The Beginning and End of Art
The Beginning and End of Art
An Interview with Jon Guerra by Andrew Horning
“Kid, strum that old guitar
The Lord will strum your heart
For that’s how all your best songs start”
These lines from “Teach Us That One Song” off Jon Guerra’s album, Keeper of Days, gives us a window into his creative process. Guerra calls his work devotional music. His songs are not so much intended for congregational worship, but rather, meant to fuel and express a quiet, prayerful attitude toward God. As I talked with Guerra on a cool autumn day, it became clear that his music flows from a life where devotion fuels art and art fuels devotion. For Guerra, the two go hand in hand.
Christian Wiman once said, “Prayer is the ultimate articulation toward which all poetry is tending.” Guerra broadens this idea by saying, “Prayer is the ultimate articulation toward which all art is always tending.” Like a stream that will always travel downhill or a compass that points north, art tends toward God.
Guerra defines art as “a bit of organized chaos,” something “whittled down to its essence” and directed towards God. This is, of course, a complicated reality. Not all art is only one step removed from God. However, in the case of devotional music, the direction towards God is clear. He explains further: “I have found that because of the way I’m wired, because of my sensibilities, because of my history, because of the music I like, the books I read, art has a way of unlocking certain parts of my person that then feels very helpful in prayer.”
Guerra has a clear memory of when this first happened for him: “My very first experience with art unlocking was really when I was twelve. I went on a missions trip and the youth pastor got up and started playing some worship songs on his Taylor Guitar. There were maybe fifteen kids in the room. I had just moved from Houston, Texas to Wheaton, Illinois and I was in a really tender spot as a kid. I think it was an experience of the Holy Spirit through art. The art itself wasn’t blazing. It was just unplugged with kids in a dingy room singing. But it did something to me. It set me on a trajectory that I’m still on.”
With this trajectory, Guerra says, “If music can do this, I just want more of that…” Quoting George Herbert, he adds, “‘You have made a bait of pleasure.’ For me, art has kind of been that. It’s been this bait that I follow and I’m always just a couple steps behind where God just was when I follow that trail.” For Guerra, art is a signpost along the path that leads to God’s presence, though as Guerra so artfully said, always a few steps behind.
“Ideally in prayer, we are naked before God. I think when Jesus says, ‘go into your closet and shut the door,’ He’s saying a million things, maybe one of which is, ‘consider God and God alone.’ Don’t think about what you’re looking like, don’t think about appearances.” Guerra admits that this is hard to do. So much of our normal lives revolve around appearances both for better and worse.
“The rules of being polite at a grocery store,” he says, “are governed by appearances, as it should be.” But our lives of prayer should look different: “Prayer is meant to be just the soul connecting with God.” Guerra quotes another Herbert poem, where prayer is “church’s banquet, God’s breath in man returning to its birth, heart in pilgrimage, soul in paraphrase… What I found as I was starting to make the record was that my songs just felt more alive when I began with prayer. And my prayers almost felt like they found their ultimate articulation when it went from prayer to music.” Guerra has found that the movement from prayer to creation results in better art. To quote his lyrics again: “that’s how all your best songs start.”
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To further connect devotional music and prayer, Guerra is trying to do with his art what he wants his life of devotion to be: “The reason I call it devotional music is because this is just my honest self in a song, edited ad nauseam, but to try to distill it to its most vulnerable core. So I call it devotional because ultimately that’s what I want my prayer life to be, that’s what I want my life in God to be: stripped and distilled down to the core.”
Moving from devotion and prayer to the work of creativity is not always a fluid transition. It can feel disjointed. However, God can be found even in the mundane details of creativity. Guerra references Brother Lawrence talking about “doing dishes as an act of prayer.” Even when devotion and work feel unrelated, the work can still be approached with a prayerful disposition. Guerra mentions a crucifix that sits on his desk: “It feels very meaningful to me that it’s right by my speaker. It’s like I want something else to be coming through.” Come good days or hard ones, “at its best,” Guerra says, “it really is like an act of prayer.”
Guerra put this devotional approach to art into practice while writing and recording his most recent album, Keeper of Days. He describes the album as “a collaboration with silence.” Talking about the process, he says, “When I made this record, I was living in Chicago and we had a studio right downtown Chicago. I lived up north in a little borough called Edgewater, a 35 minute train ride [from downtown]. So I would take the train in the morning. Usually it was very packed and I would just kind of sit in quiet and just hear the train and look at people. There was something very still about that time. I would walk four blocks to my studio off of the Van Buren Red Line stop. I’d go in and just kind of wait. The mornings were just waiting. I didn’t turn anything on. It really was just a silence and a quiet. And almost past the point where you’re saying, ‘ok I feel nervous that I’m not being productive.’ Maybe one layer past that and then I would pick up my guitar or turn on the piano and I’d just quietly break that silence with a chord or a note. When I listen back to the record now, the quiet and the silence is very much interwoven into it. There’s a lot of space in some of the tracks. It always felt full but listening back I think those mornings of quiet really came out.” The idea of art flowing from and fueling devotion is not just a theory. Guerra can see and hear a tangible difference in his work when it comes from a place of quiet devotion.
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Part of being able to create this devotional art is being mindful of one’s own heart. If the goal is to create art that in some way captures what pure devotion should be, artists need to be aware of the state of their own devotion. Guerra says, “try to be honest with yourself about why you’re doing what you’re doing. I think we can be mysteries unto ourselves. It’s nothing to be anxious about but really honestly figure out why you’re doing what you’re doing. I think as artists we really can collaborate and traffic in the same realm that the Spirit traffics in.” No matter the art form, Guerra says that the experience is deeper when there is a purity about the artist. He compares it to an internal tuning fork that is “resonating with the tuning fork you’re trying to hit with your work.” In Guerra’s experience, “it’s very difficult for me to even know if I’m hitting the mark when I’m completely shriveled up with envy or anger. So be mindful of what is in you and really attend to that.”
Being a devotional artist is not always easy. It comes with hopes and dreams but also sacrifices and loss. “I’ve had to cobble together several different jobs through the years just to stay on the path, but to me, it feels like this is a vocation. This is what I’m meant to contribute to the world and so I will wear the different hats, not always gladly, sometimes begrudgingly, but I’ll do it because both my wife and I have a sense that this is what we are meant to do. And that’s very helpful when it gets very hard. When your friends start to buy and sell houses and are pushing their 401ks forward and their savings are growing, and you’re not because you’re making art for God, then you need to have a good reason for that. Because that will come and that kind of temptation to despair is definitely there on the hard days.”
While the path may be difficult, Guerra urges people to follow it: “If you feel nudged to that then please listen to it, because there’s not a lot of people doing that kind of work. There’s a lot of people trying to be famous and make hits and trying to make a living which isn’t bad. There’s a lot of people trying to do those other things, there’s not a lot of people trying to have their work burn with something else and sometimes that takes a really long time.” The value of art that is fueled by and fuels devotion is worth the potential cost. Guerra urges artists: “Please do it. Please be patient.”
Andrew Horning
Writer & Musician
Find Jon Guerra’s work here