There are no unsacred places;
there are only sacred places
and desecrated places.
– from “How To Be a Poet” by Wendell Berry
I read this piece a couple of weeks ago and haven’t been able to get these lines out of my head. A few thoughts.
Berry captures a truth here that artists know instinctively. Inspiration, beauty, goodness, truth can be found anywhere if you know where or how to look. Artists have a unique gift of sensitivity. They sense the longings of the heart, the cries of the soul, the profound joys and deep miseries. They have been blessed (maybe cursed) with the eyes to see and the ears to hear.
Most of us miss it though. We skim along the surface barely getting wet. Artists dive in and come back up with a treasure. That’s not to say that non-artists are dull and shallow; they just miss things, often important things. It’s in the minuscule and mundane that the deep things of life often show forth. In the beat of a baby’s heart, the flit of an eyelid, an offhand slip of the tongue–something is revealed. The artist says, “Wait. Look and see.”
A kind of magic happens when something is seen for what it really is, and artists can’t help but show us what they’ve seen. The colors and textures, rhythms and harmonies, angles and aspects–they come to life. The trueness comes through. A sacredness even. Even as they squint through the dirty glass and even as they may stammer in the telling, they’ve captured something. Or maybe it’s captured them.
Artists, then, are truth-tellers. Whether they write or paint, sculpt or serenade–whatever their medium–they are truth-telling. They shed light where they have it. They catch a scrap, some grain of truth and wrestle with it. They work it over and over until it begins to shine a little. It may take just a few minutes or a whole lifetime; but that truth, that little beauty, that shade of goodness must–it must be shone to the world.
I reflect on Berry’s words as a writer myself and someone who cares very much about truth beauty, goodness, light–all manner of God really. I don’t think you can deal with these things and not bump into God, even if you don’t ever realize it as such.
I guess this is a different way of repeating the axiom “all truth is God’s truth” but have expanded it to include things like beauty and goodness. It’s all God’s, and he’s deeply involved.
I want to encourage us to have ears to hear and eyes to see wherever God may be working. And taking Jesus as our model, it’s often in unlikely places. May we be witnesses and truth-tellers (they are the same after all) in a world of fantasy and confusion.
“All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence you know.” – Ernest Hemingway
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