Artists and Ministers

by: Brian Ross

The artist and minister are brothers in this world- at least cousins. They are people who don't work, not really. Work is supposed to get your fingernails dirty, callous your hands, break your back.  At a minimum real work causes headaches, and stress, with bosses and deadlines and potential layoffs.  Work is about creating things.  Things that are useful.  Things that anyone would use- not just flakes and eccentrics and crazy fundamentalists and nice old ladies.  Work produces things that people with mortgages and children and college degrees and planned vacations pick up at Lowes, or Target, or bid for on e-bay.  Work cranks out stuff like that.  Artists and ministers are teenagers who have not grown-up.  Those who want to spend all of their lives in high-school theatre, or the easy A art class, or at Pine Grove Church Camp.  They are those poor souls who don't realize that everyone else has grown into adults and went to work making things, producing real things.  Flakes and preachers are socially or emotionally retarded. . . maybe both.  But in a nice way. 
   
If your child says they want to be artist or minister you smile.  In a playful sing-songy voice you toss out that required parental phrase.  That's nice Johnny, you can be whatever you want to be, until he is 14 or 15.  Then you go to the next phrase found in the good American Parenting Handbook section 6- Well, that's nice, and it would be a great hobby… or Well, its good to pray, but you can serve God by giving to missionaries or one of the other canned verses that are available in the child-raising manual.  If the adolescent is in danger of crossing the Rubicon from pubescent idea to squandering his working adult years, action needs taken!  Stern, direct, adult words are needed: Well, there will be bills to pay, Or, you like it when we go to the shore each year, don't you do?  If that's all you do, you wont be able to do that, or if you are really desperate, People don't like artists until their dead, and people don't like ministers until they retire or transfer. Artists and ministers are interesting for creative type junior highers, or for young teens that want to belong to something bigger- but not for real life.  These well-meaning pursuits are not for a grown son or daughter that you would be proud of and tell the guys at work about.  Who wants to admit that the future of your DNA has enrolled in a Fine Arts program, or is taking seminary classes?  Then everyone will be certain that your child is sexually frustrated, dangerous, or never got past their acne or learned how to interact with good-looking people and to be a real person.  At least a person that is normal.  You know, the type who actually work 

  
There are a few people who like artists and ministers.  They might be the strange bird that inherited wealth from someone who really worked, and so they have nothing better to do than read art criticism and try to use a foreign, nasally dialect with their friends.  They don't discuss vacations, mind you, but holidays drinking insider wine and making fun of Republicans with the aesthetic elite in New York.  They like to smoke a lot, read conspiracy books, and live in dark, aging mansions guarded by permanently shut drapes.  And of course some people like ministers.  But they tend to have addictive personalities- just getting over alcohol, or and addiction to pornography, or recovering from bankruptcy.  They smile and are cheery at bad times.  They send cards in the mail with manufactured Jesus loves you stickers when your Dad entered hospice care for his lung cancer.  They talk really loud, in the office snack room about their political and social views, which you are quite certain, would be fitting in 12 the century Arabia.  Yes, these are the people that like artists and ministers.</p>
  
Artists and ministers know differently though.  They know that they are not escaping reality and life and the problems and pains of the world.  No, they are diving into them.  They roll around in them until they smell like them, until their clothes are stained with them, until they get a bit of them stuck in their teeth.  They realize that have not received a pass from human problems, no, they are building their home right in the middle of them.  They realize that they are not exempt from working in the world- they are trying to be productive in the parts of the world everyone else would like to forget.  Who else spends hours entering into the deep of their own pain, exploring the scars and amputations from death scented relationships?  Who else will sit in the despair, awkwardly listening to a Mom and Dad who's four year old was recently hit by a car?  Who else searches for the perfect phrase to describe the sense of meaninglessness found in so many of the human years?  Who else sits alone all week with the words of the Creator that stick like a dagger in their own mis-understood soul?  Who else pours their personal worth into a canvass, only to have most people call it childish, simple, garbage?  Who else pours their personal story into a 30-minute speech, only to have people fall asleep and say Honestly, it didn't do anything for me?

Artists and ministers know differently though.  They know they didn't choose this life.  Who would?  Each day is spent agonizing over problems, issues, and questions that most people, who do real work, only battle with at funerals and on Christmas Eve.  They suffer after listening to 2-minute stories of African suffering on NPR, which drag them into days and weeks of questioning and grappling.  They know that every day is a battle with the sentence of existence, of what it means to be alive and to be dead, of how to find some kind of worth in the midst of the killing and yelling and abusing that is these seventy odd years.  They know that they have to do this- they want to make money, and enjoy top 40 music, and watch reality shows, and buy cars that their neighbors would stop and ask questions about and would ask if they could take it for a spin.  But they cant.  They have won the lottery of bearing burdens.  They have no choice.  They have been chosen to crucify themselves, to walk through hell, to lie down and sleep in human misery, so that hopefully, others can find some handle to resurrect beauty out of it.  They have been chosen to deal with the extremes of life, to live a weekly, daily, hourly roller coaster- all the while others consider them to have taken the easy way out.  They are medics on the front lines, moving from amputation to tracheotomies to telling lies to ease the pain of the mortally wounded- all the while being accused of being cowards.  Their job includes daily visits with burn victims, with the paralyzed, with the slow death of the victims of war, while the others are free to go on leave and throw back a few stiff ones and enjoy a few laughs when the shooting stops. 
  
Artists and ministers know differently though.  They live with being compared to their colleagues who have made it, who the world awards with employee of the month ribbons.  The artists who seem more interested in corporate contracts, in pleasing the masses; the ministers who seem more driven by success, in tickling the ears.  These are the few who are admired, respected, the ones that all the poor-souled artists and ministers are encouraged by real people to follow.  Only they know they cant.  To go that way- to trade in their calling for this real work would be to betray the order, the truth behind all things, the only real work they have to offer the world.  Big Brother would win, human disease would flourish, hell would consume the earth.  Their would-be patrons and their parishioners laud the praises of their vocations turncoats, while the artist and minister live alone with the Source.  
  
The artist and the minister live in the intersection of life and death, truth and lies, meaning and emptiness, values and the market.  They do work.  Real work. But nobody knows.

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