The Master's Artist

Manifesto

It’s Good Friday and it’s taken me a few years of soul searching and digging deep to find anything remotely good about it. I’ve gone back and forth through a wilderness of faith crisis restlessly trying to understand what it all means, why I should continue to follow this path? It would be so much easier to walk away. How I long to unshackle myself from two thousand years of tradition and argument, of abuse of power, of unloveliness.

Words

Guys. I'm sleep deprived and frazzled. My baby son is teething, and I'm in the thick of assignments for a course I'm doing. So I hope this little video will suffice as my post this week. I think it's a wee lesson in how important it is to choose our words wisely to maximise their effect.

See you again in a fortnight.

 

  

 

Rest for the soul

I’m working on a short film this week and I love getting to be with other actors and spend time on a film set. You could say I was as happy as a kid in muck. Inevitably, when actors get together we end up talking about work we have done, experiences we’ve had with other directors.

At the wall

 We went out for a walk today. I bundled the children up in their warm coats, put a blanket round the baby and headed out into the bright cold. We took our usual route; up the hill, past our friend’s house and round the corner past the house with the boat in the front garden. Sometimes we climb a fence in to the field behind the houses and wander around the ruined chapel or go into the woods. But we had the buggy with us today so we just wandered round the houses down to the wall overlooking the sea.

Consider the daffodils...

The seasons are shifting. It’s been a long, hard winter. We’ve kept our heads down, wrapped our arms around ourselves, holding ourselves in, protecting our vital organs from the cold. It’s been dark. We’ve strained for every bit of light we can find and held on to it tight. We’re emerging now though, tentatively feeling our way out of the damp, undergrowth and reaching up to the sky.

The Kingdom, the Power and the Glory are Yours, now and forever, amen.

At the end of the day, it doesn’t belong to us.

This gift we have, to write, to sing, to dance, to act, to create in whatever form, this gift is not our own. It is not our property to squander, it is not our talent to exploit.

Deliver us from evil...

You could say I hit the big time early on in my acting career when I landed a regular role in one of the most watched soaps on British TV.  There’s nothing freakier than being given the ratings every week and being told that millions of people have watched you in their living rooms. British soaps aren’t like American ones; there’s none of the soft focus and glamour (no one ever suggested I do anything with my monobrow for example!), they’re gritty, edgy and, some would say, depressing in their depiction of humanity. But it means that the characters are accessible to the average viewer and therefore people really feel like they know you.

I’ll never forget attending a church in London and a woman I’d never met before recognized me from the TV and came over to talk to me. She congratulated me on my success in the show. Then her face clouded.

‘It must be so difficult for you. Living and working in that world,’ she said.

A bit taken aback, and unsure if she meant the fictional world of the show or a preconceived notion of the notorious world of the entertainment industry, I faltered and said that I wasn’t really finding it that difficult. I started to tell her all about the wonderful, hard working and generous people with whom I worked, the talent of the crew, the blessing of being able to work at something I loved, but she looked instantly disapproving.

‘I’m sorry,’ she said, interrupting me ‘I thought you were a Christian.’ And she walked away.

There are schools of thought that followers of Christ should either avoid certain aspects of life and society because of the perceived evils connected to them or that we should infiltrate all areas of society in order to bring about its redemption and salvation.

I’m afraid I don’t settle comfortably into either of these groups.

There is evil everywhere, there is corruption and vice and immorality in every area of work. And I mean every area of work. It’s just that most primary school teachers, office workers, waiters don’t make the front pages of tabloids with their bad stuff. I used to say that it was probably harder for a Christian to work with integrity in the banking sector than the entertainment industry!

I also don’t see myself as an undercover special Christian agent out to convert everyone I meet to Christianity. Nor do I see it as my responsibility to set myself up as the poster child for ‘Christians in the Arts’ – been there, done that and felt the fall out when I was no longer famous enough to be useful for that agenda.

