Skill

Facility with your craft is necessary to cut to the core of what you want to express. But avoid the temptation, once you have developed sufficient mastery over your technique, to lean on your best tricks. If you do enough back-flips, people might laugh or applaud just as they would at any gymnast or juggler, but the tricks alone won't lead to transformation.

In the end, the technician is about himself. The audiences' admiration becomes, instead of transformative, merely a surrogate for what they would hope for themselves - that they need only become skilled enough at something, and they too could wear the mantle of Greatness.

Art, however, is beyond technique. It invites the reader, the listener, the viewer, into the experience, leaves room for him to invest his own imagination into the image, and in this way the art becomes not just the artist's but the audience's as well. The art does not belong to the artist or the audience completely, but is shared. The technique is the messenger, not the message.

It can be difficult to remember this. Applause is nice, and in a pinch, if you're deft enough, you can always pull a nice triple axel to distract the reader. Be generous. Your ego is here not to draw attention to you, but to allow you the courage to speak in your own way for God. Everyone has that right, but some of us have sought a bigger stage on which to do it.

Bill