The creative artist, like the philosopher, is fully committed to a truth-seeking activity, trying to see below the surface of things and acquire a deeper understanding of human experience; however, he publishes, or publicly presents, his insights in a different form from the philosopher, a form that relies on direct perception and intuition rather than on rational argument.

How is it possible to feel nostalgia for a world I never knew?

The liturgy begins then as a real separation from the world. In our attempt to make Christianity appeal to the man on the street, we have often minimized, or even completely forgotten, this necessary separation. We always want to make Christianity ‘understandable’ and ‘acceptable’ to this mythical ‘modern’ man on the street. And we forget that the Christ of whom we speak is ‘not of this world,’ and that after His resurrection He was not recognized even by His own disciples. Mary Magdalene thought He was a gardener. When two of His disciples were going to Emmaus, “Jesus himself drew near and went with them,” and they did not know Him before “he took bread, and blessed it, and brake, and gave it to them” (Lk 24:15-16, 30). He appeared to the twelve, “the doors being shut.” It was apparently no longer sufficient simply to know that He was the son of Mary. There was no physical imperative to recognize Him. He was, in other words, no longer a ‘part’ of this world, of its reality, and to recognize Him, to enter into that joy of His presence, to be with Him, meant a conversion to another reality. The Lord’s glorification does not have the compelling, objective evidence of His humiliation and cross. His glorification is known only through the mysterious death in the baptismal font, through the anointing of the Holy Spirit. It is known only in the fullness of the Church, as she gathers to meet the Lord and to share in His risen life.

As Christians we believe that He, who is the truth about both God and man, gives foretastes of His incarnation in all more fragmentary truths. We believe as well that Christ is present in any seeker after truth. Simone Weil has said that though a person may run as fast as he can away from Christ, if it is toward what he considers true, he runs in fact straight into the arms of Christ.

For someone as attached to words and books and chairs as I am, gratuitous physical labor wouldn’t ordinarily hold much appeal. Yet I had lately developed — in the garden, as it happened — an appreciation for those forms of knowledge that seem to yield most readily to the hands. Different kinds of work, performed with different sets of tools, can disclose different faces of the world, and my work in the garden had revealed a face of nature I’d never seen before, not as a reader or a spectator. What I’d gleaned there was a taste of what the ‘green thumb’ has in abundance, this almost bodily sense of plants and the earth that comes from handwork, sweat, and a particular quality of attention that involves very little intellect, but all the of the senses. It reminded me just how much of reality slips through the net of our words, and that time spent working directly with the flesh of the world is the best antidote for abstraction.

Use simple tools. Write with a pencil instead of complexity. Let no man stand between you and the land: mow your own lawn, pick your own cotton, sweat yourself under the sun

Many are avidly seeking but they alone find who remain in continual silence. … Every man who delights in a multitude of words, even though he says admirable things, is empty within. If you love truth, be a lover of silence. Silence like the sunlight will illuminate you in God and will deliver you from the phantoms of ignorance. Silence will unite you to God himself. …
More than all things love silence: it brings you a fruit that tongue cannot describe. In the beginning we have to force ourselves to be silent. But then there is born something that draws us to silence. May God give you an experience of this “something” that is born of silence. If only you practice this, untold light will dawn on you in consequence … after a while a certain sweetness is born in the heart of this exercise and the body is drawn almost by force to remain in silence.

The good thief, crucified beside our Lord, found salvation “in a single moment.” His request, “Remember me when you come into Your kingdom,” is a confession of faith that recognizes that the remembrance of God, and the remembrance by God, is triumphant over every sin and every evil. It is the triumph of “that which is” over “that which is not.”

