Your creative inclination bears with it, the blessed burden of responsibility
Let the dead bury the dead
It seems important sometimes, that the limitations on one’s creative capacity are stripped away. Occasionally, you’re granted all of the great conditions that you thought were necessary in order to write or to play music or to pray. Suddenly, perhaps you’re given the space or the time or the means, and you realise ultimately that all of your excuses were utterly fatuous.
You are granted a peace and a space you do nothing with. You fall into the torpor and lethargy of the distracted age. You thought yourself beyond it, above it. Here you are, idle, sulky. Your dead heart and dead hands making nothing and revelling in nothing. Your prayer is arid. Your notebooks are empty. If you want to be a ghost, dear reader, at least be a troublesome ghost. Rattle chains, lest you be lost and forgotten. Be a ghost who haunts and charms and whispers and rages, not silent, sullen and impotent.
Sometimes we are granted every creative luxury, every opportunity, in order for God to show us just how fickle and fruitless we can be without His grace, or without the effort and the endeavour it takes to bring work to life. Perhaps you couldn’t even be bothered burying your talent in a field. You left it, gathering dust on the table where the Lord left it for you to collect. Perhaps you treat your talent with suspicion. You circled it. You shifted the blame.
You blame family, of course. I have children, you see? I have a job. Don’t you understand? How can one write under these conditions? How can one create? How can one steal a moment to cohere a thought? How? How could it be possible? Well, perhaps your lamentation, your desire for creative barrenness, will be granted. Is this what you wanted? To be proven correct? Is this what you wanted? To make nothing, to leave no trace, to have no bearing upon the world around you, upon the thought of man and the stirrings of his heart? Your whispered aspirations to your loved ones echo, twist and turn to mock your idle heart, your dead hands.
Don’t dare let it be you. One should shudder at the thought. If you have resolved to make, or write or paint or craft or create something in this world, then you better damn well do it, because unto whomsoever much is given, of him much shall be required. Why should you get to sit and rot and fade without doing something, making something, that can touch the hearts and guide the minds of those who may benefit from it? Don’t you dare.
Lay down something anything, in ink, in blood, in seventh chords, in palm mutes, in timber, in charcoal, or oil paints, whatever your medium may be… shape today into something, something that will bear the spirit of who you were and who God created you to be. Your dead heart and your dead hands delight only the devil. Let the dead bury the dead while you bear Christ’s life and Christ’s love within you… While you nurture the tender young heart, while you hold tender little hands.
When you bring life and love and light to a grey world, you let the dead bury the dead. When you create, something, anything, let it speak of God’s imprint upon you, to the consolation of sacrament, of sound, of song and scripture. Bleed some ink, dear reader… spill some paint. Adore your wife, your husband, your vocation with everything that you have. Bear witness to the glory of God, humbly, in prayer and practice, and reveal a glimpse of that glory in the work of your hands. May the Glory be ever His.