March 5th, 2024
I first encountered art, and the possibilities of what art can do to glorify God, through the Church. I was a drama nerd at my Jesuit high school and sang in my college’s liturgical choir, two spaces where the power of love through art were a daily practice.
Then I graduated. Then I began working in the secular world. Some Catholic artists find ways to carve out careers in dedicated spaces of faith, but for most of us, we’re operating within a firm creative economy of pluralism – often openly hostile to organized religion.
I’m an opera singer and stand-up comedian in Berlin, Germany. This city has a habit of shunning nominal Christianity in any form. Many of my colleagues have very good, compelling reasons for why they are suspicious of the Church. There is a lot of spiritual trauma around me, and sensitivity to that is paramount for co-creation. But another way of thinking about this is to acknowledge that I create within a desert of religious curiosity, a perpetual Lent, when it comes to nominally bringing my faith into my work on stage.
What then? My calling as a Catholic artist is to truly live out, in actions, what I believe. I seek to encounter my colleagues and their experiences with kindness. I direct creation towards my values, which always end up being shared values: truth, beauty, authenticity, self-gift, and love. I allow myself to be delighted when I find Christ’s love in unexpected places and through unexpected people.
To be a Catholic artist is to pull out the glory of the Benevolent Creator from the in-between spaces of secular creation. This doesn’t usually involve saying the word God. But it does involve a whole lot of truth, beauty, and goodness.
Creating in a secular space is similar to creating in Lent. Easter is coming. We know it is coming. The seeds are planted. Precious love will win. And with that knowledge, we give and receive our gifts as much as we can, right where we are.