Art and Healing in a Mechanistic Age
Breaking Free from False Perfection
By Mandy Smith
“You’re a real artist. Don’t keep your art to yourself.”
I’d been doodling during Lectio Divina. A friend, who every week watches my hand busily shaping birds and seedpods, whispered these words to me as I tucked my doodles into my Bible.
I felt myself keep her words at arm’s length, thinking, “That’s nice of her but she doesn’t know art. These are just doodles.” And at once I was aware of the many moments when someone had spoken something positive over my art-making. I felt God ask: “Why can’t you take this in?”
Sadly, what’s easier to absorb is the message that what I make is insignificant. Where did I get that message from? And why do I so quickly underestimate the artwork I do? It reminds me of the way people behave when they’ve been beaten down by derision. Which makes no sense given my supportive childhood. In my home there were materials and time for creativity, safety to experiment and celebration of the things I made. No one disparaged my creative gifts or artwork.
I’m starting to name a kind of derision that’s in the water. It’s only natural that a culture shaped by industry is not made for humans. Industry makes helpful products for our use, but the values of industry are not shaped by the ways humans live and flourish. In healing ways, Makoto Fujimura names these waters in which we swim: “We must realize that in our postindustrial mindset, we understand everything we touch to be a commodified mechanism of utility and efficiency.”
Pressured to Be Productive
In our cultural waters something unhealthy steeps. If a particular person had, over the course of my life, sneered at my making, it would have been easier to name the toxic environment. But because it’s come through myriad voices and media, it’s taken me until my fifties to identify the harmful ways our culture and the healing that I need—that all creatives need.
These unhealthy forces toxins become apparent in the fear I feel when I begin to create something before I know what shape it will take. They appear in how quickly I question my instincts and apologize for my tears. I see these forces at work in the ways I pit my mind against my feelings, the ways I distrust my senses, the ways I always need to explain myself—as if the things I create aren’t valid unless I can justify them in an English sentence.
Somehow, I’ve picked up the message that the point of art is perfection. So, I’ve worn down entire erasers and still never felt the work was right. Until I admitted that the most joyful things in art are the things that happened by accident, places where ink bled and paper ripped and some kind of alchemy took place between clay and glaze.
There’s nothing wrong with the fullness of a human heart yearning to be fully alive. What’s wrong is a culture that cramps human things.
How many times has some invisible force made me feel my art-making was a waste of time? How often has play and experimentation been cramped by pressures to be productive? How frequently have I got the message that the things I make are only valid if they’re useful, my time use only valid if it’s efficient?
For decades I thought something was wrong with me.
Until Jesus showed me the way through.
Choosing the Mess and Mystery
Centuries before the industrial revolution, Satan offered Jesus commodified mechanisms of utility and efficiency, shaming human limitation. In every way that he tempted Jesus in the wilderness, he offered technologies—shortcuts to circumvent human ways of existing.
When Satan tempted Jesus to make fast food, Jesus chose slow dependence. When Satan devised a plan for Jesus to manipulate God, Jesus chose to let God reveal himself in his own way and time. When Satan offered Jesus instant acclaim, Jesus chose to worship. Jesus saw the immensity of the task at hand, yet he was unashamed of all that made him human, knowing that miracles are possible when ordinary human life is in the hands of the Lord of all Creation.
Although our temptations aren’t as obvious as the ones presented to Jesus, they feel very familiar. Daily we are confronted with temptations to avoid normal human experience, to sidestep mess and mystery, to deny the truth that transcendence takes time and is worth the risk.
But these are the sacred, other-worldly practices of creatives. Like Satan in the wilderness, our culture shames the small, slow ways we work, always asking
“What is it?”
“How is it useful?”
“Are you finished yet?”
“Is it a success?”
“Will it be profitable?”
We offer our winsome answers:
“I’m still learning.”
“I hope it’s honest.”
“Slow down with me.”
“Beauty is reason enough.”
“I pray it profits those it touches.”
Too often, in the face of the questions of an industrial culture, these answers fall flat.
Too often, we feel like failures in the face of forces that have little patience for human beings.
But we can question the questions. Questions made for machines are always going to be unsuited to humans, not because we’re less but because the way of human life is too expansive for those little boxes. Like Jesus in the wilderness, we can be unshaken by inhuman demands. We can ask better questions, like:
How are you being shaped?
What story is your work telling?
What helps you be present and attentive?
What does success mean?
How is the work hospitable?
While artists are not the only ones being cramped by the cultural dynamics of our time, artists have a unique opportunity and perspective to name the demands a commodified culture places upon human souls. As artists take the risk to question the questions, we release others from the crushing. As we share the things we make from a different sphere, beyond the constraints of utility and efficiency, we shape a joyful, human-sized way for others to join. As we defy these limiting ways of being, we embody something better.
When your art feels small and unimportant, don’t tuck it away. It may be the permission another human needs to be true to the dreams and ideas stirring in their own souls. When your art is not successful or popular or profitable, don’t set it aside. Your determination to keep making is radical work, defying dehumanizing forces. Your less-than-perfect art may be just the reminder a less-than-perfect person needs to tend to the dreams and ideas stirring in their own souls.
Mandy Smith is the pastor of St Lucia Uniting Church in Brisbane, Australia, a DMin cohort leader at The Eugene Peterson Center for Christian Imagination, and an artist. She is the author of Confessions of an Amateur Saint: The Christian Leader's Journey from Self-Sufficiency to Reliance on God, The Vulnerable Pastor: How Human Limitations Empower Our Ministry and Unfettered: Imagining a Childlike Faith Beyond the Baggage of Western Culture. Mandy and her husband Jamie, a New Testament professor, live in their parsonage where the teapot is always warm. See some of Mandy’s work at www.TheWayIsTheWay.org.
Photo by pure julia, courtesy of Unsplash.