The advice I like to give young artists, or really anybody who’ll listen to me, is not to wait around for inspiration. Inspiration is for amateurs; the rest of us just show up and get to work. If you wait around for the clouds to part and a bolt of lightning to strike you in the brain, you are not going to make an awful lot of work. All the best ideas come out of the process; they come out of the work itself. Things occur to you. If you’re sitting around trying to dream up a great art idea, you can sit there a long time before anything happens. But if you just get to work, something will occur to you and something else will occur to you and something else that you reject will push you in another direction. Inspiration is absolutely unnecessary and somehow deceptive. You feel like you need this great idea before you can get down to work, and I find that’s almost never the case.

Right now your beers are mainly available on the West Coast. How important is it to you to go national?

Not at all. We expanded three months ago into this new brewery space, so now we’re brewing in both our brewpub and in this brewery. And we started bottling Pliny the Elder, which until six weeks ago we had never done before. It had only been available on draft. We could be [widely available] like Stoneor Lagunitas, and I get calls from distributors all the time from all over the country. But we do this more for the lifestyle, my wife and I, and same with our employees. I can ride my bike to work. I live one to two miles from either brewery. I fill my gas tank once a week. I think you can get caught up way too much in growth. We don’t have any growth goals.

Hopefully, each time I ask for your attention, I’m justifying it with something original.

I’ve found salvation in working hard for other people. Maybe you find that weird, or a threat somehow. All I can say is, I’m sorry. Please exercise your right to close your browser and go care about something else. I’ve had enough of people telling me who I am and what I’m allowed to do. If you have something nice to say, I’d love to hear it. If you have legitimate feedback, I’m always trying to improve.

Although, of course, solitude and escape from distracting things does constitute the chief condition for attentive and continuous prayer, still we ought to feel ourselves to blame for the rarity of our prayer, because the amount and frequency is under the control of everybody, both the healthy and the sick. It does lie within the scope of his will.

The soul of the Christian cleric must be filled with the Word. He must know the Bible even better than the “Bible Baptists” do: it is an intolerable thing that the heterodox could ever be more familiar with Holy Writ than the descendants of the Orthodox Counselors who established the Writ in the first place. The stories of the Patriarchs and the Prophets, the teachings of the Apostles and the sayings of the Sages ought to spring like an artesian well from the lips of anyone in orders – whether he is a Reader, a Seminarian, a Deacon or a Priest. He should take up the healthy and ancient habit of reading Scripture out loud to himself daily, so that the very sound of God’s call will echo in his ears and settle in his brain. Reading silently was a bad invention. Poetry cannot be understood unless heard aloud, and all Scripture is poetry of the highest order.

Though the desert fathers said, “Prayer is a struggle to a man’s dying breath,” it is also true that prayer should increasingly be a source of life for us, so that even if we struggle, it is as if a man who has difficulty breathing still struggles to breathe. He doesn’t just give up on breathing because it’s too much trouble. He will breathe until he can breathe no more. We must pray until we can pray no more.

One must learn to call upon the name of God, more even than breathing—at all times, in all places, in every kind of occupation. The Apostle says, ‘Pray without ceasing.’ That is, he teaches men to have the remembrance of God in all times and places and circumstances. If you are making something, you must call to mind the Creator of all things; if you see the light, remember the Giver of it; if you see the heavens and the earth and the sea and all that is in them, wonder and praise the Maker of them. If you put on your clothes, recall Whose gift they are and thank Him Who provides for your life. In short, let every action be a cause of your remembering and praising God, and lo! you will be praying without ceasing and therein your soul will always rejoice.

The heart itself is but a small vessel, yet dragons are there, and there are also lions; there are poisonous beasts and all the treasures of evil. But there too is God, the angels, the life and the kingdom, the light and the apostles, the heavenly cities and the treasuries of grace—all things are there.

If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?

I’m a great starter and not a great finisher. I fall in love with ideas quickly and get enamored with them and rush headlong into working on a project only to abandon it when the next shiny thing pops up in the grass.

Once in a while, it’s time to bring the submarine up to the surface, run up the periscope, and take a good 360.

