I’m sure you’ve seen the protest signs.
“End the War on Beauty !”
If you’re like me, you’ve probably raised your own revolutionary fist in the face of the ubiquitous ugliness eating the world alive. And maybe you, like me, have suspicions as to why :
Maybe it’s the fallout of the enlightenment, maybe it’s the ever inverting value systems of profit driven “craftsmanship”, or maybe it’s the Devil and his cronies trying to suck the Life and connection out of everything Good.
This essay isn’t about that, about saving the world, I mean.
It’s about trying to not burn out while making something Beautiful in the world.
In but not of, sorta thing.
This essay is about healing and curing and renewing — the necessary ingredients of every artist.
And as with most things that interest me, or most people, to be honest, it makes most sense to tell it as a story. Data won’t heal you, cold facts don’t offer renewal.
Love might.
So here’s about twelve lessons, loosely bundled, from my own stupid life of trying to figure out how to be an artist in a world that’s become anaphylactic to Beauty.
1. Beauty Is Received
The Greeks said there were nine muses, divine voices whispering in your head and plucking at your heart. They were, these muses, daughters of Zeus and Mnemosyne, and each of them embodied a different artistic discipline. If you were going to write some epic poetry, well, you’d thank Calliope for the inspiration. If you were going to dance, you’d have to tip your hat to Terpsichore in gratitude. If you were, for example, going to write a meandering twelve point essay on creativity, well, you’d be plum out of luck — even the gods can’t help you there.
The idea was that Beauty and inspiration came from outside the person; that it was a gift from beyond the natural and not simply the by product of relentless human effort ( ouch, hustle culture ).
And that makes sense to me.
When I first quit my job to start this whole art and writing thing, some ten-ish years ago, I picked up bike courier work — mostly so my pockets were filled with more than a few coins and buttons and a matchstick. To make ends meet I would grind out art commissions; and I didn’t, couldn’t say no to anything.
You want a caricature of your aunt’s dead cat ? Sure.
You want a tattoo design of Tom Hank’s skateboarding ? Coming right up.
You need an album cover for your rock opera reimagining St. Augustine as a star lord ? you got it, my man.
And I did it all — paying my rent $50 at a time. Yeah, I did’t charge much at first, my plan was the Walmart strategy : sell much more for much less.
There’d be weeks on end of me drawing, creating, investigating, trying to come up with proper symbols, for as long as the sun shined. Twelve hours a day, easy.
And by the end, there was nothing left.
My creativity was sapped, and no matter how hard I worked, I couldn’t zap life into my weary soul and exhausted hands. Show me a sunset, give me a kiss, it didn’t matter. The organs for consuming Beauty had atrophied.
Why ?
Because I created with myself as source and all my creative illustrations left me barren. Those pieces came from me, and, as it turns out, I am a finite resource. True creativity, the infinite resource, has an eternal grounding — and any sort of creative work separated from that source destroys, rather than heals.
Beauty must be received eucharistically. With thanksgiving, I mean, and with proper direction. Divine Love is the center of Beauty, and we receive it as we grow in our union with God.
2. Beauty as Revelation, Not Innovation
I was sold the catchphrases that were supposed to save me, the ones that told me if I was ever going to be successful, especially as an artist or writer, I’d need to carve out some niche, innovate in some over-saturated market, invent the latest and greatest.
I ate it up, too.
I got fat on brand analysis and lethargic on demarcating where my unique artistic ethos could be expressed along intersecting domains of skill. I’m not in the top 5% of artists, not in the top 6% of writers, and not in the top 7% of charm. So to be the kind of once-in-a-lifetime-extraordinary success in those areas was essentially an impossibility.
But you know what ? At that weird and stupid little space where art and writing and charm criss-cross, there was a lot less competition. You wrap a bit of philosophy and theology and obsession with story around that, and you have your recipe for making it big.
That didn’t happen. The making it big, I mean.
And I wondered where I messed up the formula.
Answer ?
Right at the beginning.
Art and creativity don’t, at least primarily, abide by market analysis or recipes for success or well articulated niche plans.
