Story

 

Most recent Ink and Watercolor. I like to think of this as a vision of Vic and I sitting companionably on a  bench as we hike/visit the Alps. 

Good morning. 

Working through Kathleen Norris again. As a young wife setting up house on her grandmother’s farm in the “desert” of South Dakota, her interest is peaked when she visits a monastery 90 miles north to hear a  author speak. Afterwards, she had a list of questions and wrote them in a letter to one of the monks she had met. He answered as best he could and sent her a dense book on theology. When that didn’t do the trick he advised her to read the letters of Flannery O’Connor. 

In O’Connor Norris found a kindred soul: a serious writer striving to incorporate faith into the human experience. Norris struggled with the twin desires to write and to explore faith—a combination she had come to see as impossible while in college—and while not antagonistic to her grandmother’s little church down the road, she could not find there a path forward.

O’Connor’s words resonated with Norris, “ . . . Most people come to the Church by means the Church does not allow, else there would be no need their getting to her at all. . . The operation of the Church is entirely set up for the sinner, which creates much misunderstanding among the smug.”

Norris found a voice echoing O’Connor’s in Maxine Kuhn, close friend of the poet Anne Sexton. Kuhn wrote of an encounter Sexton had with a priest. After reading her poems, he told her that her typewriter was her altar. She replied that she could not go to church and that she could not pray. The priest replied that her poems were her prayers and that she should, “Come on back to the typewriter.”

This was an important exchange for Norris as she had been lead to believe that the coexistence of faith and good, literary writing had ended somewhere in the seventeenth century with the likes of John Donne. The nineteenth and twentieth centuries ushered in the—still popular today—assessment that a true artist is tortured by their art, struggling with mental illness, drugs, and was incapable of maintaining healthy relationships. 

The insidious subtext to this fallacy is that any attempt toward wellness through medication, faith, and/or steady healthy relationships would strip the writer of their edge, their muse. Stability and contentment equal banality, chaos and pain equal creativity. 

Now, no one has a consistently stable and contented life. All of us struggle. All of us struggle with struggling, we struggle with our past, we struggle with aspects of our present and future. No artist creates from a pain-free, worry-less place. No doubt, our painful experiences are significant catalysts for creative thinking, but the unavoidable, universal pain that comes from being human is different from a mindset that sees dysfunction as a desired state, as the only true environment for the artist. 

I do not think we need worry one iota that we will be so “well” that we will no longer feel the pain of our existence. We live as broken people in a broken world. There is more than enough pain and despair for everyone, everyday We couldn’t outrun it if we tried.  We don’t need to invite it in, feed it supper, and give it a bed, nor do we need to lock the doors and windows against happiness or wellness in fear of our becoming too healthy. Ha! What a concept. I can only wish. 

Have a wonderful day.