Our friend Ellen is an artist. It is not simply that she paints with oils and creates works of beauty that connect to people in a variety of personal ways. And it’s not only that she can take a piece of furniture, peel back the layers of time, and with the tip of a paint brush, using the moods of nature, create for this piece new raiment that radiates an intuitive awe for the earth. Before any of this, Ellen is an artist because she inhabits the soul of an artist.

The world is represented to her through eyes that see the colours, the contours, the simple wonder of the surface of things. Her way is not the attempt at seeing through properties to any supposed substance of things. Instead, as is the way of artists, her delight is in what is given, in the mystery of what is simply there. Her art comes through delight in playing on these boundaries.

So we listened as she talked about her quandary of wanting the time to create art and still make a living. She described how she had just taken a short orientation and safety course that allowed her to join a union and get on a list to install insulation. She sorted through it out loud, weighing and balancing all relevant forces, finally concluding that there comes a time when you just have to “trust the art”.

Ellen never speaks in declarations, and this wasn’t one; but her phrase had the clarity and force of a good echoing pronouncement and it stuck.

For me, “trust the art” is first of all a fresh way to check inventory. It is a way to begin-to-continue sweeping away any layers of neglect, negative self-interest, and envy; all things that kill creative instinct. “Trust the art” is a way to give myself permission to exercise, test, fail and sometimes succeed at the impulse that burns deeper than others.

For each of us, whatever our vocation, our desire, whatever we come with, the question of “trusting the art” is, at bottom, about trusting the gift given. It is about using the gift and the attendant skills and talent that millions have, but using it in the way that only you can.

Because it is formed in the crucible of all your experiences, thoughts, and emotions, it is your unique gift. A gift, by virtue of the giver, that also recognizes and learns from the gifts and skills of others and creates new things through integrating the past work of others.

“Trusting the art” is also about putting yourself out there in the knowledge that in being true to your gift, you honour the giver and add to the stock of goodness in the world. At the same time, putting yourself out there will mean risking misunderstanding, even unintentionally inviting derision.

Trusting is never easy. It has to do with repeatedly overcoming fear, insecurity, even self-contempt, through great love.

In the end we are either moving toward or edging away from trust. The disorienting moment that trust-the-art brings will always beguile us into falling back to counterfeit ways of control. Trust never becomes static. We bounce between bad faith and good, between security and trust. But the motion itself allows for possibility.

Ellen is “trusting the art”. Her own work has and is being recognized and she occasionally earns enough to make a living. This is a happy by-product of “trust the art”–not given to all. While desiring the “by-product” is right and good, the centre-point not the payoff. I suspect if it is, no payoff is ever enough.

“Trusting the art” is finally about an orientation to life. While the erecting of personal securities finally leave us as hollow as the walls, trust-the-art gives us the only access we have to the great mysteries of origin and things seemingly infinite. “Trust the art” is deep wisdom.

I remember a basketball game my son played in. It seemed to me that he worked hard. Made some plays. He ran the length of the court, got to some loose balls, passed to breaking team mates, but rarely did he get a return pass. Rarer still, did he get an original pass.

I recall my hurt for him, my anger at the other boys, and my embarrassment as I sat among the other parents; and I recall my mix of shame and annoyance at feeling any of this at a simple, “for fun league”, basketball game.

The eyes of parents are filtered. When I talked to him afterwards he said that he was disappointed in his play, but felt no animosity towards the other players. He chalked it up to a bad game and figured to do better next time. I on the other hand, having endured the gravity of a bad hour and a half, felt wrung out.

I think I see more clearly now. Not that I’ve eclipsed agonizing or even being petty about events like this, only that I’m more apt to listen to the experience. And not get played so easily.

The first word of St. Benedict’s Rule is “listen”. In Latin, obsculta. It’s where we get our word obedience. Here’s Benedict’s first line: “Listen carefully, my child, to my instructions, and attend to them with the ear of your heart.”