Artists are, I had to learn, co-workers with God and His creative enterprise. That means we don’t invent Beauty, or innovate the next iteration of it. It means we are revelators of the Divine Reality already saturating the cosmos. Artists part the veil, or we offer new eyes, or some other visual metaphor, all in the hopes to show the mysteries of God.
3. Creativity as Participation
Like I said, my creativity is a finite resource; part and parcel of being human — everything I have and everything I am is in short supply.
A few years back I was putting together some visual suite for an online seminary; some 45 classes, each needing a unique icon that represented the theological core of the course. The first dozen were pretty simple : you choose the easiest classes, like a Gospel or some topical study, you drink a coffee and think about the main themes, and then you try to come up with some simple symbol that can act as an artistic invitation.
So if it was the Gospel of John, you would want to pull on the Divine Identity of Jesus, and you could either go the historic route and draw a winged eagle, or you could depict particular miracles with Old Testament allusions.
But eventually all those bottom shelf, on the nose, iconic depictions are used up : anchors or doves or wounded hands or lanterns — and you need to start thinking outside the box.
I remember being however many weeks into the project staring at pieces of paper with scribbles and doodles on them, notes asking myself if a wizard is really the way to go for Ecclesiastes. And I would sit there for hours on end, bash bash bashing my head against the empty page, hoping some kind of inspiration would shake loose from the cobwebbed corners of my soul.
No such luck.
So I took a week off.
Everything was bending me out of shape, even the sing song voice of my better half, so I figured it was probably a me thing.
Every night that week I went for a walk down to the water to have a cigar and to pray. You know, to figure out the thing in me that was okay to grow progressively more irritated while accomplishing nothing.
The dark water waves sang their hymns to me every night and the wind whispered her ancient secrets in my ear and the bullfrogs chanted as swallows danced under moonlight.
And there you had it :
Divine Splendour suffuses all of Creation — and my job, my calling, as an artist, is to participate in the Masterpiece. All I had to do was slow down and shut up long enough to contemplate the wonder of God, and then, slowly, through scaled eyes and plugged ears, begin to perceive the Glory shining through.
It still took me ages to finish the project; deadlines were missed. But I got there in the end, and the path was wrought with a lot less anger and a lot more prayer, and I hope, the art with a lot more meaning.
All this to say, Creation is Sacramental.
These above points are rooted int the idea that Reality is Sacred and when we don’t live in that reality, our creative works become shallow, Sisyphean, and self-serving. If we don’t drink from the Divine Life, burnout and creative exhaustion is inevitable.
4. Flow as a Shadow
I remember when that book on flow came out — it had a blue cover and it talked about that state of optimal experience. I was in seminary at the time, hiding a smoking and drinking habit, wondering what the hell I was going to do with my life.
Flow was a gospel preached to me on almost every podcast ( there were a lot less of them back in 2009 ). The Flow evangelists told me that central to my meaning was creativity, and setting my life up around the entering in, and enjoying of, flow states. That would mean I could live more fully. Be a part of something bigger than myself.
And I mean, I was 5’10 and 145 pounds at the time, so, finding something bigger than me wasn’t too hard.
Flow states are when you forget that you exist. Time melts away, your grilled cheese gets cold, and you suddenly snap back into reality some five hours later, ravenous like only lunatics ( or geniuses ) can be. You become so consumed with the making and the doing that every other present interruption dulls into silence.
The psychologists who write about flow say that if you don’t have enough of these kinds of experiences, have enough transcendent moments, you’ll get burnt out, you’ll wriggle around in that void of meaninglessness, and you’ll try to chase external validation with your art.
Somebody, love me, please.
And so, I’d take a notebook and a pen and a pack of cigarettes, and I would try to write myself into the spirituality of flow, give myself a bit of meaning, earn a bit of love, one ecstatic experience at a time.
Didn’t work. Why ?
Answer :
Because it’s a shadow of that Divine Participation.
I mean, sure it worked for a bit; but there was no ground beneath my feet, no aim for my writing. Flow was a kind of artistic masturbation, done by me, for me, without any patient or sacrificial other-love.
