Responsibility
It can't have escaped the notice of anyone following this blog (which, I'm pretty sure, is nobody) that the last several weeks have featured copies of sermons I've given a the Basin Bible Church in Glennallen Alaska. I do not apologize for this because spiritual issues are endemic to the highest aesthetic considerations. I intend to keep posting such comments, but this week I gave a sermon on evangelism, the main point of which was that we are not required by the directives of Jesus to talk anybody into anything they don't want to be talked into. It was a long sermon that borrowed heavily from internet writers on the subject, and I did not feel that it had anything significant to add to the topic of art, inspiration, or genius.
However, the problem of gifted people's responsibility to humanity is indeed a weighty one, and I have thought deeply about it. One of my major disappointments about never having made it as a composer, was that I felt I had a message to give to the world that was important and could influence the young. I now realize that this vanity of vanities was placing the sins of the world on my own shoulders, and now I am free to be nobody and let the world solve its own problems--they'll have to anyway.
May 15, 2011
Glennallen, AK
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