Lamentations of Jeremiah: A Letter From An Artist

 Dear Mrs. Nicolosi,

I recently watched your 19 April, 2012 address to the students of Franciscan University of Steubenville ("Beyond Just Beautiful Movies: Keynotes of Authentic Catholic Storytelling") on YouTube. I found myself saying, "Yes, YES" and "finally, someone is saying it!" throughout the talk. I was familiar with your writing and film reviews, and have quoted some of your insightful commentary on Catholic art and film making here, here, here, and here. I excitedly sent your talk to multiple friends too, sure they would appreciate it as much as I did. I was met with...crickets. 

I guess I came across your talk seeking some balm and respite after Nefarious came out. I saw it when it opened, and wrote my review (critique) here, which seemed to precede much of the "critical acclaim" in my Catholic circle. Though I'm not on social media anymore, a friend passed me your own critique of the film (which I think you posted on Facebook), and again, I took some solace that I wasn't as alone as I felt, that someone else gets it.

But this letter isn't about that particular film, or even film in general, but more a lament seeking encouragement from one right-brained Catholic artist to another. I've been a writer, poet, painter, etc (not professionally) as long as I can remember. In lieu of financial recompense, or maybe because I've never taken it to the next level, I try to instead give back to God and His people the creative talent I've been bequeathed as a drummer-boy offering. I've been published here, here, here, here, etc., but most mainstream Catholic sites won't publish me because what I write doesn't fit pre-set Catholic molds very well (As a friend and fellow writer recently said (someone pejoratively) to me, "you're too trad for the normies and too normie for the trads.")

I don't mean to "curse the day I was born" (Jer 20:14; Job 3:3), but being an artist and writer is as much cross as blessing. I think you may have written and/or spoken about the prophetic witness of the Catholic artists, but prophets were lonely, alienated people who "got it" surrounded by people who didn't. In some cases, they listen (Jonah 3:6); in most cases they don't. 

I'm forty three years old. In my twenties, as a new Catholic trying to put the "old man" to death,  I felt that the world was open before me: I chased the Holy Spirit wherever He led me without question; I fed the hungry and housed the homeless because Jesus told us to. I wept over my sins, and burned with zeal. In my thirties, now married with a family, I still wanted to serve the Lord and went where I felt He was calling me--from the Lion's Den of San Francisco Pride to witness to the gay community, to doing my best to spiritually monkey-wrench a Black Mass in Philadelphia, and hit the streets to evangelize publicly. I was more involved on social-media than I am now, and made some friends there who I stayed in touch with, thought most were just phantom-friends. I also wanted to make a name for myself.

Now, in my forties, I find myself slowing down, stabilizing and trying to plumb the depths of my own interior life with the Lord, and pulling back. I serve my community in more conventional ways, continue to write with the hopes it will lead others from darkness to light, and try to love well with all I've been given. But I've grown weary of the tribalism and group-think I see in online (and even real-life) Catholics--purity signaling over vax-status, liturgical wars, outrage-porn pedaling...majoring in the minors. I've grown weary with how Catholics stay ensconced in their like-minded safe spaces and camp out there. Heck, I've grown weary in everything from finding it harder to exercise to finding the motivation to write anymore. 

I've never really journaled--I've always written for an audience. It's a blessing and a curse, a cross...you try not to have what you write tainted or influenced by what you think people want to read...but that's probably why I don't make money from writing, either. You also try not to mind what people think, or get down when no one comments or seems to care...but you do mind, which shows that I haven't purged out those last vestiges of pride and vanity in my spiritual life yet.

In The Special Cross of The Artist, your interview with Angelus News, you note,

Dante puts the artist in purgatory, not hell, which is encouraging. I think he’s saying that artists are innately close to God because they’re going to suffer. They’re also going to have an innate humility, what John Paul II calls the “suffering of insufficiency.” Artists are given a divine vision that they can never quite reach. That suffering is sanctifying.

I found that accurate but not comforting. I feel like I've been a "suffering artist" (maybe that's a redundancy in terms) all my life, and it's like the conundrum Thomas a Kempis describes in Imitation of Christ,

"A fervent religious accepts all the things that are commanded him and does them well, but a negligent and lukewarm religious has trial upon trial, and suffers anguish from every side because he has no consolation within and is forbidden to seek it from without. The religious who does not live up to his rule exposes himself to dreadful ruin, and he who wishes to be more free and untrammeled will always be in trouble, for something or other will always displease him." (Chap 25)

This is what I feel like when I try to stop writing, to bury my talent once and for all, so I don't have to suffer anymore--instead, I suffer more! It becomes a "fire in my bones" (Jer 20:9) when I try to keep it in. I'm trapped...curses of curses! I suffer when I write, and I suffer when I try to stifle it. I go to Confession sometimes to confess that I hate who I am, how God made me, cursing the blessings He has entrusted me with. I hate my fellow man, because I seek in them what I should be seeking in Him--affirmation, encouragement, the ability to be myself and trust without fear of abandonment. I feel like no one understands me, and like Job and Jeremiah, curse the day I was born. The loneliness is palpable. 

I used to see beauty all around me when I was young, to the point where I felt my heart would burst. Now, the world we live in is a lonely place indeed--people on their phones all the time instead of talking, mindlessly and ravenously consuming content, reducing beauty and wonder to pragmatism and marketing and being content with it. A friend is offering to publish some of my essays in a book--but why publish when no one has an attention span or even reads anymore! It's all so disheartening.

I'm trying to carve out beauty when I see it, and pull people onto the baroque as they are drowning, serve the needy and speak truth to those hungry to it. But I'm human, too. I feel discouraged, disenchanted, unappreciated, tired. The Christian life is WORK. And we have to keep laboring for the Kingdom.

But as you said in your talk, when you were speaking about Act One and the 'critical mass' needed to reshape the culture--"where are the troops?" Why do I feel like an island? Do people even know beauty when they see it today--and have I become so jaded that I can't even see it myself? I mean, I do--I see it in the conversion of others to the to the Truth of the Gospel, in the snapshots of grace, in radical authenticity that doesn't pander to low-brow Catholic appetites for outrage and complaining and their like-minded bubbles of insularity. There's a lot of work to do, and the work is out there...where are the workers?  

Gosh, I realize this is quite a self-pitying rant disguised as a righteous lament. I just struggle to know what to do--keep writing and continue to suffer? Stop creating and suffer more? Try to contort my voice into the pre-packaged Catholic boxes for publication to a wider audience? Keep pouring myself out via my blog, despite how pointless it feels? Keep my expectations low? I know I can't be the only one out there feeling like this--but it sure feels like it!

I know you probably have a lot of scripts and things on your desk to read, but I just wanted to thank you for the things you write and say, and solicit any words of advice you may have for me. I don't want to harden my heart or take things offline, bury the talent, so to speak. But what a thankless industry the creative arts is. I guess all we can do in the end is shoulder our cross, do the work entrusted to us, and offer up the suffering for the good of souls who need a light in their darkness.