Shifting Culture
On Shifting Culture we have conversations at the intersection of faith, culture, justice, and the way of Jesus. Hosted by Joshua Johnson, this podcast features long-form conversations with authors, theologians, artists, and cultural thinkers to trace how embodied love, courage, and creative faithfulness offer a culture of real healing and hope.
Shifting Culture
Ep. 441 Merideth Hite Estevez - Art is How God Loves Us
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In this episode, Merideth Hite Estevez joins me to talk about what happens when a lifetime of chasing excellence quietly empties out the joy that started it all. We dig into the idols hiding inside performance and perfectionism, why she redefines art not as a talent for the gifted few but as something anyone can do out of love, and what it means to create as an act of worship instead of proof of worth. It's a conversation about shame, recovery, and the spiritual thread running through every creative act - whether you call yourself an artist or not.
Dr. Merideth Hite Estevez is a coach, educator, oboist, and author of The Artist’s Joy. Through her workshops, her award-winning podcast Artists for Joy, and her one-to-one coaching, she is a spiritual space-maker for artists, leading thousands in various fields to creative recovery. Dr. Estevez has performed with top orchestras and holds degrees in oboe from The Juilliard School and Yale School of Music. Her writing, which Publishers Weekly calls “expansive and joyful,” illuminates the spiritual journey of the artist. Her next book, Art Is How God Loves Us, debuts in July 2026. She hails from Abbeville, SC, but now lives in Metro Detroit, Michigan, with her husband, Rev. Dr. Edwin Estevez, and their two children.
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Everything beautiful and everything lovely about this world was created by God, and so we're invited in that same love to create beauty ourselves and to create a life that is beautiful, and that you know we don't have to understand the theory of art, we just have to work on paying attention and inhabit, like surrendering to inhabit it and to to let it lead us into a deeper love and deeper joy that we can even imagine.
Joshua Johnson:Hello. Hello, and welcome to the Shifting Culture podcast, in which we have conversations about the culture we create and the impact we could make. We long to see the body of Christ look like Jesus. I'm your host, Joshua Johnson. Our guest today, Meredith Haight Estevez, spent years training to become one of the best oboists in the world, and you know what happened in the midst of all of that, it's what happens to a lot of us. She turned her craft into proof of her worth. She was chasing achievement to outrun shame somewhere, and all of that performing and all of that anxiety that it produced, the joy of just playing, the joy of creating and music went away. It took a used copy of Julia Cameron's The Artist's Way, handed to her by her husband, to put her back on the path, and that recovery became what she does now. She helps 1000s of artists reconnect their creative lives to their spiritual ones. And now Meredith is a creative coach. She's the host of the podcast Artist for Joy and author of the new book, Art Is How God Loves Us. In this conversation, we talk about the idols we build out of performance, the disordered loves hiding underneath perfectionism, and the gig economy pressure to turn every craft into content, and what it means to redefine art itself, not as talent for the elite few, but as something anyone can do out of love rather than necessity. If art is how God loves us, what does that mean for us as people who are beloved as people who are loved by God. What do we do in return to Him as worship? She redefines art as Adam's responding to transcendence, and I love that it is something that we do in response to being beloved by God, so what would shift in you and your own creativity in your own life if you believed that your creativity was already loved, that you were already loved before you ever did anything. So join us. Here is my conversation with Meredith Hight Esteves. Meredith, welcome. Welcome to Shifting Culture. So excited to have you on. Thanks for joining me.
Merideth Hite Estevez:Thank you, Joshua, for having me.
Joshua Johnson:Excited to dive into your new book, Art is how God loves us. You really take that a little bit from a Mekoto Fujimura quote from his Faith and Art book, God creates out of love, not necessity. What really resonated with you with when you thought about art and God and love and creativity? What did that do for you? Why'd you glom on to that?
