Mail me comments, suggestions, warnings, flames, whatever One mission made up of artists was called The Alabaster Jar. Those who labored out of guilt or to satisfy some inner Pharaoh asked what all the "entertainment" had to do with mission and the liberation movement. "After all, we, too, could do a little writing or painting if we didn't have the poor so much with us." . While it is true that not many artists have made profound statements on social issues, the reason may be that we have not allowed them to live in the midst of the people of the God of the freedom movement. It is so much easier to believe in what one can see, and anyway, who really can know what an artist does with all his or her time? Moreover, artists forsake themselves for fear they are betraying the community. I have a friend, a Photographer, who says that sometimes when she has spent long hours in the darkroom she is seized with a "panicky feeling, "What if there is no one there when I open the door?" I have kindred thoughts when I have done a piece of writing over a long period of time. I open my eyes and observe that life has gone on without me, and there is the dread feeling that never again will I be able to be "in on" things.
By its very name, The Alabaster jar mission group told us it is all right to follow call even when one is full of self-doubt and is troubled about wasting a "onetime life." They reminded us that we did not have to turn out to be another Picasso or Solzhenitsyn-that we were not called to be successful. Rather we were called to be faithful and to share in the being of the Creator.
No one can know in advance how one will be used, or when, or what one's life will count for in the long run. The young Pablo Casals, while pouring his life energy into years of practice on the cello, could not guess that when Franco came to power, he would stop playing for three years, and that the silence would be heard throughout Spain as if the streets were full of demonstrators. But then, not every artist is called to take up a social or political cause. When the need for bread is met we discover that we have other hungers, and none so deep as the hunger to be understood. The artist helps us to interpret, understand and communicate feeling. When the artist is successful we are led into communion with ourselves and with the world, and the solitary work becomes a communal work. For want of this we walk on parched land.
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