Article February 8, 1975 Issue

God Directs

MADGE REINHARDT RITTER

When I was a student in a playwriting seminar at a university, a young man in the group looked up every now and then with cool gray eyes and seemed to take in everything about his fellow students. Midway through the term he wrote down some comments about me, essentially: "Potential, but no courage."

Now, one learns early in such a group to weigh, and perhaps discard, what one's fellows say. But this remark had a ring of truth to it. I had been trying to write only what would please friends and make me look good. There had not yet come, in my thinking, the step of actual commitment to an artistic idea. This abandonment—self-forgetfulness—is necessary if we would respond to Mind's unfoldment of artistic expression. God is divine Mind, and Mind's unfoldment is more important than is our own solely human reason or effort. Whatever protection or privacy may seem wise in any individual situation, honesty and sincerity in faithfulness to a developing idea is far more important than the desire to please everybody and gain human adulation.

What is basically a spiritual attitude—willingness to be led and not to feel we have to outline or manipulate artistic inspiration rigidly as it begins to unfold—is primary in the arts. If we have this willingness—and it's really a quality of self-forgetfulness—we cannot be timid about it. Courage is part of self-forgetfulness. And an artist who is trying to follow as closely as he can what he presently understands of God's plan for him, and His requirement, will also have the courage to be honest and sincere with his present best understanding of that unfoldment as it appears in artistic expression. Working with this motive, one has direction and protection. Man is not a personal creator; he is a recipient of Mind's ideas. One's motive to be true to these spiritual ideas—and, in turn, true to an artistic idea as it develops—ensures his progress as an artist.

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