Merideth Hite Estevez:I realized when I read that quote that I had created out of necessity instead of out of love. I am a Juilliard-trained oboist, and I went to 12 years of college at Ivy Leagues, and some of the best world music schools in the world. And I got to the end of that 12 years of higher education in music, and I had really lost my joy, for I had forgotten the spiritual connection that I used to feel with music as a kid, and so since I graduated, I've been on a journey, it's, you know, almost been 20 years ago at this point, I'm looking for ways to connect my spiritual life with my creative life, because I really feel like that has been the central key in recovering my joy, but also finding sustainability and finding creativity to be a fulfilling process of seeking well-being, not a way for me to prove my value and prove my worth. And so when I read that book, Art and Faith by Makoto Fujimura, and I came across that quote, God creates out of love, not necessity. I was like, yeah, that there's a whole book in there. So I, I started remembering and sort of paying attention to moments where I had felt God speak to me through music and art and sculpture and trees and rivers and created things. Yes, and then I started looking for examples of that in literature, in novels, in other nonfiction books I read, and they were everywhere. And so the book is really a celebration of how art speaks of God's love, and how if God's creative power is synonymous with God's love, then maybe every time we seek to create and get into creativity as a spiritual practice, then we can be part of that love, experiencing it, and to share it.
Joshua Johnson:Why do you think that we've maybe missed some aspect of God's love out of creativity, and our love out of creativity? Like, where did we miss this love aspect of it.
Merideth Hite Estevez:Well, I think it goes along with idol worship, sort of the whole theme of the way we, we disorder our loves, right? I think for me, I had turned my performance into an idol, right? I had, I thought that if I just achieved a little bit more, and I could possibly outrun this shame that I feel and have felt since childhood, that I just wanted to perform my way to being worthy, and, and I think it's really common in my coaching practice where I work with artists to help them connect their spiritual life to their creative lives. I think that's a really common thing when we turn our crafts into content and we're tempted to make everything into our next side hustle and we lose that impulse to connect with God and create from a spiritual place,
Joshua Johnson:it's a difficult time that we live in for that, right, because everything we think that we have to throw it up there, let everybody in the world try to talk to us about our art, say, is it good enough? It's very performance-oriented, performance-based, and we're think that we live in a, in a new, newer world than it was in the industrial revolution, that we make a lot of, we make money out of, like, our own. It's like a gig economy, right? So we're trying to, like, produce something. As you were, like, moving out of the space of, like, losing some of your joy and creativity, and maybe thinking things were about perfection and performance, and you know, there was no joy left in art. How did you start to get some of that joy back to know that that art isn't just about performance and perfection?
Merideth Hite Estevez:Yeah, well, I'll say I always give credit to Julia Cameron for putting me back on the right path, because her book, The Artist's Way, which is one of the top selling self-help books of all time. It was the subtitle is A Spiritual Path to Higher Creativity. My husband, who is a Presbyterian minister, he sort of like, gently, as husbands do, sort of like, hey, you should read this book, you know, like, and because he had read about it, I guess, in seminary or in college, and somehow I, with all my training and Musea, nobody had ever told me about that book. We had been working on theory and scales and making reads in my world, and so that book was really profoundly impactful, not only in helping me with my own recovery, but helping me experience God's call on my life to for this vocation to invite artists into a more wholehearted spiritual conversation through their work, and so it was, it was, you know, right when I left New York and Chicago and found my myself married and living outside of Philadelphia and in Wilmington, Delaware, and Edwin gave me that book, and I started leading those creative clusters in person, and then it, when Covid hit, it all went online, which, which actually was profoundly impactful, because then we could reach more people, and we could, you know, so my latest creative cluster, you know, had, you know, 1000 people registered from all over the world just to talk about these, these ideas that Julia Cameron put forth, and so I've really felt like that when I, when I was at my lowest low, that book met me where I was, and reminded me how much God loved me, and how much creativity was an expression of God's love, and helped me, I hope, to help others to find that too.
Joshua Johnson:In your book, you talk about art, you use a new acronym, Adams Responding to Transcendence, and you're talking about art as evidence of a like this creating spirit calling matter deeper into spiritual reality, the reality of what really is there. How do you think that art and creativity, like, gets us to a place of like what is really real, what's underneath the surface of what we think is reality.