If you depreciate the sanctity and solemnity of marriage, not just as a bond between two people but as a bond between those two people and their forebears, their children, and their neighbors, then you have prepared the way for an epidemic of divorce, child neglect, community ruin, and loneliness. If you destroy the economies of household and community, then you destroy the bonds of mutual usefulness and practical dependence without which the other bonds will not hold.

For education has become increasingly useless as it has become increasingly public. Real education is determined by community needs, not by public tests.

But most important of all, now, is to see that the artistic traditions understood every art primarily as a skill or craft and ultimately as a service to fellow creatures and to God. An artist’s first duty, according to this view, is technical. It is assumed that one will have talents, materials, subjects — perhaps even genius or inspiration or vision. But these are traditionally understood not as personal properties with which one may do as one chooses but as gifts of God or nature that must be honored in use. One does not dare to use these things without the skill to use them well. As Dante said of his own art, ‘far worse than in vain does he leave the shore … who fishes for the truth and has not the art.’ To use gifts less than well is to dishonor them and their Giver. There is no material or subject in Creation that in using, we are excused from using well; there is no work in which we are excused from being able and responsible artists.

In denying the holiness of the body and of the so-called physical reality of the world — and in denying support to the good economy, the good work, by which alone the Creation can receive due honor — modern Christianity generally has cut itself off from both nature and culture. It has no serious or competent interest in biology or ecology. And it is equally uninterested in the arts by which humankind connects itself to nature. It manifests no awareness of the specifically Christian cultural lineages that connect us to our past.

Work connects us both to creation and to eternity. This is the reason also for Mother Ann Lee’s famous instruction: ‘Do all your work as though you had a thousand years to live on earth, and as you would if you knew you must die tomorrow.’

I have been talking, of course, about a dualism that manifests itself in several ways: as a cleavage, a radical discontinuity, between Creator and creature, spirit and matter, religion and nature, religion and economy, worship and work, and so on. This dualism, I think, is the most destructive disease that afflicts us. In its best known, its most dangerous, and perhaps its fundamental version, it is the dualism of body and soul.

The misuse of the Bible thus logically accompanies the abuse of nature: if you are going to destroy creatures without respect, you will want to reduce them to ‘materiality’; you will want to deny that there is spirit or truth in them, just as you will want to believe that the only holy creatures, the only creatures with souls, are humans — or even only Christian humans.

By denying spirit and truth to the nonhuman Creation, modern proponents of religion have legitimized a form of blasphemy without which the nature- and culture-destroying machinery of the industrial economy could not have been built — that is, they have legitimized bad work. Good human work honors God’s work. Good work uses no thing without respect, both for what it is in itself and for its origin. It uses neither tool nor material that it does not respect and that it does not love. It honors nature as a great mystery and power, as an indispensable teacher, and as the inescapable judge of all work of human hands. To work without pleasure or affection, to make a product that is not both useful and beautiful, is to dishonor God, nature, and the thing that is made, and whomever it is made for. This is blasphemy: to make shoddy work of the work of God. But such blasphemy is not possible when the entire Creation is understood as holy and when the works of God are understood as embodying and thus revealing His spirit.

… our destruction of nature is not just bad stewardship, or stupid economics, or a betrayal of family responsibility; it is the most horrid blasphemy. It is flinging God’s gifts into His face, as if they were of no worth beyond that assigned to them by our destruction of them.

The global economy (like the national economy before it) operates on the superstition that the deficiencies or needs or wishes of one place may safely be met by the ruination of another place. To build houses here, we clear-cut the forests there. To have air-conditioning here, we strip-mine the mountains there. To drive our cars here, we sink our oil wells there. It is an absentee economy. Most people aren’t using or destroying what they can see. If we cannot see our garbage or the grave we have dug with our energy proxies, then we assume that all is well. The issues of carrying capacity and population remain abstract and not very threatening to most people for the same reason. If this nation or region cannot feed its population, then food can be imported from other nations or regions. All the critical questions affecting our use of the earth are left to be answered by ‘the market’ or the law of supply and demand, which proposes no limit on either supply or demand. An economy without limits is an economy without discipline.

