When one imagines prayer, one has an image of kneeling in the pews at Mass, hands clasped, still and silent. It isn’t easy for everyone to be in such stillness. Although it is an excellent discipline, it also has a monopoly over our imagination of the pious life. One must remember one of the overlooked purposes of the Mass, as contained within the word “Mass” itself. The word “Mass” comes from the Latin missa, meaning ‘dismissal.’ So the deacon says at the end: ‘Ite, missa est’ or ‘Go forth! The Mass is ended :)’ In a strange way, the purpose of the Mass is to depart from the Mass, to go out into the world with the renewed love of God we have received into our hearts.
So here we are, back in the world. There are many things we could do with our freedom. Some socialize, some do charitable works, many spend time with their families. But another type of person, with a certain type of active disposition, lurks in the shadows. We call this person “artist.” This person isn’t special, although he likes to think he is. He’s more like a spaz. He has ants in his pants. He’s desparate to form a corpus outside his own God-given one in which to achieve some illusion of immortality. He will never be satisfied. Deep down, he knows he cannot rest until he rests in God. He must transmute these spastic behaviors into prayer. And sitting still, with hands clasped, isn’t going to cut it.
This artist-in-question knows there’s an order to the Scriptures and the Christian truth that goes far beyond his own chaotic life. So he turns towards them in hopes of bringing order and truth into his life. But merely reading Scripture isn’t enough. He needs to explore in order to understand. He creates some abstract paintings about the Book Of Exodus using only oval shapes in colors of olive green, maroon, and sea foam. He has a bizarre dream about Christ’s cursing of the fig tree, and upon waking immediately goes to his piano to work it out in sonatic expositions and developments. He begins a poem about Mary, but doesn’t finish it.
He’s unsure if there’s any point to this, if it’s silly or opaque or bourgeois. He asks himself, am I grasping at straws? How did I end up here, like this? However, the more he creates and explores in the things of God, he notices something. All notions of a public audience, besides God and his angels, are becoming less and less relevant. He is creating less for himself and his imaginary public audience, and more for the Mystery itself as it continues to unfold. And as this occurs, his corpus of artworks become more free, more human-like than he’s ever been himself. He realizes that audience is the decay of personality. A man’s childhood is a growing of life and personality proportional to how unaware he is of what he can offer to the world. A man’s growth slows down once he’s come up with something to sell, because his attention is thenceforth focused on growing the effectiveness of the product rather than the personhood of himself. And soon, his growth ceases altogether as his reality becomes a fixed demarcation of himself, his product, and everything else.
But the Christian religion taught him that these demarcations are illusory, and that growth doesn’t cease at the end of puberty, or at 25 when scientists claim the “brain stops growing.” We are born anew and made into children daily. The things of this world may give us fuzzy feelings of childhood nostalgia, but they cannot make us like children again. It is with this revelation that, finally, God the Father came into the artist’s sight. Or shall I say, the child’s sight. It was then that he could pray, to speak to his Father in Heaven, to be with Him, whether he is painting little pictures for Him or not.
God the Father embraces his child briefly, but soon lets him go and tells him there is something greater to give, greater than his artistic sub-creations: himself. And the Father told him: there are times when you will think I am not with you, because I must let you go so you can learn to walk on your own — but I will always be with you. And so, like a parent sending their child out to their first day of kindergarten, or out to college, so God sent him into the world. Ite, missa est.
This is what the artist prayed would happen to him one day, as he finished up his poem for Mary.