Merideth Hite Estevez:Yeah, I love that question. Thank you for allowing me to talk about art. Adams responding to. Transcendence, because that's really one of my favorite things about the book, is is redefining art, which is a word that comes from the Latin word ours, which is connected to skilled labor. Okay, so very from the very beginning, we've been talking about art in relationship to skill, and I think that that idea can be really harmful for both professional artists and amateurs, or those who, and by the way, the word amateur comes from the root to love, right, for the love of something, you do it for the love of it, and so we've, we've made art into this capital A only for certain people, elitist thing that only some people can do, and I wanted to find a new definition to invite people who might not consider themselves artists with a capital A to pick up the book and realize that they too are made of atoms and they too can respond to the transcendence that's already among us, that's here and in process in creation each and every new day that God is making, and I think that just like in the conversation we were having at the beginning that we tend, we want to see product, we want to see value, and and we tend to weigh something's worthiness on how useful it is, and and we're a product of our culture, but I think that the reason why in the whole Timothy Chalamet conversation, I don't know if you saw that, where he talked about the decline of the arts, you know, and, and how he doesn't want to be associated with about ballet and opera, and I really resonated with not what he said, but with the sentiment of what he said, because I, as a classically trained musician, I have had to sing for my supper and prove to people why the oboe matters, but I think what's at the heart of that, especially in terms of shifting culture and thinking of art beyond skilled labor, is that this, this decline of the arts is really a spiritual crisis. It's really a well-being crisis. We keep trying to make art be content, and we want it to, we want to understand it, and we read the placards, and we read the books, and we get obsessed with the theories, and we miss out on this invitation to inhabit it, to to experience it as a thin place to speak to the spiritual.
Joshua Johnson:Go to your thin place, like, what, what does that look like, and speak to what is a thin place for people.
Merideth Hite Estevez:Sure. So, well, um, let me define it, in case no one's heard that term before. It is a.. it's from a Celtic spirituality, and it's the name for a place where you.. the distance or the wall between this world here and the spiritual world is thinnest, and so where we feel the goosebumps, the tears in our eyes, the bubbling up of joy, the connection, and the closeness of God's love, and really, the, the book is my new book, Art is How God Loves Us, is really a celebration of those thin places through art, but I'll tell you about one. I was sitting in my final ear training exam at Juilliard, and ear training is what is the fancy term for where we learn how to hear music, so that anytime that something plays, we'll be able to write it down or to analyze it. And it was very, very stressful. The class was really difficult, because I had come up in the wrong school of ear training. I had learned movable dough, which is like solfege, like dough remi, and Miss Cox at Juilliard wanted me to sing in fixed dough, where the note C is always dough, etc. etc. And so this class, for my perfectionistic doctoral student self, was a very difficult psychological torture, really, to go in there and to feel like I had, I was getting just, I ended up passing with a B minus, but I'll just tell you, it was, it took a lot out of me, that, that during that program, so we were sitting in that class, it was my final exam, and everyone was, was supposed to recite in fixed dough soul, sing in front of everyone a piece from their instruments repertoire, and I was, you know, shaking. I had to stop drinking coffee on the days I had ear training, and I was looking down at the music that I was going to recite, the Strauss O book and shared a second movement, and all of a sudden one of my, my classmates stood up, and I barely knew him. He didn't really speak a word to anyone, very quiet. He was a pianist, and he stood up, and he started singing a melody from a Chopin piece on Dante Spianato, which you should Google it. It's a beautiful, beautiful piece. And he started singing this melody, and it gives me goosebumps to even talk about it now. All of a sudden, it was like a door was opened to a to a to and it reminded me it was, it was like God had been there all along, and in that little ear training exam with a with a pianist who didn't have a really especially great voice, and as a wind player I'm always looking for how people are breathing, and he wasn't breathing, quote unquote, right, but somehow. Through it all, that melody reminded me of what I love about music and what I love about God, which is this childlike, abundant, playful richness. I mean, it sounded like a melody that I had heard before, like I knew it, like a lullaby or something, but I, it was a totally new piece of music to me, and I teared up in that exam, and I wasn't crying because I was nervous or sad. I cried many times in that room for that reason, but it was almost like God was, was saying, you know, I'm still here, it's still here, it's still possible to find your way back. It can be as, as simple as a tree blooming this time of year, or you know, a piece of fine art, or something your kid makes, or a little poem your my daughter wrote poems this month for April Poetry Month. You know, it's there are so once you start noticing them and naming them, they can be everywhere.
Joshua Johnson:Those sort of moments, it feels to me like what they do to me, like before we started this conversation, I was listening to an album from Ray, and Ray's new album gives is like it's about hope in the midst of despair, and the music, the songwriting, everything about this album, these songs may contain hope, is the name of it. It gives me an imagination for new life, for love in the world, where there is despair, where there's chaos, where there's, there's difficult things that feels like, like even you know something like you, that melody that you heard there, there's a jumping off point that it's not just for that moment, but it feels like there's a new imagination that could take place for how the world truly is. I don't know what to do with the with that to get it to the place of my life is going to change just a little bit to see some of this love come to fruition in this world. What do we do with those thin moments? What do we do with those moments to say, okay, I have an imagination for something better.
