Feast or Fallow

In the harvest feast or the fallow ground,
My certain hope is in Jesus found
My lot, my cup, my portion sure
Whatever comes, we shall endure.

- "In Feast or Fallow" by Sandra McCracken

Last week, I attended the launch for Art House Dallas, a ministry derived from Charlie Peacock and Andi Ashworth's hospitality to artists in Nashville. As we lunched on BBQ and sweet tea, writers, musicians, and visual artists gathered to meet and discover.

I'm pretty sure fairies danced through the air.

After lunch, Charlie invited musicians, producers, and critics onstage to share their experience of Art House Nashville. With their busy schedules and traveling, why did they return to this place? Why did they make room?

Sandra McCracken (fellow tea lover, I've recently discovered) said (something to the effect) that Art House helps give musicians a framework of living for both working in obscurity and working in fame. It is a place where artists gather but where they aren't defined entirely by their art. The community reminds them of that.

Our society, still in the haze of Romantic fallout, views artists as "other-than," as specially inspired, bohemian, eccentric. Often, we gladly take up this mantle. And often, aspects may fit. We may have different schedules than, say, a lawyer. We don't mind using the descriptor "eccentric" as an excuse to wear or do what we want.

But in all honestly, this mantle also burdens our spirituality. Happily defined by our art, it engulfs us so that our identity, rather than in Christ (a common identity to all believers), becomes in art. Our hope, our persona, our self-presentation, even our view of our meaning in the world is caught up by the success of our art. More than this, we put ourselves into our work. Tread lightly, that's me on the page.

(In truth, this differs little from lawyers and accountants and salespeople who intertwine their identity with their work, except that we can claim to be misunderstood by the masses.)

So how do I do this? How do I be artist--completely, fully artist, a writer not just at the keyboard but as a traverse the grocery store or wash dishes or plant tomatoes--and more than artist? I suspect this gets down to the difference between roles and identity. I am also wife, daughter, sister, mother. I am piano and flute teacher, musician, homemaker. These roles move in flux within themselves and in relationship to my other roles. And in many ways, my relationships with others (family members, friends, church, publishers) determine and influence these roles.

In all of these roles, I am never less than me. That seems a strange thing to say, but all of these roles flesh out my identity and gives me the opportunity to develop my identity. More than that, God speaks and acts in and through all of these roles in his silence and in his roar.

And in this, I discover I can endure during feast and fallow. I can be more than artist, and thrive as artist, even when the rejections flow or circumstances rob me of time to write or writer's block threatens to dismantle my story. I'm free to fully present myself in art, and indeed even discover more about me, God, and the world in art, while not being defined by my art. I endure because God endures. He is "sovereign-sufferer who withstands" (Kevin Vanhoozer, Remythologizing Theology, p. 466), who provides a template for work in obscurity and work in fame. He is outside of me and the story of my life and so can see me--and my circumstances and roles--as a meaningful whole in ways my limited POV cannot afford.

Just as we understand the essence of a character by their actions and stories in a story, so do others know us by the way we play our roles in feast or fallow.

Heather A. Goodman stumbles across herself in her stories, even when she doesn't want to.