I’d Rather Be Whole

Last updated on: February 4, 2015 at 5:55 pm by Sam Rocha

I’d Rather Be Whole 2015-02-04T17:55:47-06:00 Sam Rocha

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Since the release of my album, just over a month ago, I’ve faced a number of related questions about the identity of this music I’ve made and, more intimately, my own identity as its maker. Many have wondered how my work as a musician can be reconciled to my work as an academic and a father. Others have wondered about the religious identity of my work, across its various mediums, and have been generous in allowing me to offer a series of difficult answers.

In some cases, such as this review by Pia di Solenni, the position argued for since at least Jacque Maritain has been granted to me: I don’t need to be a Christian or Catholic artist, I simply need to be an artist. Image Journal, who I am playing a concert for next week, has neatly packaged this idea into the claim that the term ‘Christian’ should not function as an adjective.

I must admit: for the last ten years of my life, I took claims like these to be a wholesale endorsement of my work and, out of sheer convenience, I accepted them in an uncritical way. Over the last few months of this process, however, I’ve developed some important degrees of distance from this idea that art need not be religious in any devotional or confessional way. More and more, I am finding a great deal of comfort in being classified as a Catholic artist, even a Catholic person.

I think we all agree that art cannot suck, and surely my greatest fear is that I don’t make that mark. To be a serious artist is to know the most severe weaknesses and limitations of one’s craft and not be paralyzed by them and sometimes embrace them. Few people achieve the technical mastery of an instrument we witness in some of the great masters, but even in those instances the same pursuit is evident and none of them remain above critique or taste.

This question of identity may not be about art in the sense that is related to making and crafting music or other things. In this case, I suspect that the desires of the artist are nothing more or less than the desires of every person: to be what and who one is and to not be otherwise. The making of a work of art may indeed offer a sharper and more descriptive image of that desire, but my intuition is that there is nothing special about it; it is not unique or elevated above the domain of human life more generally speaking.

This separation between being alive in a generic way and being alive in an artistic way, between being an artist and being a person, is an outright mistake. The objection that collapsing the artist into the general human condition is a disgrace to the sufficiency and glory of art is to misunderstand art in the first and last place. of course art is special, of course the human person offers the closest imitatio Dei when she creates something, of course the traditions and artifacts of art are the most precious treasure we can ever hold in our cultural hands. But art need not become a deus ex machina.

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