Merideth Hite Estevez:I think there's that's an invitation to submit to the creative process and listen for what is next that will come through you, because sometimes another reason why we often get discouraged in these thin clothes moments is like we we see hear the music and we're like, well, I'll never write a melody like that, or I'll never write a song as good as that. What's the point, you know? And I always recognize now, like that's not the voice of God, that's the voice of fear, and that's me running from the call of love, right, to step into the difficulties that love invites us to, right? Like, I was just listening to your conversation, we were talking about it before we logged on with Tish Harrison Warren about sometimes we have love calls us into doing hard things and to needing to to surrender, and so I think that's once once we have those, and that's I say in the book, like once I heard that melody in that exam, I wish that I could say, like, oh, and then I let go of all my problems and my shame, and I got over it, and I got over myself, and just started being joyful again. It's like, well, no, in fact, I like walked around New York City, and like, listened to that song in my headphones for a couple of months, and then I just, you know, sewed back up the armor of trying to get through it, and I, you know, three years later I finished the program, right, and so maybe seeing them too as beyond an invitation to create an invitation to let a seed be planted and watered within you, and trusting that God will bring the growth,
Joshua Johnson:you write through three major sections of your book, right, the spark of finding God as artists, there the shadow, which is the really companion in the darkness art, is and source art is the way back to who we are ourselves, which, as we're walking through some of those, if we get into the shadow, if we get into the chaos, when you're in the midst of really some hard, difficult times, what helps you get back to your creative self, that you are like your image-bearing self? When you, you look at the world and the chaos of the world, what helps get you back there?
Merideth Hite Estevez:The shadow portion of the book is really my favorite. It was my favorite part to write. I'm an Enneagram four, and so I love to go into the shadows. So I loved that part, and the work of art I'll mention now about that, because it goes connect next to your question, is is a sculpture by Ruth Duckworth, who is a German. A American, she, she immigrated to America in this, in the 60s. It's a sculpture made of clay, and usually clay is not, you know, the great artists, quote unquote, sculpt from marble, right, or bronze, but not clay. And so Ruth Duckworth, really, she wanted to work in clay, and she made this sculpture of creation, and it was a really powerful work of art to consider by the light of a trip to Germany, where we studied, we went to Dachau, and we looked at the Holocaust and World War Two history and art of those times, and Ruth Duckworth's sculpture of creation, in the middle there's this sort of chaotic primordial goo, and it's dark and chaotic, like you described, and and then she, it's a spiral, and on the way around she has humans and animals, and you know, separating the sky and the clouds, and then on the seventh day, the day of rest, that chaos, that primordial color and darkness and and disorder comes back. I sort of read that she, she wrote about it and said that she had great anxiety around the climate, and this was back in the 80s. I mean, she was really like talking about her concerns for the future of our planet and our world, but for me, that that art, that expression of art, to hold the question of, okay, so you know, is God creating still, and are we going to be part of it? And what, there is chaos here now, and so what does that mean, and how can I be a part of the recreation, the co-creation with God today, and I loved that sculpture, because we went on a trip to see Dachau, and it gave me permission to sort of let art hold the questions in the air, and the injustice, and the great pain, and great grief, and begging God to answer questions, and you know, if God is our potter, God works in clay too, and so finding, you know, the hope emits the chaos for me. It means finding art that allows those questions to stay there and not have to have them have all the answers, and to look for places that, you know, songs that these songs could contain hope like that, that invite us amidst the chaos, don't deny it, but to be a light and to find to find God's love in the act of creation.
Joshua Johnson:What does good art look like, especially when it comes to like art and faith?