5. More than Material
Our culture places a premium on productivity; the more you produce the better you are, as a person, I mean. That premium betrays a hierarchy of values devoid of any real metaphysical foundation. It’s what drives the souvenir market, late night talk shows, and our mass produced phones : each product is the potential for profit.
And when all of culture is dress in this very ill-fitting ethos, when every person is presented with material goods to consume and create, well, roll out the red carpet for burnout. Because, even though we are human, finite resources, turns out we’re also more than physical.
Who knew.
Spiritual nourishment is needed when it comes to creating and making. It’s why those hand made ceramic mugs you have sing when you pour coffee into them, and it’s why your factory made Ikea cups ring that metallic hollow : there is no human or spiritual connection between maker and made.
What I mean is, Beauty is Incarnational.
We’ll hit the attention economy a bit harder later on — but for now, it’s easy to watch “creators” churn out content in some desperate pursuit of adulation or sales without that undergirding and ever sustaining why.
And it exists in the Christian arts world, too.
I know. I’ve been there.
6. Holy Stillness as Food for the Creative Life
I currently have headphones in. Wired ones, mind you. Bluetooth ? Couldn’t be me.
And I have had headphones in for about my whole adult life. At the bank they’d be in while I was excelling spreadsheets and minuting meetings and hiding, muted, on long status calls.
When I rode the subway to work, when I delivered Red Curry on my bicycle, when I walked to the coffee shop, music and noise would reverberate off my ear drums and play a little beat of distraction for my whole body to enjoy.
I did it, still do it, to drown out the distracting noise of junkies fighting on street corners, of honks and alarms, of conversations, of everything. That’s what mattered, some peace and quiet, so I could create.
The thing is, our culture is so damn loud, so damn distracting, all the lines got blurred. I was always consuming, always collecting, always listening to something as some way to not listen to something else.
My prayer time became app based, bible reading was audio, too; and my study was YouTube lectures. Always listening, always thinking, always fidgeting.
Like I said before, it revealed more about me than I ever wanted to admit.
Pascal said something about that, I think. That almost all of humanity’s problems can be summed up by the fact a man can’t sit alone, quiet, in a dark room for an hour.
It just meant that when it got quiet, real quiet, quiet enough for me to hear my own soul, I didn’t like what it had to say. What it was telling me about a need to be seen, a need to become, a need to disappear, a need to neglect.
Contemplation is food for the creative life.
And contemplation, or hesychia, depends on a silence and a solitude. I’d wager that was what Pascal was on about.
Hesychia is a prayerful silence in which a person communes with God. It is active and deloiberate, a way of gathering all those wandering and rogue parts of ourselves that flee from silence, a way of bringing them together in the heart to receive grace and illumination.
I guess what I am trying to say is :
If you can’t find peace in the quiet, you’re gonna burn out.
7. Only God Creates From Nothing
The gift of creating ex nihilo is not a human one.
Make of this what you will.
8. The Ascetic Life
Someone told me that my life, even when we were scraping by, under the poverty line, that we, in the modern world were better off than any number of French Aristocrats up to the 17th century. Wealthier in meat and cheese and ease of travel and convenience of clothing or entertainment.
And sure, he was probably right, but that fact didn’t pay the bills.
It did get me thinking though, that for me, even in that belt tightening time, I was still prone to excess. Indulgence. Movies or games or scrolling or anything.
And you don’t need me to tell you, but that’s our culture.
Gluttonous.
The traditional church had a solution to all this overconsumption, a way to keep the gourmandizing to a minimum :
Fast.
Say no with a greater yes.
When it comes to art and creating and pushing against burnout an ascetic life starts to make a ton of sense.
If art is revelation, and it is, and if we are trying to reveal Eternity, and we are, then we can only show what we have seen. And that’s what Jesus was on about when He was talking about the pure in heart — they get to see God.
Let me say it another way :
Do you think you can paint or write or rhyme the Divine Mysteries without a true and vibrant spirituality ?
Answer : no.
And therein lies the ascetic demands placed upon us.
A life of fasting so as to feast.
A secret, between you and me, is that as I am writing this second book, I have put certain rules of sleeping and eating in place — kinds that, genuinely, suck, all in the hopes that my book won’t. What I mean is, I am fasting from kinds of rest and recuperation that we tend to think lead to excellence, and I am trusting the opposite. Taking a page out of Rad, Shack, and Benny’s book, only eating veggies and bulking up.
