I was sitting at my desk with paint tubes, brushes, rags and books scattered around me. I was working on a painting inspired by a poem I had written after Wendell Berry died, when John Prine came across my playlist singing “Jesus: The Missing Years.”
I worked blue-gray paint into the sky and green and yellow into the field. I placed a fence post in the foreground, ran black wire across the canvas and opened a river between the distant trees. Near the bottom, one small green plant pushed through the dirt.
I cannot tell you when something changed. I kept moving the brush, listening to Prine sing about Jesus and watching an empty canvas become land. Somewhere between the sky and that small green plant, I felt alive.
That may not sound like much unless you have spent six years wondering if you would ever feel alive again.
I spent twenty years in ministry. I preached sermons, studied theology, read the books, learned the language and knew how to give an answer when somebody asked about God.
Then everything I thought I knew about knowing God ceased to exist. God disappeared.
Before anybody rushes in to defend God, please hear me first. I know what people say.
God never leaves. God was there the whole time. I should have prayed harder, believed more, found another church, or read another book.
I am telling you what it felt like.
The church betrayed me and tore open an old wound, the childhood wound of being abandoned by people I trusted. I carry PTSD from it. I became depressed. I woke up without hope. I lost friends, the life I had built, and the version of myself who knew what everything meant. I came close to atheism.
Some days I thought God was dead. Other days I wondered if there had ever been a God to begin with.
People still try to get me saved. I tell them I am not lost; their map no longer tells the truth about where I am.
For years, I wanted to return to the life I had before. But that life was gone. So was the man who had lived it.
Some part of me had been buried long before everything fell apart. Every pastor carries a different story, but I have talked with enough of them to know what the collar can cost.
You learn which questions make people nervous. You learn how much honesty a room can tolerate. You learn which parts of yourself to keep quiet so everybody else can remain comfortable.
You cut away small pieces until the person in the pulpit can no longer remember who first walked into the church. When it all ended, I had to discover who was still alive beneath the person I had become.
Resurrection has a limp. Mine took six years before I could even stand.
Then poetry found me. Painting found me. They uncovered something that had been inside me the whole time, buried beneath sermons, expectations, and the person I thought I had to become.
Words gave the grief somewhere to go. Paint gave the silence a body.
The answers stayed gone. Color returned.
I started noticing fields, rivers, crows, fence posts, dirt roads, old houses, and the faces of people I had passed a thousand times. I began making things. Then I began imagining a future where I could keep making them.
Hope came first. Belief came later and it came back different.
The divine had grown larger than anything I knew how to explain. I found it in the land, in human faces, in music, in the silence between words, and in the mystery of that strange Galilean who has mesmerized me for most of my life.
I still do not understand him. I am no longer convinced I have to. John Prine kept singing while Wendell Berry’s field appeared beneath my brush.
The books were still there. The questions were still there. One of my brushes was drying stiff because I had forgotten to wash the paint out.
After six years of wondering whether anything was still alive inside me, the man I thought was gone was making something again.
So let me preach this much.
If poetry does nothing for you, that is all right. If you never want to pick up a paintbrush, I understand.
I am as blue-collar and country as anybody. We have made art sound as though it belongs behind museum glass or inside books most people will never read. Creativity is larger than that.
It happens under the hood of an old truck, in a row of tomatoes, over a stove, inside a woodshop, through a song sung badly with the windows down, and in a story told on a porch after the sun goes down.
Find your thing. Break a rule if you need to.
Make something that did not exist before your hands touched it. Grab hold of whatever hope rises from the making, then give some of it away.
Use what you carry to bring a smile, a little beauty, or one decent moment to somebody you can name right now.
Art helped me remember how to be alive. Somebody you know may be trying to remember.
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Paul Jones is an Alabama writer and storyteller whose work explores place, memory, doubt, and the search for meaning in ordinary life. He is the author of After the Silence, a collection of poetry shaped by questions of absence, longing, and grace. He lives in Alabama with his wife and seven children.