The idea is to let nothing go by, no event, no moment, from wondrous to depressive, without listening and learning from its interior.

Make friends with every mess in your life, not to control but to grow and live. Allow yourself to be nourished by mystery and possibility.

So when we find ourselves in the waste spaces of life, even there, where it feels as though nothing is left for us, we might at least remember to wait and not flail, hope and not hate.

Life is not the domination of a series of events. Life is carefully attending to our days learning to listen with the ear of our heart.

I hugged Jeanette in the funeral home hallway. She said, “God gives and takes away, but it’s so very hard.” Her husband Doug was in the bathroom. I asked her how he was, she said, “Not too bad, he knows something’s happened, but he says outrageous things sometimes.” He came out and I said, “Hi Doug.” Doug said, “Hi Hansome”, and I remembered Jeanette’s words. Jeanette then introduced me to the man I had worked beside at Hope Mission for over ten years. Doug and I shook hands.

I made my way to a chapel pew and waited through organ and piano solos for the service to start. I recognized some Enya.

Why did I feel so uncomfortable while the pastor gave his sermon? It was, after all, Doug and Janet Green’s pastor and he was speaking at the funeral of their forty-some year old son Donald.

For all the pastor’s references to time in this life being fleeting, it sure wasn’t when he got hold of it. No bombast, just slow steady sermonizing.

And then I sat there asking myself where my gracelessness came from? But I couldn’t help it. The principle text was the Lazarus story…and how Christ said, he was dead…yet he lives. So the refrain was that Don was dead, yet he lives. It’s a comforting Christian belief. But the repetition that was employed reads almost like an evasion of death, no real allowance or time to grieve through it.

So the well-meaning pastor spoke theology. Dragged out proof texts about everlasting life. About how to get. And how important it is to think about it on a day like this. And there were life-is-precious proof texts, life-is-fragile proof texts…and always the hanging explication that a time like this should remind us of life’s precious and fragile nature etc. All beautiful texts handled pedantically.

The best moment in the sermon was while the pastor paraphrased a Psalm. “The grass is green but it withers and dies.”, at which time Doug piped up and said, “Hey, my name is Green!” I’m sure he would have said more except for the embarrassed shushes.

No embarrassment necessary. However I imagine the pastor was relieved to hear the shushes. You can’t have old men with Alzheimer’s taking coherent runs at a good Plymouth Brethren sermon. Not when the stakes are this high and you’ve got a chapel full of pagans. But then I imagine him reprimanding himself for playing fast and loose with the Psalm. There’s no “green” in it, as far as I recall, just “grass”.

But thank God for genuine human moments. A truer form of theology. The family spoke of Don’s life, of their memories. Spoke wonderfully, beautifully, and we were overcome.

There was mercy here. It came shining through the stories from Don’s siblings. It came through the description of Don’s “grumpy love”, as he sat by his younger brother helping him break an addiction. It came through his sister’s description of Don’s unassailable curiosity.

Two brothers and a sister told us of a life lived in quiet wonder, a dozen global trips. We heard of a man who read deep into history, especially Celtic and Druid history. They told us of his ploughing through a couple degrees, then learning French, and Portuguese, and traveling some more. And then, winding up working for Alberta Employment and Human Resources, finding ways to help everyday workers. Judging from the number of colleagues there, Don Green made a mark.

Donny, as his mom called him, was no dissembler, he believed with a passion. But my suspicion is that he didn’t believe the way the pastor wanted us to believe he believed. Not that Don didn’t believe what he wrote and signed in his Gideon New Testament that the pastor kept holding up. Not at all. By accounts, he believed passionately, just differently.

While he might have been a bit embarrassed at times for the scores of friends co-workers who packed the chapel, he would, I think, have loved his mother’s prayer that asked the right question. Janet prayed: “Why God, did you take him? And yet, we bless your name. Still, why do you give and take away?” Tomorrow will bring its own questions. Today was the day for this question.