An Artist’s Prayer for Community
"PENTECOST," by JOHN AUGUST SWANSON (2013)
One of the most confused desires that artists frequently experience is the desire for community.
On the one hand, they crave it. They crave the validation and the affirmation. They crave the sense of belonging that comes from finding one’s “people.” They crave the ability to lose themselves within a tightknit group of friends without “losing” themselves.
They crave it because that’s how God designed them.
On the other hand, they resist and reject community, alternately finding it wanting and suffocating. They wish to belong to a community but often struggle to define themselves over against the community—to be “better,” to be the “one,” the one who “makes it.”
It’s what I might call the Nietzschean impulse: the desire to be “admired and honored and loved,” as Karl Barth once put it, yet also to live “six thousand feet above time and man.”
Over the years, I’ve often heard artists confessing their struggle with loneliness, and it grieves me. It grieved me as a pastor and it grieves me still today.
If any friends are to be had, they often live far away, and no amount of digital intermediaries satisfy the longing for embodied friendship with kindred others.
The Greek playwright Euripedes once remarked that “one loyal friend is worth ten thousand relatives.” Similarly, St. John Cassian called the indissoluble bond between “soul friends” as “what is broken by no chances, what no interval of time or space can sever or destroy, and what even death itself cannot part.”
God of course has made us for this kind of friendship and our hearts are restless until we find it, to paraphrase Augustine.
So what do you do in the meanwhile—if you don’t have good artist friends? What do you do if you find yourself restless or frustrated with the community that you do have?
Amongst other things, you continue to bare your heart out to God in prayer. That’s certainly what the psalmists would encourage us to do, and it’s what I’ve attempted to give voice to in this prayer for community: a prayer of hope and surrender.
Christ himself, I believe, ceaselessly prays such a prayer for artists whom he cares for deeply, and I cannot imagine that we as the church would want to pray anything less.
