure to say it, because it isn’t in the name of self-surrender itself that three weeks ago I witnessed a woman begin to cry when a group of poor little sisters in blue sang a blessing to her in the heart of Toulouse. But if you ever feel like nothing is beautiful anymore, or like life is only worth deconstructing, or if you’re even just a little dissatisfied with the circles you spin, or the ground you’re looking at, I highly recommend that you go to a beautiful and silent place, remove from around you everything that is keeping your heart from being open. And look. And listen.