Why do you increase your bonds? Take hold of your life before your light grows dark and you seek help and do not find it. This life has been given to you for repentance; do not waste it in vain pursuits.

For me, drawing has been the most fundamental way of engaging the world. I’m convinced that it is only through drawing that I actually look at things carefully, and the act of drawing makes me conscious of what I’m looking at. If I wasn’t drawing, I sense that I would not be seeing.

He wrote very slowly at first, and then with increasing rapidity; faster and faster, gathering momentum and growing more and more fevered as he sped, till at last the true fire came, without which no lamp of real literature may be made to burn.

If we speak of a healthy community, we cannot be speaking of a community that is merely human. We are talking about a neighborhood of humans in a place, plus the place itself: its soil, its water, its air, and all the families and tribes of the nonhuman creatures that belong to it. If the place is well preserved, if its entire membership, natural and human, is present in it, and if the human economy is in practical harmony with the nature of the place, then the community is healthy. A diseased community will be suffering natural losses that become, in turn, human losses. A healthy community is sustainable; it is, within reasonable limits, self-sufficient and, within reasonable limits, self-determined — that is, free of tyranny.

Why teach drawing to accountants? Because drawing class doesn’t just teach people to draw. It teaches them to be more observant. There’s no company on earth that wouldn’t benefit from having people become more observant.

All that exists is God’s gift to man, and it all exists to make God known to man, to make man’s life communion with God.

The goal of perfection, for which the classics are our measure, is intimidating enough to freeze fine minds and pure hearts into permanent silence.

The idea that we live in something called ‘the environment,’ for instance, is utterly preposterous. This word came into use because of the pretentiousness of learned experts who were embarrassed by the religious associations of ‘Creation’ and who thought ‘world’ too mundane. But ‘environment’ means that which surrounds or encircles us; it means a world separate from ourselves, outside us. The real state of things, of course, is far more complex and intimate and interesting than that. The world that environs us, that is around us, is also within us. We are made of it; we eat, drink, and breathe it; it is bone of our bone and flesh of our flesh. It is also Creation, a holy mystery, made for and to some extent by creatures, some but by no means all of whom are humans. This world, this Creation, belongs in a limited sense to us, for we may rightfully require certain things of it — the things necessary to keep us fully alive as the kind of creature we are — but we also belong to it, and it makes certain rightful claims on us: that we care properly for it, that we leave it undiminished not just to our children but to all the creatures who will live in it after us. None of this intimacy and responsibility is conveyed by the word environment.

If we are serious about reducing government and the burdens of government, then we need to do so by returning economic self-determination to the people. And we must not do this by inviting destructive industries to provide ‘jobs’ in the community; we must do it by fostering economic democracy. For example, as much as possible of the food that is consumed locally ought to be locally produced on small farms, and then processed in small, non-polluting plants that are locally owned. We must do everything possible to provide to ordinary citizens the opportunity to own a small, usable share of the country.

The true source and analogue of our economic life is the economy of plants, which never exceeds natural limits, never grows beyond the power of its place to support it, produces no waste, and enriches and preserves itself by death and decay.

It seems that anything is possible now. We experience a world in which time, distance and production circumstances hardly seem important any more. But for this very reason, we need to look back and talk with our predecessors. The way to do this is by doing what they have done. Only then is there a chance of thinking the way they thought. And then there is some basis for comparison. When you stand on common ground with your predecessors, you can define your own position, estimate progress or see what has been forgotten in the meantime. Talking like this with colleagues from the past has nothing to do with sentimentality or nostalgia or a useless search for craftmanship. It has however everything to do with bringing back knowledge that can serve as a mirror for ourselves and our technical achievements. An honest assessment of this kind is thus an essential step in the search for relevant improvement: now, and for the future.