Josef Pieper says in one of my favorite little books that “…music, the fine arts, poetry – anything that festively raises up human existence and thereby constitutes its true riches – all derive their life from a hidden root, and this root is contemplation which is turned toward God and the world so as to affirm them.” 

The last few days my brother and I have been having a conversation about the relationship between work and play, and I couldn’t help but be drawn back again in my mind to Pieper’s little book “Only the Lover Sings”. In it he offers a recovery of the word leisure, saying it is not a passive concept, but rather a posture of deep engagement. Leisure takes work, but it isn’t work, at least we work at it for very different reasons that the ones that keep us at our day jobs. Our jobs have a pragmatic end in mind, for instance, we push this button so we get a paycheck. But leisure is not about practical ends, it’s not about utility, it’s about protecting and cultivating the things that make us whole and human.  

Pieper in the quote above calls these things humanity’s “true riches”, and he says the way to get these true riches is by contemplation of God and the Cosmos God has created. I’m calling this kind of contemplation a posture. Posture comes from the same root as position or pose – it means something like the direction that you are facing, the orientation of your whole self. Contrast that with practices, which are things we do like push a button or walk the dog, cook a meal or do the laundry.  

Now, I’m not saying that postures are good and practices are bad. But it is true certain practices help to cultivate a certain posture. We had long meals together in my family growing up. When you’d sit down for dinner at night, you knew you’d be there two or three hours just visiting. That was a practice that shaped a posture in me, so that now, as an adult, I think of meals, if they’re done right, as occasions not just to mechanically acquire sustenance, but as occasions for a kind of timelessness within time to face each other around a table. Yes, of course, we’d cover the practicality of eating food, but the meal extended far beyond utility as we’d linger in conversation. 

I remember someone saying once that when John the Baptist says, “Behold, the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world,” that the word behold means more than biological seeing; it carries within it the sense of spiritual perception. To behold is not merely to see something, but to see into it. In George Macdonald’s “The Princess and Curdie” The little boy Curdie kills a pigeon, and then is overcome by remorse. 

“Curdie’s heart began to grow very large in his bosom. What could it mean? It was nothing but a pigeon, and why should he not kill a pigeon? But the fact was that not till this very moment had he ever known what a pigeon was.” 

Curdie takes the pigeon to a sort of fairy grandmother, The Mistress of the Silver Moon, and repents. The pigeon had been one of her special creatures. The Grandmother heals the stricken bird, and forgives Curdie for carelessly shooting it with an arrow saying, 

“Therefore I say for you that when you shot that arrow you did not know what a pigeon is. Now that you do know, you are sorry. It is very dangerous to do things you don’t know about.”

Curdie had seen pigeons, but he had never beheld what a pigeon really is. John the Baptist beheld Jesus, and invites us to truly behold Jesus too, like Peter did when he said, “you are the Messiah, the holy one of God.”  

Pieper says that cultivating a posture of beholding is necessary if we are to pick up on humanity’s ‘true riches’. And he suggests that certain practices can get you there, and others will make it harder to get there. The last five years, I’ve learned that my practice of complaining costs me the sensitivity needed to maintain a posture of gratitude toward life. If family meals were a helpful practice in our family growing up, complaining was an itch I learned to enjoy scratching, but that has created a callousness toward joy that God is just recently healing in me. The practice of ingratitude produces the same gross pleasure and the same delay of healing as picking at a scab or scratching a rash. Similarly, Ephesians 4:17-24 talks about the practice of sensuality costing people their sensitivity. Some practices shape in us a posture of numbness, insensitivity, and in turn we can slowly forfeit our humanity. Other practices cultivate in us a posture that is open and sensitive to goodness, truth, and beauty. 

Songwriting is, for me, a gift and a practice that cultivates beholding and protects those sensitivities Pieper calls “true riches”.  Still, as an artist, I have found myself over the years constantly striving to justify (to myself mostly) the value of what I understand my calling to be. It’s true that making a living as a singer/songwriter is next to impossible. Even harder, since music at this point in history is an essentially free commodity. It costs somewhere between 15 to 20K for me to make an album, which will be available on Spotify for free. So how to make sense of the pursuit? It doesn’t add up, does it?  

It really doesn’t unless the pursuit is grounded in a system of value that is not of this world. Like Pieper says, music is among those things that “[raise] up human existence and thereby [constitute] its true riches”. But the true riches are stored up in heaven, where no thief can steal and no moth or rust can destroy. The calling to create art may participate in temporal economies, but it does not originate from within them, nor does it play by the same rules. The reason for this is, I believe, that it is a calling to open up an alternate vista – a view onto a kingdom whose life-blood is not industry, utility, or market viability. 

Andy Crouch makes this point in his essay “The Gospel” in the book “For the beauty of the Church”, asking, 

“Who will be the people who will champion that which is not useful? 

Ours is the age of the economist and the evolutionary biologist, each of whom have gotten very busy explaining why everything we thought was particularly human is actually just useful. Religion turns out to be economically and evolutionarily useful. Charity and generosity – useful. Sex – useful, merely useful… Once you have lost the idea that the world is a gift… all any of it is, is useful. And then, eventually, this is all you can make of human beings – useful.” 

Crouch ends his essay saying that the calling of not just the Christian artist, but of the Christian is to “rekindle our capacity to be beautifully unuseful to God.” 

I pencilled in a margin note the last time I read Crouch’s essay to remind myself of what I am called to as an artists and a follower of Jesus, 

“Part of the responsibility of an artist is to disagree with the world’s ways of attributing value, to defy that value system, and to cultivate a system (now I might say posture) that is truly in harmony with God’s way of understanding what is valuable.”  

What practices do we engage in, and what postures are being formed in us? How can we cultivate sensitivity to the ways of God? And how can we make manifest in this world God’s beautifully contrary economy? I think these questions have something to do with Jesus’s prayer to his Father and ours: “Thy Kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.” 

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