Merideth Hite Estevez:Yeah, I think I, for me as a professional artist with some, with a lot of training, I've had to like wipe the word good from my vocabulary because, because sometimes that's the question that that question leads me down a road away from curiosity and more towards judgment, and so, and I'm really interested, especially with my coaching clients and people I work with, who are very blocked and haven't made art in decades or years, I want them to make bad art, you know. I want them to make art. Period. I want them to work with the atoms that are already responding to transcendence here and now, and to begin to be part of the process instead of looking for the product, and so I think somebody asked me on another interview about, you know, what do you think about Christian movies that are there to convert people, and like, and I thought I think they wanted me to say, like, something rude or be have a hot take instead. I said, isn't it amazing that there's art for everyone? I mean, truly, I could be the judge, and trust me, I have been the judge in my of myself and of my children, of my family, and many, many other people, but I, that never brought me joy. It made me feel a little righteous, self-righteous sometimes. But I want to ask, not is the art good, but does it connect? Can I connect with it, and sometimes it's not going to connect with me, but that doesn't mean it's not good. It can connect with someone, and maybe the question for you, if you're an artist and you're listening to this, like, how do I know if my art is good? It's like, well, do you like it, and if not, you know, could you find something in it that you like, and you know, seeing is again, you have to love this process of creating and seeing your life as a work of art, instead of becoming obsessed or becoming too concerned with naming it as naming it good,
Joshua Johnson:and I think when we try to name it good, what we're trying to do is figuring out what is the process towards what you just said is process towards connection? If I'm trying to maybe create out of maybe a false sense of identity of who I am or create out of like what people want instead of how I can connect with people like. Then I think the process is maybe a little off, totally. So, if we could get back into a process of connection and love, I think that could, that could do wonders for me. You have a section of your book, and you're talking about identity and formation and who we are and getting back into really our truest selves as beloved in this chapter you talk about the Shaker tune simple gifts when you were hearing it in its different forms and stages and Appalachian Song and others, how did that speak to identity and why do we need to get down as artists into our truest identity.
Merideth Hite Estevez:I wrote that chapter when I, when I had been to my bibliography class, which was.. I didn't mean to write a book about, like, with exact taking down my teacher at Juilliard, like they were great. I was the problem this one class bib bibliography, we had to study all of these different, you know, how to research. Anybody who has a doctorate took a bibliography class of something, and in bibliography is in music, you have to learn about tune indexes, and there's this huge book somewhere on in some library that has every single melody that composers have ever written in a particular genre, and so in hymns it's called hymnity, and so the tune indexes of hymns have, like, the name, you know, simple gifts, and it'll have different iterations of that tune, you know, made most famous in Aaron Copeland's Appalachian Spring, but you know, also exists as a hymn in the Methodist hymnal called The Lord of the Dance. Sorry, I grew up United Methodist, and that was one of our bangers. So, when I read in that hit tune index, the different iterations of the same melody, right? It was a melody that was written for a dance, it was a shaker dance, it was supposed to be up tempo, quote unquote, supposed to be, and different people had interpreted it, and translated it, and transfigured it through different iterations and different ensembles and different orchestrations, and that as a metaphor for our identity really hit me, because I had latched on to that tune as a kid in three of its different forms, and I saw the beauty in each of them, just like I had been named, you know, a classical musician, a daughter, you know, my mom always called me Birdie because I was always flying away. I'm a mom, I'm a wife, I do all these things, and we're tempted, I think, especially at different phases of our lives, to look at our identity and look at what the world calls us, the world's iterations of our tune, our melody, and take that to be the truest sense of who we are, and I loved this idea of thinking that maybe God, only God, knows my tune name, that only there's the iteration of me that exists in some pure form, my true self, maybe that I, when I am in centering prayer, and when I'm closest to God, when I'm in those thin places like that, I'm being reminded of my, my true name, my true song that was given to me at birth, and so I, I think we, we must work hard in the world, and maybe work hard is not the right word, because a lot of times it's about surrender, it's not about working right, it's like it's about letting go that kenosis of like letting God less of me and more of God, and remembering who we are and whose we are.
Joshua Johnson:Can art help me get down to my truest song? Can God love me in that way to find my true song, and the song that I was born with? Like, is that possible? That art can help.
Merideth Hite Estevez:I do. I think so. Obviously, I'm a convert, but I'm curious to hear from you. You know what? What holds you back from from art experience, art calling you into your truest self?
Joshua Johnson:For me, it's about, you know, performance. Am I good enough? It hits on the whole, you know, bunch of things that I've needed healing from that then form my identity, form who I am, and so it's shame and hiding if I'm not good enough. So it's a simple thing when somebody tells you growing up that you're you're the best, and then you form like, if I'm not the best, then it means I'm no good, so that means that when I'm want to actually create, I want to create the best thing, and it's like, well, that's not possible, so, so that hinders me, yeah,
Merideth Hite Estevez:right, yeah, of course, me too, and I've been really struggling, because I kind of won't say that I healed totally, but I got over a lot of my seeking my validation through Muzk. I did a lot of work around that, and you know, the early 2020s and that, that's my been my, that was really what my reverse book was about. But now I think in this phase I'm having to, you know, as always. The same temptation to now I'm putting my performance on my writing and my social media, and how successful this book is going to be, and so I read about this recently. I have to sort of check myself before I wreck myself at all times, but the key that has been in this phase is is choosing to separate my creative impulse from my content creation, and it's not that content can't also be spiritual and deeply inspired, and having a conversation with faith, like, yes, but when I'm only creating for the critic, or for the followers, or for the eyes of others, there's something I'm holding back that I'm not really giving over to God, and so I'm working on creating writing out of the words that I feel that bubble up, not because I want to turn them into a Substack post, but because I feel that I'm called to say them, and I'm called to notice and pay attention to the beauty and the poems that are right around me, and I just, you know, make myself, and you have to have some devotion to it. I don't use the word discipline, because discipline brings back that try-hard sense in me. I want to be devoted to creation for the purposes of having a conversation with God more than I am devoted to creating for accolades and even ministry sharing with others.
