To all the artisans among us, Benedict offers a particular calling: practice your craft with humility. Pride diminishes us because it slowly erodes our respect for the gifts and abilities of others.
As an artist, you are called to develop your craft fully—but always to understand it as part of something larger: your own formation, your place within the human community, and ultimately your spiritual life. Share your gifts widely. In doing so, you enlarge and enrich the world around you. Yet remember that the deepest purpose of the gift is not recognition or accomplishment. Our gifts should lead us toward, and ultimately become an expression of, personal sanctity.
Sister Joan describes this beautifully. Without the artist to show us what we do not yet see in the world around us, we may lose sight of the beauty of God. We must never substitute conformity for the full expression of the beauty of life.
The artist is called to make the transcendent visible; to touch the soul in ways that help us recognize the soul; to enshrine beauty so that we may learn to see it; and to make every place on earth a place of wonder.
And then Sister Joan takes us one important step further:
The Benedictine is called to share these gifts widely, expressing their love for creation in the bounty of largesse. It is Benedictine to develop our gifts and distribute their fruits as widely and broadly as possible so that JUSTICE, not profit, is the principle that impels us.
The gift, then, is never ours alone. We develop it with humility, offer it generously, and allow it to become one more way through which the beauty, goodness, and justice of God enter the world.
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