artists obedience.

" The artist is a servant who is willing to be a birth giver.  In a very real sense the artist (male or female should be like Mary, who when the angel told her that she was to bear the Messiah, was obedient to the command.

Obedience is an unpopular word nowadays, but the artist must be obedient to the work, whether it be a symphony, a painting, or a story for a small child.  I believe that each work of art, whether it is a work of great genius or something very small, comes to the artist and says, 'Here I am.  Enflesh me.  Give birth to me.' And the artist either says, 'My soul doth magnify the Lord,' and willingly becomes the bearer of the work or refuses; but the obedient response is not necessarily a conscious one, and not everyone has the bumble, courageous obedience of Mary.

As for Mary, she was little more than a child when the angel came to her; she had not lost her child's creative acceptance of the realities moving on the other side of the everyday world.  We lose our ability to see angels as we grow older, and that is a tragic loss.

....

In art, either as creators or as participators, we are helped to remember some of the glorious things we have forgotten, and some of the terrible things we are asked to endure, we who are children of God by adoption and grace.

....

The artist, if he is not to forget how to listen, must retain the vision which includes angels and dragons and unicorns and all the lovely creatures which our world would put in a box marked Children Only."