{"id":137,"date":"2008-01-22T02:19:25","date_gmt":"2008-01-22T09:19:25","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/?p=137"},"modified":"2008-01-22T02:19:25","modified_gmt":"2008-01-22T09:19:25","slug":"thoughts-on-arts-and-the-spirit-of-the-lord","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/thoughts-on-arts-and-the-spirit-of-the-lord\/","title":{"rendered":"Thoughts on Arts and the Spirit of the Lord"},"content":{"rendered":"

My friend Andy wrote on her blog<\/a> about this really powerful and influential talk by Boyd K. Packer<\/a> about Mormonism and the arts.\u00a0 I haven’t read this talk before, and all I can say is: wow.\u00a0 Well, actually, that’s not<\/em> all I can say, because I’m about to blog about it…<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

My initial impressions can basically be summed up as “youch!” “uh oh,” and “maybe there’s still hope for me.” In other words, it was a very good talk.\u00a0\u00a0 As for specifics, here’s some of the bigger stuff that came to my mind:<\/p>\n

It really was something of an indictment for my own attitude that I’ve had recently.\u00a0 I could go on and on about my own struggles with personal pride, but I’ll spare you.\u00a0 Basically, this talk led me to some self-introspection and started me on thinking about things that maybe I shouldn’t be so dismissive about–namely, Mormon fiction.<\/p>\n

Yes, there is a lot of stuff there that is poorly written, clich\u00e9d, formulaic, preachy, etc etc, but that doesn’t mean that the genre is bad as a rule.\u00a0 Certainly not that the Mormon-ness of the works is the direct cause of these problems.\u00a0 Orson Scott Card’s Ender’s series was full of Mormon themes on ethical dilemmas and cosmology, but it was also some of the best sci fi written in this generation (funny enough, probably much better than his earlier stuff–which tried explicitly to take stories from the Book of Mormon and Joseph Smith and reset them in an sf \/ fantasy setting.\u00a0 Blegh!).<\/p>\n

The biggest thing about this talk was that it got me thinking about Neuromancer, which I finished just recently.\u00a0 I have no doubt that every one of BKP’s individual hairs would stand on end if he read just one chapter from that book.\u00a0 It was explicit, violent, godless, and full of evil.\u00a0 I felt spiritually depressed at certain parts of it.\u00a0 But I can see why it’s considered such a good work–and not only that, but what’s actually good about it as well.\u00a0 The writing was just superb, the setting felt real, the ideas were fascinating, etc.\u00a0 I learned a lot from reading it.<\/p>\n

The question I have is where is the line in what you expose yourself to?\u00a0 Do we flee the worldliness of the world so much that it would be unthinkable to even pick up a book like this?\u00a0 Carry that to the extreme, and you get that one girl who questioned whether I was a worthy priesthood holder for writing The Clearest Vision!<\/em>\u00a0 OTOH, do we go so far in the opposite direction that we embrace the worldliness of the world like Richard Dutcher appears to have done?<\/a><\/p>\n

Obviously, I’m not the only one asking these questions.\u00a0 I’m just stumbling into this debate–probably one of the largest ongoing dialectics in the LDS arts community.\u00a0 I would like to say that it comes down to an “in the world, not of the world” kind of thing: that we need to be able to look at the world as it really is–look evil in the face and recognize it–while remaining spiritually grounded.\u00a0 It sure seems more conducive to the arts than some kind of siege mentality, while at the same time taking care of spiritual needs.<\/p>\n

Or does it?\u00a0 How does this actually work in the real world? Is it wrong for me to read books like Neuromancer?\u00a0 Is there really a way to remain spiritually grounded while exposing yourself to these things?\u00a0 What is the alternative to the Utah bubble–to the siege mentality that tends to create preachy, clich\u00e9d Mormon fiction?<\/p>\n

I’m just jumping into this debate.\u00a0 I’ve still got a lot of catching up to do.<\/p>\n

But the talk gave me hope in some ways, and that was good.\u00a0 I’m not one of these self-aggrandizing people that BKP was talking about.\u00a0 I’m not writing for myself, I’m writing for the story and the fact that I’ve just got something inside of me burning to tell stories.\u00a0 Call it a gift, call it craziness, but it’s who I am and what I do (I’d like to think it’s a gift, at least). \ud83d\ude42<\/p>\n

And, besides giving me reason for hope, it helped me to redirect myself.\u00a0 I want to write stuff that God can really speak out of.\u00a0 That involves me striving a little harder in my personal discipleship, as well as stepping back and letting God do the preaching instead of me.\u00a0 It involves recognizing God more often for his influence over my creative process.\u00a0 In a sentence, it involves writing under the mindset of blessing the lives of others.\u00a0 That’s probably the single greatest message I got from this talk: bless the lives of others in your art.<\/p>\n

Will I be doing this explicitly?\u00a0 No, because that’s probably how so much of this Mormon fiction became so clich\u00e9d and preachy in the first place.\u00a0 I just need to perfect my discipleship in the gospel and stay close to the Lord, and make it possible for these things to distill on my work “like the dews of heaven.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

My friend Andy wrote on her blog about this really powerful and influential talk by Boyd K. Packer about Mormonism and the arts.\u00a0 I haven’t read this talk before, and all I can say is: wow.\u00a0 Well, actually, that’s not all I can say, because I’m about to blog about it…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[],"tags":[599],"class_list":["post-137","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","tag-thoughts-reflections","entry"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p7iXK-2d","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/137","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=137"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/137\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=137"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=137"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=137"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}