It has been very hard.
9. The Attention Economy
There’s this theory they use at the Big Dog streaming platforms :
Second Screen Power.
Whatever show or movie or reality trash they decide to create and push out has to be so…psychologically engaging that people will watch it, at least a little bit, while they doomscroll on their phones.
Our age is perpetually distracted; so much so that when we say, watch a movie, we need to have memes or tweets flashing past our eyes at the same time.
Two screens going at once.
Imagine trying to find stillness in this world. Trying to ignore the pings and dings and little red numbers counting up up up promising to give us a bit of needed value.
Creating requires deep work — you gotta read books, you gotta think big thoughts, you gotta synthesize ideas and images and concepts — and to do deep work, well, we need to minimize the distractions. The amount of times I’ll be seated at my desk drawing, or in my chair reading, only to be dragged away, out of the joy of making, by a melodious chime, is seemingly infinite. As infinite as an algorithm.
It is a superpower to say no. It’s one I don’t have, which is why I downgraded to a dumbphone. Dumbphones are kryptonite to algorithms.
How does this, the distraction, lead to burnout you ask ?
Shallow, meaningless, engagement drains our energy without the accompanying satisfaction for our souls. Divided attention, between screens, or the constant consumption of emotionally and psychologically driven reels or shorts increases our stress and decreases our capacity for insight.
I was out for coffee over the weekend with a friend, a connection from the Inkwell artistic community, and she was saying that learning to say no to the rapid fire proclamations of every pain, every joy, every celebration, and every horror on social media has allowed her to say yes to the very real people in her community.
And that means the inverse is true :
If you say yes to the siren call of social media, and you give your empathy and your joy out to 30 second reels, for hours a day, you have to say no to all the people around you; your very real, very present, very human community.
Both drain, but only one refreshes.
10. Daydreaming is Synthesis
I don’t have some big proof for this, just more fuel for the fire already burning.
Boredom is vital.
I don’t listen to music in the shower anymore, I stand there in the hot steam and let my mind wander. When I go for walks, I don’t use headphones, I let the symphony of the leaves and the chorus of traffic pull my imagination all kinds of places. My dumbphone is so dumb that I am left to pay attention to everything in the world around me — and as time goes on, you start to see things more clearly.
You see them naked and unashamed.
What I mean is, you start to see things how they were intended to be seen.
They say that our brain’s default mode is synthesis. As in, when we don’t actively consume, our brain kicks into what it does best : put things together and find patterns. That’s why eureka moments happen in the shower, and why breakthroughs happen walking through the woods, and why, for me, I could draw some silly little pictures after sitting down at the pier and watching the lake lap up the shore.
A quiet and unfocused brain does all kinds of subconscious activity.
But we think we need to work it to death. And that’s why we burn out.
11. Work Saints
Max Weber coined the term Protestant Work Ethic. At least, I am pretty sure he did. That idea tied together an oh-so-diligent labour output with religious virtue. You’re as holy as your productivity, kinda thing.
Yes, that’s a problem, but we face a bigger one in our modern, free-spoken, secular society :
We don’t have a religion or a standard of virtue to tie all that diligent fecundity to. Shame, really. That means instead of the religious identity of sainthood, we’re left with workaholism, or, identity by productivity.
Work Saints.
You know these people, maybe you are these people.
You ask them, “how are you doing ?”
and they always say :
“Busy, busy, busy.”
Like it’s a virtue. Like we should be jealous. Like maybe, one day, we can be as exhausted and productive as them.
Like we should feel bad for being human and needing rest and slow and laughter and sleep and hugs and kisses.
Toxic productivity.
I reject the protestant work ethic. You saw that coming, I assume.
You see, I think the majority of the Christian life can be encapsulated by being. That is, who we are in God. Maturity in this sense is not output or products or efficiency; maturity is transformation.
You don’t need to carve a name out for yourself, or produce yourself into the limelight. You can just be. Take the time to become a saint, offer yourself and your art, and let the Good Lord multiply it as He sees fit.
