perhaps i didn't express it well...

["J. Marie Hall" <fionaeval at yahoo_com>]

i wrote:

> my pastor corrected me very quickly one day when he
> was asking questions about my heart towards the
> creative things i do.  he wanted to know why i wrote
> poetry or wrote anything for that matter.  why i
play
> music or would want to.  the obvious answer was "to
> glorify god."  and he said, "no, not directly."  you
> do it b/c you have to.  b/c there is something
inside
> of you that needs to pass through you.  that it is
> more honoring to god to submit to what we were
created
> for and let him use us as an honest and natural
> vehicle for the wonderful things he has left in that
> left-over breath.  

and john wrote:

Interesting stuff: therefore, drawing breath is
glorifying God.

--->what i'm getting at (and i think my pastor was
getting at) is that you can't control creativity.  the
most truly beautiful things don't happen when i sit
down and say, "right now, i'm going to write a poem
about god b/c that'll glorify him."  what's in me
_will_ do that on its own b/c it's the real response
of a relationship.  genuine.  not so contrived.  and
it doesn't often take the form of "you" and "i."

i believe in doing good work and employing all my
faculties, don't get me wrong.  but like lewis said,
he just had this picture in his head for all those
long years.  so he finally sat down and did something
with it.  he didn't say, "i'm gonna sit down and come
up with a picture and a story."  he probably didn't
know it'd be a full story either...you don't _really_
know what it will all emerge to be.

one implication that is important for me as a
christian doing any kind of art is that i need not be
afraid of writing things that aren't directly
christian.  a lot of us are trying to get at reality. 
and to know the truth: to know god.  what you said
later about the notion of the sacred and the secular
is what i think i'm appealing to more or less.

a good article, imho, is:

http://www.regenerator.com/8.1/arvin.html


still, breathing is a good beginning...
-j. marie

=====
But now, like a whispering in dark streets,
rumors of God run through your dark blood.
-Rainer Maria Rilke (The Book of Hours; I, 38)

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