an artist meets The Artist!

I had recently an embarrassingly obvious point pointed out to me - I hate that! I was whining about the ambiguous nature of my chosen subject of study, and this inappropriately wise person made the connection between art and creation. It is true, certainly, that I have been insisting on a certain clarity and concreteness from God which I instinctively do not expect from my own art.

Does God react to her own handiwork in the same manner us poor copyists do? You see, at a certain point, the artist is no longer in control. The art takes on its own character. It makes its own demands. It may not have power over the artist, but it within its own context, it has its own kind of power. The artist has a vision of the final piece, but this is reached through a conversation of sorts.

Is this the nature of free will? Not so much that free will is a gift from God as much as an acknowledgment by God that the art will have its say? The greater the art of course, the greater the risk of failure, but never will art simply be a translation of the will of the artist. Materials and circumstances, the thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to, will have a vote. This is the world as God has set it up, this his masterpiece! Could God have set up reality so that this was not so? I don't think so. Material is material (and in a certain way, spirit is material also...). As soon as pure will is projected into a real situation, reality will begin to shape that will. It is always a conversation.

Of course this is how love also works, in conversation. In a certain way the artist loves the art, in a more perfect way God loves her creation. But this love, this presence, is not a certain particularity. As much as some of us would prefer less an art as some demonstration of physics, with hard and certain rules. The problem I think is that God is a person, and made little persons like himself. A communion of persons, the traditional definition of the Trinity, always involves less certainty because there is more art.