We are, after all, just trying to cooperate with His creative work.
Again, if memory serves, rejecting this synergistic relationship is what the Desert Fathers called demonic. Their view was actions not done according to God was the essence of evil activity. Whew.
12. Theosis vs Self Care
Guys, I can’t go three thumb flicks before I stumble upon some reel that’s telling me how to fix my tight hip flexors, drain my lymph, hack my sleep schedule, or put in boundaries to guard my peace.
I hate it.
I love it.
I need it ?
People are selling me health; trying to go viral and make their $0.37 for every thousand views by offering me another product. The pseudo gnostic secret to save you.
I don’t really know how else to talk about the commodification and proliferation of self-care, except for it seems to put a price tag on recalibrating from producer to be-er.
And that, for sure, I hate/
The real path to healing, to creative renewal, to energetic making is theosis.
Your creative work, and mine, are a participation in God’s own Creative Life.
Theosis is just what the Fathers called union and transformation; like when Athanasius said “God became man so that man might become god.”
And so, as we participate in God’s creative life, from this perspective of wonder and holy imagination, fuelled by prayer and a Eucharistic receiving, we begin to become creative. We heal ourselves, body and soul, as we approach our work as an act of worship and as an offering.
We hear that a lot.
But I do mean it.
Cut out all the other bullshit. Or, if that offends you, the Pauline skubala.
Our craft is for Him, not for self.
For His fame and Kingdom, not ours.
All things are as loss, rubbish, just that we might have the joy of knowing Christ our Lord.
And it’s why the calling is so enormous — the hidden life of it so valuable. And from here, from this enormous and hidden calling, we cease “manufacturing” art and we start “growing” it. We cease to be factories and worker drones, and we become gardens and saints.
We must be unified with God if we are ever going to see Beauty and reveal Beauty with our craft. Beauty, if you didn’t know, is the manifestation of the Goodness and the Truth of God. And that means, if you want to be an artist, and if you want to heal the broken creative impulse within you :
You must be re-united, and participate in, both Truth and Goodness.
After all, that is what resurrection is all about.
Well, Well, Well…
I guess I write all of this to say :
If you want to Feast on Beauty you must Fast From Noise.
I was stuck, for about a decade, in this brutal cycles of burnout. I had a spiritualized vision of a worker saint; I bastardized what Paul said about working harder than all of them and ground myself into the dust trying to help others.
I thought it gave me an identity.
I thought my value was derived from what I could give, what I could do, what I could offer. And it was the same, in lots of ways, when it came to all this, the art and writing.
I thought success was in production.
And so it was easy to run myself ragged, drain myself, all in the hopes of giving someone, offering someone, a bit of Truth or Goodness or Beauty that might help them. But I had it all backwards.
The thing about being human, you see, is I am not all knowing, not all powerful, and I don’t take up much space, on the grand scheme of things. I can’t save people. And no matter how hard I worked, that remained true.
Over the last six or seven years, I have done my best to progressively and actively try to get my life in the right order. God first, family second, craft after that ( and a host of other things ).
To be honest, it still makes such little sense to me, but then, I am very young, on the grand scheme of things. And I guess, things don’t need to make sense to me for them to be true. Me being abundantly stupid.
I’ve been exhausted a lot in the last few years, but never burnt out, and not really tapped creatively. And I guess it’s because I keep trying to pray first, and second, and third, and then, after that, see the world with God’s eyes.
And then, it’s all I can do to keep myself from writing or drawing.
Learn from my mistakes.
My bits of selfishness and silliness and trying to push myself into the center.
Not worth it.
When you do that, the whole cosmos works against you, as it should.
Every Day Saints is a torchlight searching for the quiet miracles, the beautifully human stories and ideas that exist all around us. And it is a place to dialogue, not Holy Ground, but still a place of gathering.
I’ve been reading a book on musicianship called Effortless Mastery, and he talks about these spiritual concepts as well, giving up yourself and letting the gods takeover. You blended this concept with proper theology, and that was the missing piece for me on this, thank you for this.
This life giving and spirit filled message has arrived just in time for a much needed soul exhale. Beautiful. Thank you.