The Artist is Present

by Stephen Perrault

OVERLOOKED by most in the razzamatazz of the Big Picture is a string of compelling, inviting—if we let them—minute pictures—none of them minor. There are no ordinary moments, no ordinary hours, no ordinary days. The space between two stars is as wondrous as the sparkling lights. The silence between musical notes can bring as much awe as the melody. Every moment is an opportunity for awareness. The more mere moments are engaged by perceptive minds, the more awe-inspiring life is discovered to be.

The ordinary is where the extraordinary is found.

The current unordinary moment found me on an April morning, 2003, standing silent and still, looking out the open window of my art studio. I was listening to the enjoyable, non-judicial commentary of the goldfinches in my backyard as they fed on a sack of thistle seed that swayed on a low branch of a sugar maple tree. I was the grateful beneficiary of this daily and always ineffable flittering and chirping. The birds came and went, and their untroubled minds came and went with them.

Paying attention to the present, I felt a sense of the sacred. The creatures of nature are more in touch with the universe than humans ever will be. Their lives are a nonstop connection to, and processing of, the world around them. Not a single day is ever botched.

My friends the goldfinches could never be anything except true to themselves, and they made no exceptions to the rule of saying yes to the moment. It was as if they knew there were no other options. This was clarity of living. They didn’t stress-eat, ruminating over the neighbor’s cat.

I glanced at the wall clock. It was time. I moved across my studio toward my paint-smudged radio, brushing the trailing ends of hanging cobwebs from the cathedral ceiling off my forehead. The swatting motion of my hand reminded me of a beloved uncle, my mother’s younger brother, who lived with my grandparents. His signature stylized “sign of the cross” looked like he was slapping himself.

I scanned the paint-splattered walls of my austere studio. The forms and colors of spattered paint reflected no ability or proficiency. It was not art. The walls could be art if the intention was art-making and the context was art-viewing. There was no intention. No context. The walls just happened to be in the way of the flying paint—splatter-making.

Intention and context. This is where meaning is found. Having it or not having it is like the difference between talking to yourself and saying a prayer.

At home with silence—always good company, but admittedly out of fashion these days—I seldom used the radio. If I did it was to listen to classical music notes and the spaces between them. Silence was an active ingredient in life for me. A prescription for the insignificant rash of worldly noise. Substantial daily doses were necessary. Like an ointment with vitamin B5 for a rash, you just rub it on. The effect is soothing.

I was now breaking the great silence of my space to listen to a popular syndicated talk show. A bishop was scheduled to be on the program. I did not expect anything out of the ordinary. These men were the custodians of safeguards. They sang with the same voice. But I was curious. I wanted to hear the tenor of the tune.

When I listen to bishops, I inevitably think of sixteenth-century structures with terracotta rooftops in the shadow of towering church domes. I would hear stone and oxidized copper talking.

Polite and personalizing, the bishop addressed each of the issue-specific and historically controversial issues by stating the first name of the interviewer, pacing himself, and moving on with the historical answers the faithful are accustomed to hearing. He was not just rubber-stamping church ideology, he was imprinting branded morality. The overarching theme was one of control.

His words were soft-spoken—and inflexibly harsh. He was not hoping to influence the listener, he was dispensing imperatives. As I listened, I asked myself if it was the role of religion to compel morality or promote a person’s own discernment of moral reasoning? I believe it is the latter.

What I was hearing reminded me of The Outer Limits, my favorite science fiction television program of the sixties. With an out-of-focus image on the screen, a voice with an eerie sound would command the listener at the opening of each episode, “Do not attempt to adjust your television set … We are controlling transmission.” I was a young kid in the sixties; I believed “they” were in control. I obeyed. I was faithful because I was fearful. I did not touch the television knob.

Faithful. A definition? “Adhering firmly, worthy of belief, valid, not deviating from correctness.”

Seemingly at home under fire, the bishop could immediately flip to the correct response page in a mental manual of theologically correct responses for whatever question was asked. Careful and cautious in his choice of each word, he was not talking about love, he was talking about a particular religion. A religion—like most—concerned with particulars. He was talking about hereditary doctrinal declarations. He was articulating in the present an authoritative, unassailable voice of the past. Many organized faiths attempt to map out the terrain of unchartable spiritual territory and then plant a flag on the unknowable nature of things and declare it a blueprint for life.

He was speaking the “Truth.” What is the truth? A collection of ideas you believe in. Truth changes—it is only a matter of time.

I had tried to follow such a blueprint when I was younger. As I grew older, the visual aids, tools of the trade, tables, chairs, and kneelers became irrelevant. An armchair architect, I modified the blueprint to make it more down-to-earth and less thematic. The result was a Zen-like minimalism with a personalized worldview.

In responding to each question, the bishop spoke in a steady, modulated manner—like a person fighting a hangover while maintaining good manners. It seemed to me he had so strongly identified with a role he had become it. Common people don’t talk that way. But the ego does not want to be common. It abhors being ordinary.

If you stripped away the mandatory pleasantries of the bishop’s public manner, the common denominator of his answers was sex, and the math was simple.

Birth control + Abortion + Condoms + Pre-Marital Sex + Post-Marital Sex + Celibacy + Ordination of Women + Pedophilia + Bisexuality + Homosexuality + Metrosexuality + Sexagenariansexuality = Sexuality is Widespread.