Joshua Johnson:How do we do that if everybody is an artist, right? If we are creators like this is who we are as human, how do we do that if you're not a professional or you don't like, see yourself as someone who, who creates like the art thing, whatever, be painting or music, or you know, whatever it is, writing, what, what does it look like every day to pay attention and to become your creative self?
Merideth Hite Estevez:Well, I think that Eric Booth's definition, he's a writer and a teaching artist. He defines creativity as making things you care about, and if art is atoms responding to transcendence, then being an artist is to use the atoms that are already responding to transcendence in whatever form they're in in your life, and to create things you care about, and that looks like the way you raise your kids, it looks like the music you pick to sing along to in your car ride, where that nobody's going to hear the recipe you choose to make for your family for dinner, like it's it's not something that you have to choose to be, it's something that you name ways that you already are, and enjoy the conversation you're having with the spiritual around, you know, cutting into a ripe avocado, and you know, choosing even sports, even the physical act of moving. You might not think, like, I'm not an artist if I'm like playing pickleball, but the way you play with your teammate, the way you move your body, the kind of racket you choose, you know, those little things are choices you're responding as an atom yourself to to creating a life that you love, and I think that that makes everyone an artist, because being an artist does not mean you need skill or need to be good, it needs, it means you, it's something that you already are, that you can find deep joy and love by naming that, that's part of your identity,
Joshua Johnson:since we're already doing that. Most people go through life not paying attention to the stuff that they're already doing, right? So, as our brains, like 90% of our decisions that we make are like automatic, they're unconscious during the day, and so a lot of times I go through life, and I'm, don't feel like I'm like going through life as an artist, as a creative, I feel like I'm going through life as a robot sometimes, and just making decisions. Are there practices, things to help us like slow down and pay attention to, like craft some of this within us, so that we can like pay attention to the creativity of it all, of who we truly are, and not just the unconscious activity that we do all day.
Merideth Hite Estevez:Sure, I'll give you two things: one is one is hard, and the other one is a little easier. I am a tried and true follower in the belief that the morning pages, which is Julia, one of Julia Cameron's basic tools, it's the three pages long hand stream of consciousness writing every morning before you know, as soon as you wake up, before your coffee, and like people like, but I want to drink my coffee, it's fine, like just like centering prayer, the only wrong way to do it is not doing it, and so just getting up and slowing down, and I like it, and people are like, well, I have trouble with my arm, and I don't want to do long hand, and that's fine. If you wanted to, like, type your morning pages, you can, again, whatever is cool, but the fact that if you do slow down and physically write them, it may. It makes you not only have to go slower, but you, you see your thoughts, and so that is my number one tool for mental clarity, finding, you know, slowing down, not feeling like a robot, feeling human. The morning pages will do that, and you may find Julia Cameron talks about the page and a half truth point that you really have to write a page and a half before you really get to what you're really feeling or what's really in there, and so if you feel like you're complaining and just whining about how tired you are for a page, that's okay, it's just part of the process, and I kind of see that as like rinsing out the espresso machine before you make your coffee, that it's like okay, let's move some of this junk so I can get to the deep, the real thoughts, the ones that feel most like me. So that's the first one, and the second one is an exercise for my book. Throughout each chapter in the book, I have these things called Ars Nova, which is a Latin term for new art, and my favorite Ars Nova exercise in the book is one called Let Art Be Light, and so what you do is you, you pick a work of art, and it can be a tree in your backyard, or it can be a work of fine art in a museum, and before you view it, you pick an exercise, you pick a challenge, or something, a difficult thing in your life that you want to shift your mindset around, or change your mind around, and so you name, you know, I'm really grieving, you know, this news, or I am deeply disturbed by the news today about this or that justice issue, and you, you then you, you name your challenge, rename the thing that's difficult, and you look at the work of art, and you pray in the moment, and ask God to shed light through the work of art on your next move, or your shift that you could make, and so let letting art be a light, viewing art as a lens, as a thin place, will help you name ways in which you can step into just slight shifts of mindset, slight shifts of lens, and find more joy, and see, be more open to the way that God is moving here and now.
