Dr. Vincent Reusch

Vincent Reusch
9/19/11

Homily

In light of this month’s chapel theme of “creating” and in the wake of the symposium and
its theme of “The Role of the Artist in Society,” I would like to talk today about the sometimes
overlooked generosity of indulging in the creative act.

Often, I think, creative self expression is viewed—perhaps tacitly more than explicitly—
as at least superfluous, if not narcissistic or self-aggrandizing. I’m not talking about the great
canonized writers here. For them, we seem to make exception, as if they were somehow
ordained, as if their draw to the arts were somehow different from our own. I’m talking about
you and me, when we dare pick up a paint brush, a cello, or a pen. Even as I’ve made a career
out of creative writing, I’ve found my writing sessions nagged by feelings of self-indulgence.
Mine has often been a guilty pleasure. It has, that is, until just this summer, when I received a
gift from my father that will forever change the way I think of art and the act of self expression.

First I should say that my father is an unlikely agent for this change. He is a
businessman, as was his father, of whom he once said (and this is not a compliment), “Your
grandfather is more interested in making a friend than making a buck.” Before getting into
business, my father had been in the air force, or as he simply calls it, the service, and though he
had entered civilian life before I was born, the service never quite left him. When I was a child,
his sentences were regularly suffixed with, “and that’s an order.” Order in its other sense, order
as opposed to sloppiness or disarrangement, was also strictly upheld in our house. After my
parents’ divorce when I was five, my brothers and I spent weekends with my father. At his house
in the country, we slept on canvas army cots, lined up in a single bedroom upstairs. We each had
a pewter mug that hung from a hook on the dining-room wall, mugs that we used for all our
drinking and that we were responsible for keeping clean. Each week when we arrived, three
bottles of Coke were lined up in the door of the refrigerator, our weekend ration. This would not
seem a breeding ground for creativity. But one weekend, we arrived to find a roll of butcher
paper on the wooden floor in the corner of my father’s living room.

For those here younger than myself who may not be familiar, butcher paper comes in
large rolls, three feet or so wide. The butcher roll sat on a metal stand, a sharp steel cutting rail
running the width of the paper. The process of cutting it was much like that of a roll of
aluminum foil, only on a grander scale. I still remember the brilliant white of that paper, and its
crisp tautness, so much like my father’s starched white shirts. When I pulled out a length of the
paper and raised it against the cutting edge, it almost seemed to hum with tension. That electric
white sheet was far cry from my elementary school’s limp brownish paper with its rows of solid
and dashed lines into which I would fit my letters, copied from the alphabet above our
blackboard. We drew cities on the butcher paper. We drew spaceships and pirates and Peter Pan.
We lay on it, outlined each others’ bodies and costumed them as cowboys, as superheroes, as
ourselves, as girls, as old men. At the same time the butcher paper arrived, the coloring books all
disappeared. We didn’t miss them. Much later, when I asked my father about the paper and the
ban on coloring books, he simply said, “I wanted you to draw your own pictures.”

So I learned to draw my own pictures, first in visual form, and then in words. I learned,
too, that this act enriched my life tremendously. I know myself better than I otherwise would. I
understand those with whom I interact better than I otherwise would. But I never quite lost the
feeling that this knowledge came at a cost, that the great amount of time I spent developing
myself, even if in a good way, was too large a self indulgence. I thought so until this Fourth of
July, when my father handed my brother and me each a large rubbermaid container. Inside the
containers were scrapbooks, photo albums, framed pictures, genealogical charts, our whole
family history, outlined, dated, organized in my father’s meticulous fashion, and passed onto us.
One of the first things I pulled from my container was a stack of papers. Folded in half, they
were about the size of the large scrapbooks. They were white, yellowed a bit now. I unfolded
them to reveal a dozen or so butcher-paper drawings. There were several that I had done. Some
that my oldest brother had done. And some by my brother, Eric, who passed away twelve years
ago. It was one of Eric’s drawings that changed in an instant my understanding of the
importance and generosity of artistic expression. It was a native American, what we at that age
and in that era called an “indian,” and I saw Eric in that indian so strongly that it froze me. The
bashful smile on his face, the sweeping lines that formed his uplifted arms, the choice of green
that colored his shirt, the stubborn confidence in the thickly waxed crayon strokes that made up
the brown of his tasseled pants. It was my brother, evoked as no family snapshot could. It
wasn’t his likeness captured in that drawing, but his energy, his spirit. I wasn’t seeing him, so
much as I was feeling him, there with me. After six years of his illness and twelve years of his
absence, I had forgotten what my brother felt like. And now here he was, present in a way I had
never imagined possible, in this crayon and butcher-paper indian that I could keep for the rest of
my life, that had returned to me a piece of my brother so absent that it had been lost even to my
memory.

In the weeks that followed, as I made my way through this gift of family memorabilia, I
found more gifts, if none so dear as that indian. My father had included two paintings done by
my great grandmother, who was both a painter and an art teacher. He included photographs by a
great great uncle, who worked mostly in urban winterscapes, and whose photographs, though not
famous, had won awards in regional competitions. I also found a journal kept by my great great
grandmother, who, in pen and ink, detailed the movements of our relatives as far back as she
could remember, and who wrote alongside these facts her own thoughts and feelings about our
ancestors’ fortunes and motivations as their lives unfolded. Through her narrations, she had
turned our family history into a story.

I’ll never know the nature of the satisfaction my six-year-old brother took from his act of
drawing that indian. I’ll never know the pleasure or motivation of my ancestors as they created
the artifacts of their inner lives. But I now know how great the value of their acts beyond any
reward that was strictly their own. If theirs was a self indulgent pleasure, then perhaps we
should all be so self indulgent. Perhaps we should all take time, if even occasionally, to make
tangible something of the way we experience the world, to fold our inner lives outward, so that
we may more fully know each other and bring ourselves into deeper, more revealing
communion.

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