Embodying Art in the Midst of Creative Block

For creative Christians, art embodies worship. But how do they make that work when life blocks creativity?

By Gianna Soderstrom

When I was in high school, I sang with the choir every single school day for an hour. Every morning just before lunch, we could count on the particular joy of climbing up and down the scale in  warm-ups, and then branching into four or more parts and casting resonant chords around the high-ceilinged room.

Those years were more than a decade ago, and I have not sung in a choir since. I miss the communal beauty that a choir creates. Beyond merely singing, there is something unique and magnificent about using our very voices as a communal act of worship. The choir at the church my family and I attend practices only once a week, but even that is too much for the season of life I’m in right now.

Although I delight in singing, my love of writing runs deeper; and it is for me one of the best ways to turn an act of creativity into an act of worship. When I write about my own life, I’m able to offer it back to God, just like we offer our bread and wine when we prepare communion, or the Eucharist, in a church service. And just as bread and wine become the body and blood of Christ to us, writing as worship becomes a nourishment to me. It is a way of living out the Eucharist. 

My family and I spent last summer in the mountains with a ministry, and although I loved it, I grieved the time away from my community. But when I turned to writing for comfort, I encountered three long months of writer’s block. The words wouldn’t come. All through that long, slow time, I wrote nearly nothing. I found other ways of practicing the eucharistic life: washing the dishes so my husband could come home to a peaceful kitchen; folding the laundry and teaching young hands how to put it away without unfolding quite all of it; making coffee for Bible study and brewing tea for long conversations on the front porch. All summer I held up these acts of service as an act of worship and let what felt like the more obvious worship of creativity have a rest. 

In the hymn “Jesus Shall Reign” by Isaac Watts, the sixth stanza begins, “Let every creature rise and bring / Peculiar honors to our King.”* We sang it in church one Sunday, and I stumbled over the bumpy syllables of the word “peculiar.” It’s not a simple word to sing. But when I bemoaned the clunky word to one of my friends after service, his eyes lit up with excitement. 

“In another hymnal,” he explained, “it’s rewritten as ‘highest honors’.”

I was emphatic that “highest honors” would be much easier to sing, but my friend shook his head. Peculiar was perfect, he said, because each of the creatures is not only bringing praise and honor due peculiarly to God, but they bring their own peculiar honor to offer Him; something that no one and nothing else can bring.

The beginning of gratitude is noticing.

Bringing our own peculiar praise is offering writing or singing or any other act of creativity or service as worship, and to do that, you must begin with gratitude. The beginning of gratitude is noticing. Noticing bears its fullest fruit in our Christian lives when we look past the surface of things—it is a tree—to see in it a fuller picture of God—it lives above ground and below, like the sovereign God who also became fully man. I think of this as bearing witness; a gratitude that begins with noticing and ends with returning our gaze once again to God. 

There is great beauty and importance to the quiet, hidden acts of noticing, of bearing witness as service and love to the people around you, whether or not they see it. Things like folding laundry and washing dishes that bring order and peace to your home. And there is great, magnificent beauty in bearing witness together with the Church; singing in a choir or playing guitar during the worship service or feasting together on Easter Sunday. 

And yet, somewhere between those avenues of eucharistic living, there is a gap. What happens when you love to sing or write or dance, when any kind of creativity makes you feel more human—but it isn’t the right season or there isn’t enough time for you to craft an essay, or publish a book, or share your work to a broader audience? What is there when you’re not in the season for edifying, outward-facing ways of worship, and the quiet, hidden ways that strengthen your faithfulness don’t call on your own peculiar gifts? 

Somewhere between washing the dishes and serving coffee and not joining the church choir or scribbling notes for a new essay, I felt both tapped out and unused. What good is being a writer if you’re not writing? What good is having any passion if you’re unable to pursue it?

I am meant to write—I don’t have grand aspirations of a New York Times bestseller, or seeing my name on a shelf in Barnes & Noble, I just know in my bones that writing makes me aware of the presence of God in my life in a way nothing else does. Writing is how I bear witness to the world; how I receive it and give thanks for it and hold in my open hands as an offering back to God. Writing is like the Eucharist. And all summer, I couldn’t write. 

One evening in August the not-writing became too much. I opened a new document on my computer and stared down the blinking cursor in the corner of the page. I clicked in the title field and typed Bearing Witness: A Journal. I determined that I would write at least 100  words, and before I stopped I’d written 220. 

I will not tell you about them: they were not intended to ever move beyond that strange small file I reopened again and again over the rest of the summer and fall. But in a small and steady way, they returned to me the faithfulness of receiving and giving thanks for the minute and vast and particular world around me. God took my small rough words and tumbled them like stones until their polish gleamed, not in the skill of my writing but in writing as an act of faithfulness to Him and the world He gives. It feels like singing.

And so even in the slow and steady days when I'm not writing books or singing in a choir, I can bear witness in slow and steady ways, embodying a life of Eucharist in the crumbs of the day I have.

I can bear witness in slow and steady ways, embodying a life of Eucharist in the crumbs of the day I have.

Someday I want to take all the choral practice I had in high school and join the choir in our church. That day might be years away, so until it comes, I sing hymns by snippets in my car. It’s not the same as studying sheet music or plunking out the alto harmonies on my piano until I can hear them even among the swirling voices. But it is a real and embodied way of bearing witness to both the pain and the goodness in the world and singing it back to God. 

I don’t ever want to take my peculiar praise away from the whole and beautiful body of the Church, but while I walk through this long quiet season of laundry and homeschool and the repeated, never-ending cultivation of peace and stillness in our home, I steward the ability to bear witness in the small and peculiar ways I can find; one stanza, one note, one hundred written words at a time. 
_________

Mountain dweller. Minnesota lakes girl. Giver of goldfish crackers and piggy back rides to the two littles. Owner of too many blue striped shirts. Adventure-hearted, but also a connoisseur of cozy, hot-chocolate evenings. Amateur wildflower naturalist, picker of wild raspberries. Writer, dreamer, wife to Grant, mama to E1 and E2. Assistant director of the Anselm Society Arts Guild. And more than the sum of her parts; just like you. Gianna writes here and everywhere else to bring hope out of our ordinary moments.