The good, from Church member and National-Book-Award nominee Martine Leavitt (from an article that used to be on her website before she took it down):
My faith, my family and my friends make me happy. I’ll tell you: life makes me happy. But writing is my way of being alive. It is my way of being in the world, my way of experiencing it and understanding it. . . . [I have] a sense of obligation to develop a gift that the universe has given me. That way, I am able to give it my heart and my time, without feeling that I am taking anything away from my family.
The bad, from BYU dance professor Pat Debenham (and apologies to my friends who are tired of me sharing
this article wherever I go):
We must be careful not to infer that our artistic gift, though divinely given, is a divine appointment. When we suggest that we are called or in some way appointed to use our gift, we precariously position ourselves as official representatives of God. In so doing we are presumptuous, I believe, and in danger of blasphemy. Of course we feel a responsibility to magnify our gift, but to represent it to either the public or ourselves as a calling possibly perverts the original intent and certainly distorts the source of the gift. A Church calling is directly from God as an appointment with all the pertinent rights and blessings bestowed upon us, but viewing our gift as a calling is a self-appointment.
Just as we can be seduced into believing that our gift is our calling, we can also be lured into thinking that our proclivities are equivalent to gifts given to us by the Holy Ghost or by the Spirit of God. When we interpret scriptural and prophetic references about gifts to mean our God-given proclivities, we confuse our talent with the actual gifts that God enumerates in the scriptures. . . . Nowhere do [the scriptures] mention the gift of dance, song, music, or painting. Nor do [they] mention the gift for building or troubleshooting machines, the gift of public speaking, the gift of medicine, or the myriad of other gifts that we often refer to. . . . What we label this proclivity that Heavenly Father has bestowed upon us can produce an exaggerated sense of what our abilities are for. . . .
We need to consider our professional involvement in the arts as a job. Pure, simple, and pointed. It is a job. Our work in our art form is a vehicle that allows us to accomplish other things in life. It is not . . . a "calling." As much as I, the artist, the choreographer, the dancer-performer, have in the past reveled in perhaps even been self-congratulatory for my status in life, . . . discipline-related talents are not the spiritual gifts that God bestows upon us to assist in the redemption of mankind.
The ugly, from C.S. Lewis in
The Great Divorce, wherein a heavenly spirit and a ghost from hell are talking:
“You’re forgetting,” said the Spirit. “That was not how you began. Light itself was your first love: you loved to paint only as a means of telling about light.”
“Oh, that’s ages ago,” said the Ghost. “One grows out of that. Of course, you haven’t seen my later works. One becomes more and more interested in paint for its own sake.”
“One does, indeed. I also have had to recover from that. It was all a snare. Ink and catgut and paint were necessary down there, but they are also dangerous stimulants. Every poet and musician and artist, but for Grace, is drawn away from the love of the thing he tells, to love of the telling till, down in Deep Hell, they cannot be interested in God at all but only in what they say about Him. For it doesn’t stop at being interested in paint, you know. They sink lower—becoming interested in their own personalities and then in nothing but their own reputations.”
That's all I have to say about that for now.
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