Joshua Johnson:Both of those are really helpful for us to be creative, and I think that art can help us encounter God. What does that look like to encounter God through art?
Merideth Hite Estevez:For me, it looks like having my attention given back to me, it's almost like, you know, I give my attention away to many things that distract me, and so when I encounter God in a work of art, whether it be a song that comes on the Spotify list or a sunset, you know, we have an agreement in our house, if there's a beautiful sunset, we yell"sunset alert" and everybody drops what they're doing and comes into the patio, and looks at it with us, and it's like an attention that encounter for me is like, come, come to me, is what I feel God saying in those moments, and like, get here is your attention, it's being returned to me again, and I, and I get to choose to step into it, and so, yes, maybe the encounter of seeking God, and through art, the first thing is to just be awake and open to the encounters, and to listen for when somebody yells sunset alert, and stop, stop what you're doing. I've, they've made me like get out of the shower, and like come in there, and like dripping wet bathrobe before. That's how serious my children are about sunset alerts, and so looking at, yeah, looking at that encounter, seeing God, and just finding the attention, and you know, I don't want to make turn this whole art viewing thing as like every time I look at art, I, you know, get slammed in the head by by a message from God, it's not, it's not like that, but I do feel like ever since I wrote this book and started looking for ways that God spoke through created things, human-made and natural, I am more likely to see them. It's sort of like the more coincidences you name, the more coincidences you have. It's like, oh, it's actually been there all along, and I just had to slow down enough to notice it.
Joshua Johnson:What was the last one you noticed?
Merideth Hite Estevez:Well, there's a road that I walk every morning. I try to do this loop in our neighborhood. I drop my kids off at the top of our hill. We live in the suburbs in Michigan, and this time of year, Michigan, the weather is all over the place. I'm telling you, it's like one day it's snowing in April, and then it's like beautiful, 80 degrees, and so honestly, I love the seasons, and I love spring in Michigan, because it, it's just kind of feisty, and I enjoy that, like feistiness of weather. I grew up in South Carolina, where it was just hot, and then slightly less hot, but there's this road on my walk, and it's most of the roads here are paved, but occasionally in Michigan you'll find these unpaved residential streets, and so I turn on there, and every morning I'm looking for how dry is this muddy road going to be, because one day it's frozen, and then it melts, and it gets super slushy, and I have to determine whether I'm wearing the right shoes. News, and this morning the sun was out, and it was still a little chilly, but the road was really starting to dry, and I, you know, it's just a simple thing of just, no, like, and I felt God sort of stopping me in my tracks, and being like, I'm, you know, I am making all things new, it might not be in your timeline, and it might even stow again, but just noticing how dry the land is, being attentive enough to return again and again to that road to see to see what God is doing there has been one way that I have felt God speaking through created things, the last one that was a couple hours ago,
Joshua Johnson:and a realization that God is making all things new, and it feels like when I am able to step into a place of I could join Jesus in the restoration and reconciliation of all things, like I could be a part of it here and now, and not just wait for new creation to come, but I could be a participant, a creative participant in new creation. Now, in the world that we live in today, we are in a turbulent, chaotic, hard, difficult world full of despair, and feeling like a lot of people feel like it's the end of things, like they're there's so many post-apocalyptic shows and movies we're inundated with this stuff, like the world is ending. What are we going to do about it? You end with Beethoven's codas, where we think it's ending, but there may be something beautiful. So, for people who's thinking about the end of all things, the endings. What do Beethoven's codas teach us about maybe the reconciliation, God making all things new, the beauty that can come at the end.
