I am a Christian Artist. This is something I have had to struggle with for most of my life (since I realized in the first grade that I had a knack for acting and wanted to be a movie star). The World doesn't treat Christians very well and ostracizes them. Meanwhile, unless an Artist is creating "Christian" art, the Church tends to shun and ostracize the Christian Artist.
Since a freshmen in college when I first read one of her short stories, I have been a fan of Flannery O'Connor. I wish she would have lived longer so she could have written more. Recently I came across an essay O'Connor wrote entitled "Catholic Novelists and Their Readers." Below are just a few excerpts worthy of sharing. You can read the whole essay here.
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"Every day we see people who are busy distorting their talents in order
to enhance their popularity or to make money that they could do without.
We can safely say that this, if done consciously, is reprehensible. But
even oftener, I think, we see people distorting their talents in the
name of God for reasons that they think are good—to reform or to teach
or to lead people to the Church. And it is much less easy to say that
this is reprehensible. None of us is able to judge such people
themselves, but we must, for the sake of truth, judge the products they
make. We must say whether this or that novel truthfully portrays the
aspect of reality that it sets out to portray. The novelist who
deliberately misuses his talent for some good purpose may be committing
no sin, but he is certainly committing a grave inconsistency, for he is
trying to reflect God with what amounts to a practical untruth....
"Whatever the novelist sees in the way of truth must first take on the
form of his art and must become embodied in the concrete and human. If
you shy away from sense experience, you will not be able to read
fiction; but you will not be able to apprehend anything else in this
world either, because every mystery that reaches the human mind, except
in the final stages of contemplative prayer, does so by way of the
senses. Christ didn't redeem us by a direct intellectual act, but became
incarnate in human form, and he speaks to us now through the mediation
of a visible Church. All this may seem a long way from the subject of
fiction, but it is not, for the main concern of the fiction writer is
with mystery as it is incarnated in human life.
"The novelist is required to open his eyes on the world around him and
look. If what he sees is not highly edifying, he is still required to
look. Then he is required to reproduce, with words, what he sees. Now
this is the first point at which the novelist who is a Catholic may feel
some friction between what he is supposed to do as a novelist and what
he is supposed to do as a Catholic, for what he sees at all times is
fallen man perverted by false philosophies. Is he to reproduce this? Or
is he to change what he sees and make it, instead of what it is, what in
the light of faith he thinks it ought to be? Is he, as Baron von Hugel
has said, supposed to "tidy up reality?"
Just how can the
novelist be true to time and eternity both, to what he sees and what he
believes, to the relative and the absolute? And how can he do all this
and be true at the same time to the art of the novel, which demands the
illusion of life?...
"There is no reason why fixed dogma should fix anything that the writer
sees in the world. On the contrary, dogma is an instrument for
penetrating reality. Christian dogma is about the only thing left in the
world that surely guards and respects mystery. The fiction writer is an
observer, first, last, and always, but he cannot be an adequate
observer unless he is free from uncertainty about what he sees. Those
who have no absolute values cannot let the relative remain merely
relative; they are always raising it to the level of the absolute. The
Catholic fiction writer is entirely free to observe. He feels no call to
take on the duties of God or to create a new universe. He feels
perfectly free to look at the one we already have and to show exactly
what he sees. He feels no need to apologize for the ways of God to man
or to avoid looking at the ways of man to God. For him, to "tidy up
reality" is certainly to succumb to the sin of pride. Open and free
observation is founded on our ultimate faith that the universe is
meaningful, as the Church teaches....
"This is no superficial problem for the conscientious novelist, and those
who have felt it have felt it with agony. But I think that to force
this kind of total responsibility on the novelist is to burden him with
the business that belongs only to God. I think the solution to this
particular problem leads us straight back where we started from—the
subject of the standards of art and the nature of fiction itself. The
fact is that if the writer's attention is on producing a work of art, a
work that is good in itself, he is going to take great pains to control
every excess, everything that does not contribute to this central
meaning and design. He cannot indulge in sentimentality, in
propagandizing, or in pornography and create a work of art, for all
these things are excesses. They call attention to themselves and
distract from the work as a whole....
"The fiction writer has to make a whole world believable by making every
part and aspect of it believable. There are many Catholic readers who
open a novel and, discovering the presence of an arm or a leg, piously
close the book. We are always demanding that the writer be less explicit
in regard to natural matters or the concrete particulars of sin. The
writer has an obligation here, but I believe it can be met by adhering
to the demands of his art, and if we criticize on this score, we must
criticize by the standards of art. Many Catholic readers are
overconscious of what they consider to be obscenity in modern fiction
for the very simple reason that in reading a book, they have nothing
else to look for. They are not equipped to find anything else. They are
totally unconscious of the design, the tone, the intention, the meaning,
or even the truth of what they have in hand. They don't see the book in
a perspective that would reduce every part of it to its proper place in
the whole....
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