Sexuality. A definition? “The unadulterated condition of being sensual … suggestive … desirous”—suspicious adjectives historically kept by religions at arm’s distance. Keep that hand away.

How did this attitude evolve in human history? When did sex become unsexy—but still necessary? How did it come to be an infection?

When the bishop was pushed for clarity, the definitive, and therefore divisive, declarations were issued with conviction. The bishop stated slowly, steadily, and unsparingly, that a person could not be in a state of “full communion” with the Church if he or she believed this or that, voted this way or that, was this or that, had done this or that.

“Both Saint Augustine and Saint Aquinas said a fetus did not become a person until forty to eighty days after conception,” the interviewer commented.

“The position of the Church is clear nonetheless,” the bishop responded.

“We’ll be right back after a break. Stay with us.”

The bishop talked as if morality was something physically solid—like something from a line of consumer goods from a company in which loyalty was mandatory. The bishop was on a perch proclaiming judgments. He would not be successful working as a cruise ship director.

Religion judges us more severely than God ever would, I thought as I blended titanium white and mars black acrylic paint to produce a desired, pleasing shade of spiritual gray. Yes, gray is a spiritual color because it is free of associations. Red is blood. Blue is Massachusetts.

I pondered if there were more than a handful of people out there who, if the meaning of “full communion” was wholly understood, could declare her or himself with confidence to be in this “full” state. How would you know if you had arrived there?

I had known a priest, a seminary professor of mine, Father Razzi, affectionately called “Papa” by the seminary community, who probably would have fit the mold of the bishop’s prescribed state, but Papa had a love of watching boxing on ESPN, which the Church has proclaimed immoral—boxing, not ESPN. Thus that probably drained some of his “fullness.” Nevertheless, he was my best guess.

Admittedly unenlightened on the current complete requirements for “full communion,” I tried to place myself on a self-invented Kinsey Scale of Communion. It was a scale from zero to six, zero being “empty communion” and six being “full communion.”

An individual’s stance on the “sex issues” was essential.

I was a big zero. Becoming a zero does not happen overnight. It requires a retrospective of one’s “working” habits. I didn’t know anyone currently alive who was a six.

To be in full communion means you are behaving and thinking as you are told. Children are in full communion with their parents when they do and say what their parents require of them while still in the fold. Parents have the power and are in control. Children need supervision. Thinking adults need their own vision. Unearthing your personal truth can be sticky if you are glued to grounding ideologies—secular, political, or religious. Ideologies do not encourage you to be engaged in the discovery process.

In the four Gospels—the four that passed muster and made it into the Bible—Jesus was asked by a disciple in three of these four, “What must I do to inherit eternal life?” Jesus’ answer in all three was simple and the same: “Love your neighbor.”

Three words. Period. Less is more.

All descriptions and definitions of religion are inadequate, but it is safe to say that religion secularizes spirituality by making it worldly. The ways of the world are under the auspices of the ego. Control, planning, conforming. What begins in shared values of people evolves into an interest in paper—administration. A regular, spiritual way of life that goes public becomes a life of regulations. What’s that? Great idea! Let’s organize. Volunteers?

I turned off the radio with one hand and brushed the accumulated dust off the top of it with the other. I had heard nothing helpful in the bishop’s answers. I did not perceive God in the hanging vibrations his words created in my studio.

Where is God? Whose God you ask? Good question. My God resides outside the box. Humans have not and cannot build structures to fit the space that surrounds the box because this space is a cosmos. Emancipation and freedom are found in the expanse.

God dwells in the breathing spaces between spoken words; within the visual spaces between written words. God is in the intervals between thoughts. God is in the pauses.

Stealing a glance out my window, I watched the willows sway in the gentle breeze. Their flexible response contrasted with my neighbor’s rigid flagpole.

The goldfinches ended their chatter and scattered from a perceived danger. I watched them with child-like awe as they magically disappeared with twirling short spurts up into the clear manganese sky.

I thought to myself how the extraordinary goldfinches had a relevant and spiritually helpful message for anyone tuned into their winged and wondrous wavelength. I simply listened. No voices were pushing or pulling me, yet I felt something had taken hold of me and was spiriting me away while still grounded on this earth.

Nature speaks with a voice heard by those willing to listen. Nature is another name for God. I hope the goldfinches are aware that they know the true nature of nature better than human beings.

“Does the Divine, the Ultimate, the One, the Supreme, the Ideal—God, Father, Allah, Tao, to name a few terms utilized—really care whether a person is in full communion, half communion, or no communion with this communion or that? This religion or that?” I asked the universe. I thought not in the answering silence. Silence always has the last word.

Intention and context. This is where meaning is found. Be honorable to yourself. This is where your truth is found. Be ordinary. By being such, your “ordinary” makes you extraordinary because you are being natural.

I looked at the writing on the walls—the splattered paint around my easel. I was surrounded by the colors of children’s toys. Magical.

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Author Bio:

Stephen Perrault Perrault is a full time artist who wins prestigious awards, receives positive reviews of his work in national publications, holds solo exhibitions, and has his work included in many shows and collections. His background in art, philosophy, theology and psychology creates a mysterious connection and deep appreciation of the incongruous aspects of life. For ten years, working as a psychotherapist, he shared the lives of many, including the incarcerated. For thirteen years Perrault lived in the context of seminary and religious life. Both these ways of life provided the artist with the opportunity to experience environments of architecture with light and darkness, containment and expansion. Find out more about Mr. Perrault at www.sjperrault.com

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