We are living in an age when words have become cheap and beauty eludes us.
We’ve been in this place myriad times before in human history. But it just seems different now.
While I long for people whose words are vessels of truth and grace, I hear only the silence.
And while I search for reliable witnesses to reveal the beauty which fills this world, I too often meet people whose despair has caused them to store their brushes or shutter their lens.
And yet, we need these voices with the right words, these artists with their visions of beauty, more than we’ve ever needed them before.
In recent months, I have noticed artists of all types–writers and poets and teachers and painters and photographers–speak about giving up their work. “It’s just too much,” they say, “offering up words and beauty and no one seems to notice or care.”
Even in the best times, but certainly now, artists know the temptation to believe that all the real decisions and great deeds are being done by people with “real” authority in the places of power, and not by ordinary artists in the midst of ordinary life.
Scratching out words on paper, spreading paint on a canvas, capturing the splendor of a sunset with your camera seem futile in a world that prefers to seek answers in power and might rather than truth and beauty. Is that why the voices have gone silent? Why beauty lies hidden?
But we’ve been here before.
In fact, Günter Glass wrote his novel The Meeting in Telgte about this very thing.
Glass sets his novel in the first part of the seventeenth century, just after the Thirty Years War in Germany. As with all wars, the slaughter was horrendous. The whole country had become a battlefield and people wondered whether life would ever be life again.
The story centers on two meetings. The first took place in Münster, the “important” city where all of the diplomats and military leaders gathered to discern how life would go an after all of that devastation and destruction.
But Glass imagines a second meeting happening at the same time. He envisions all the famous poets and writers of the age gathering not in the city of power, but rather in the small town of Telgte not too far outside of Münster. Through this construct, Glass sets up a great tension. While the great politicians and military leaders are working out the terms of peace, the artists convene to engage several questions:
Can art rise above the clamor of the nations?
Can truth transcend the compromises and mutual suspicions and power plays of the “deciders” in history?
Can words be found that might give despairing humanity a little courage to begin again?
At first, things went well. The gathered artists wrote beautiful essays and poems. But then something happens that sends them into despair, and into silence. They realize that they are themselves not removed from the chaos, but rather that they are part of it. And they begin to ask the question I hear too many asking today: “Why are we even here?”
Glass puts the answer to that question in the voice of a musician at the table, Heinrich Schütz. He said to the artists that you are here “to wrest from the helplessness…a faint ‘and yet.'”
And yet.
To wrest from the helplessness a feeble yet unmistakable “nevertheless.”
The world is waiting for your “and yet.”
Do you wonder what your “and yet” may be?
Perhaps it’s a photo of the sun dipping below the Blue Ridge Mountains and setting the sky on fire and breaking open the hearts of those with eyes to see.
Or maybe it’s an essay in which you reveal the ways your heart is alive by pointing us to the beauty or sorrow or ache or splendor of the world that we miss until you name it for us.
Or it could be a painting that comes from somewhere inside you in response to what you have seen, and as you paint, you weep as you imagine how what you have seen might reshape the world for someone who is waiting for just the thing you are creating that speaks your feeble but persistent “and yet.”
Whatever you have that bears truth and points to beauty, that is your offering to heal the world.
The world may not realize that yet.
But I want you to know that I know that what the world is waiting for is you. It waits for you to show up this day, in this moment, to offer your unmistakable, unique “And yet….”
Jamie
Thanks for writing this. I have definitely been feeling a certain futility in my writing lately,so it’s nice to get this kind of encouragement to keep going.
John P. Leggett
Thanks, Jamie. As one who has been both encouraged and challenged by your writing, I’m glad you plan to keep doing it. Thanks for reading as well.
Karen Blalock
I needed to hear this today. Thank you.
John P. Leggett
Glad you found it helpful, Karen. Thanks for reading and for taking the time to comment.
Ken Rummer
Wise, memorable, and hopeful…Thanks, John!
John P. Leggett
Thanks so much, Ken. As one who values your writing and wisdom, I can’t think of a nicer thing to hear from you. Keep writing!
Matt Hamblen
Very inspiring and very much needed. On my hikes in Shenandoah, I expect to run into you someday….
Best, Matt
John P. Leggett
Thanks, Matt. I appreciate your kindness. And as for the hike…I’ll probably walk right past you while watching for bears, so be sure to holler at me! Blessings!