In what sense is art-making service? If you give a person a drink of water, when they ingest it, there are immediate, real-world results. If you offer a hungry person bread, when they eat it, their bodies replenish and become better able to negotiate their day's tasks and responsibilities. If you offer a coat to …
An Artist’s Prayer
Dear God, You make, I make. You make me to make. What am I to make today? What are You making today, and what is the plan for how our making? In every small corner of every large nation, human beings are setting out to take disparate materials and fashion them into a piece …
God Spoke to Me: The Crisis of Knowing How We Know – 3
This morning, I'm not writing about what I said I was going to write about. Instead, I offer you, hot off the presses of my experience, a case study...an experience in knowing. Years ago, I was tasked with writing a personal credo, and it began with the words, "We are not alone." And yet, loneliness …
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The Belly of the Beast
It's a metaphor that's been around since Jonah. Writers talk about it as the state of being deep in the middle of a work as the wheels are coming off, your faith in your talent and in your ideas crashing head-on into failed structures and dead-end choices. In Do the Work, by Steven Pressfield, …
“Do the Work” by Steven Pressfield
What is it about people who speak with "authority" that can be so inspirational? (Who does that make you think of?) Almost two years ago, I wrote a blog post about the metaphor of war as it related to prayer. Read it here. I questioned whether war was the best frame through which to …
JEFF BERRYMAN 