Art and Faith Empower Us to “Allay Doubt,” Says Prize-Winning Author

Author Alice McDermott sees a strong connection between struggling with her Catholic faith and the creative process. “Neither one guarantees success,” she observed recently. “They strive to apprehend some perfection that we suspect is unattainable, but which we seek to achieve.”

McDermott expanded on that theme in “Faith and Literature,” a lecture she delivered to nearly 150 students, faculty, alumni and friends at St. John’s University’s Queens campus on April 2. Close to 40 people attended the same lecture at the Staten Island campus on April 16.  

A three-time Pulitzer Prize finalist and 1998 National Book Award winner, McDermott currently holds the 2012 Peter and Margaret D’Angelo Endowed Chair for the Humanities in St. John’s College of Liberal Arts and Sciences. She is spending the spring semester at the University, teaching a fiction-writing workshop and meeting with students and faculty in addition to delivering these two lectures.

Remaking the World

Art, said McDermott, often begins in doubt. Artists ask themselves whether they are up to the task of creating. They wonder if their vision is clear enough, and may even question their sanity for undertaking such a venture. “Every work begins with a vague ideal, the barely understood notion of a novel’s perfect rhythm, shape and meaning. It is the beating heart of what compels us to write.”

The “process of faith,” McDermott stressed, often has a similar start. “We begin in doubt — in ourselves, in our capacity to believe, in our ability to remain steady in belief.” The great promises of the Church, she added, “can sound like wishful thinking.”

Catholics “are driven to remake the world into something more reasonable and just,” she observed. “We intuit the form of that perfection in Christ. We are driven to pursue it, knowing we are not up to it, but we strive nevertheless. Sometimes, in our daily pursuits, as in art, we stumble on moments of insight, inspiration and grace that for an instant allay doubt.”

These are moments many of McDermott’s characters know well. “I write about the Church,” she explained, “because it provides them with a language for things they wouldn’t be able to articulate.” Noting these themes, readers often ask McDermott to discuss subjects relating to Catholicism.

‘A Catholic Writer’

A self-professed “Cradle Catholic,” McDermott stressed that the promise of Christianity speaks to the longing her characters feel throughout their lives, helping them to make sense of notions such as suffering, loss and love.

McDermott turned away from her faith for a time, and during her “apostate years” she found that the questions Catholicism taught her to raise “were currently under consideration in the world’s great literature — not answered, but under long, serious, eloquent consideration.”

“I am a Catholic writer,” she said, “because my faith taught me to seek those answers — to reflect on mortality, to rail against suffering, to consider the grace by which we endure, and the love that proposes to redeem. It made me a lover of poetry and fiction, and eventually I decided to try my hand at it.”

That faith, she added, informs her writing. “It’s utterly impossible to leave your own experience out of it.”

Artistic inspiration and religious faith come from years of long effort, McDermott said — and, at times, working in the dark. “In moments of passionate intuition, it arrives in the usual and miraculous confluence of ordinary events. It is sustained by doubt and is the work of a lifetime.”