When we are called to create, to make art in whatever medium, we make it from where we are. We reflect our environment, respond to it, comment on it. We point to its beauty and brokenness. We look at the dark side of life and we cry out, ‘deliver us from evil’ and then we get on with brushing away our tears and working to reveal the Kingdom, which was there all along hidden in the debris of messy lives.

If we avoid going to those places where we think we see more darkness than light sometimes, then our faith is nothing but an escapist fantasy with no real hope for anyone. If we see everything as broken and in need of Christians to make it all ok, then we put ourselves on God’s throne and underestimate the gentleness of the Divine, who dwells in the broken places, even those places where evil resides.

Well may we pray ‘deliver us from evil’ but if God is in those places with us, then we have nothing to fear.

Melanie Clark Pullen is an actress and writer living in Ireland. She likes this quote by Oscar Wilde; “We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at stars.”

And lead us not into temptation...

  It's the end of the year, and we're on the cusp of the new one with all the plans, dreams and resolutions that come with it. January the first rolls around and within ten minutes we run up against the first temptation to renege on our well meant promises. At the beginning of every new year I make promises to eat better, exercise more and live more intentionally and at the end of every year I look back at the litany of failure in my wake.

I think Jesus knew first hand what it was like to be led into the wilderness to be tempted and he wouldn't wish it on anyone. He was tempted to depend on himself rather than trust in God for his basic needs, to goad God into dramatic action,thus saving his reputation, with an act of self sabotage and to glorify himself rather than God. As artists, we can probably closely relate to all these temptations as we attempt to live and work in sometimes toxic environments where competition is fierce and drama is the order of the day.

We don't like to think that God intentionally leads us into places that will tempt us to be other than faithful disciples but we are told in Matthew's gospel that it was the Spirit who led Jesus into the wilderness for that exact purpose. It's painful but neccessary work on the path to spiritual maturity and in including this phrase in the prayer, I think Jesus was acknowledging this.

Tonight I sat with my father in law, a very wise and Godly man, and talked about the coming year as I come off maternity leave and begin to look for work again. We discussed my various options and he asked me what he could be praying for. I listed off some concrete concerns and needs that I felt were vital but as I have sat down to write this piece I realised I didn't ask him to pray for the most important thing; that I would not be led into the temptation of thinking it's all about me.

Jesus was tempted to consider himself of greater importance than the path he was called to walk, the Kingdom he was bound to instigate. If, as artists, we have chosen to follow God, then all we do, be it writing, painting, acting, composing, becomes an act of worship. The greatest temptation is to believe that we, as creators, and the art we create are more important than the Creator. But we are called to 'seek first the Kingdom', to allow it to break into every part of our lives and infuse our work with its beauty.

In a culture which values the independence, significance and celebrity of the individual, an artist who follows the way of Christ could well find that the world becomes a wilderness of temptation. Well may we pray for the Lord not to lead us into that desert but suffice to know that angels await to minister to us when we overcome.

Melanie Clark Pullen is an actress and writer living in Ireland with her husband Simon Maxwell and their two small children. She and Simon wish everyone God's richest blessings for 2011.

 

 

Forgive us our sins, as we forgive those who sin against us...

I heard it said recently that ‘unforgiveness is a poison we take, hoping someone else will die.’ It hit me like a slap in the face. As an actor I deal with rejection on a regular basis. As an aspiring writer, it’s only a matter of time before I’m receiving rejection letters in the post as well. It struck me, hearing that quote, that I have a habit of hanging on to those rejections, hoarding them up, and using them as the tipple of choice at my pity parties.

Give us this day our daily bread...

Well, it seems the proverbial has well and truly hit the fan over here in Ireland. We’re experiencing the lowest temperatures on record, snow all over the place which we’re not used to and therefore unable to cope with, and our government has accepted an €85 billion bailout from the European Central Bank and the International Monetary Fund. As we await a budget next week that intends to cut €6 billion from our country’s expenditure, there are more than a few people who are losing sleep about the immediate future.