Merideth Hite Estevez:I love that there's a Leonard Bernstein quote where he talks about Beethoven, and he says, and I paraphrase it, because I don't have it memorized, but he says, you know, you, when you hear Beethoven's ninth symphony, for example, you just feel like there's some goodness in the world, like there's some, there's something right, and I think that is a testament to the power of God to speak through art and through people of different faiths, and you know that there's some, we can hear the rightness of God, and the reconciliation that is coming. We can hear that in a, in a piece of music written, you know, in the, in the 19th century, right. And so I, I want to say, Beethoven, his music is very tumultuous and fiery, and he did experience the deafness rather early, and a lot of people don't know, but even by the third symphony he was basically deaf, and what I love about his music, there are many things I love about it, but you mentioned the coda, and for the non-music people, the coda is sort of, we, we like, end the music where the form is supposed to end, and then there's a little play out, or a little extra added part at the end that is, that comes, comes along, and sort of like ties it on a boat, like, dun dun dun dun dun, you know, that's the coda, but in Beethoven's music, sometimes his codas were almost as long as the A section or the the exposition we call it in sonata form, and there are times in other composers where they bring up completely new themes in the coda and they go to a totally foreign harmonic place, and I think that we as humans, we want thematic continuity. We want to understand that, like, okay, God created A, and then there was B, and now there's A again, right? And I think God's a lot.. thank God, God is a lot more creative than that. Is is a God of surprises and mirth and joy, and like detours of harmonies on at the 11th hour and I think that for me represents the goodness of God that there is beauty and joy right here in the chaos and maybe as artists we're called to to be part of of the beauty that's here now and focusing not on the end and focusing not on the ways that our expectations are not being met or are you know have been have been dashed but in joining like you said in the reconciliation and and I think beauty is a profound way to to experience reconciliation and to invite others into it, so yeah, I love the idea. This is just the code up, people. This is, there's some good music here. Keep listening,
Joshua Johnson:that's right, keep it, keep listening. What would you say to readers? What do you want people to get from art is how God loves us?
Merideth Hite Estevez:Oh, I want them to get so many things, but I guess if I had to pick. One, I would invite them to see the beauty of God and the beauty of creation, that everything beautiful and everything lovely about this world was created by God, and so we're invited in that same love to create beauty ourselves and to create a life that is beautiful, and that you know we don't have to understand the theory of art, we just have to work on paying attention and inhabit, in like surrendering to inhabit it, and to to let it lead us into a deeper love and deeper joy that we can even imagine. A
Joshua Johnson:couple of quick questions here at the end. One, if you go back to your 21 year old self, what advice would you give?
Merideth Hite Estevez:Whoa, I would first of all say, please eat, because I had an eating disorder at that time, and I, yeah, I would, I would spend a lot less time worrying about my body and my body image and myself and look more towards the ultimate things instead of the the superficial you know things that are here here and now and so that's a good lesson for me to take with me so that's a really good question I also was really worried in my 20s about being married and having grown up in a Christian world, I think I felt pressure to like meet the person and have the kids, and you better do it before you get too old, and your eggs are gonna die. And I, you know, I didn't meet my husband till I was 33 so I, I would, I would have said it's worth the wait. And 33 is young, right? And so, like, even if you haven't met the person, or even if you never get married, it's all good, and like, your, your identity is not in whether or not you're successful or married or whatever. Just to remember that those things are are temporary and and one part of a really full life.
Joshua Johnson:Anything that you've been reading or watching or listening to lately that you could recommend?
Merideth Hite Estevez:I just finished The Pit. I'm a little behind. I don't know if you ever watched that show on HBO.
Joshua Johnson:Oh yeah,
Merideth Hite Estevez:loved that show. I mean, it was like a little stressful, because you know, there's like
Joshua Johnson:an emergency room,
Merideth Hite Estevez:yeah. But yeah, I'm trying to think, I want to say a TV show, but my husband and I love whodunits, especially of the British variety, and so we are watching Young Sherlock right now, too. That's on Prime Video, I think. But yeah, lots of good books. I read Shannon Martin's Counterweights. I had her on my podcast. It's a really great book. Yeah, so those are just a few
Joshua Johnson:good recommendations, that's great. Well, Art is How God Loves Us will be available july 7 anywhere books are sold. How could people connect with you anywhere else that you'd like to point people to in what you're doing?
Merideth Hite Estevez:Thank you so much for asking that, Joshua. I, yes, the book is available july 7 wherever books are sold. Always like to tell people to go to bookshop.org and support support local bookstores. And as for me, I am on Instagram at Artists for Joy, plural artists for Joy, that's also the name of my weekly-ish podcast, Artists for Joy. And I'm over on Substack. This week we were top 50 in the category that was really exciting, rising rising star, or something, whatever, but it's called my Substack, is called Arts Open Door, and we talk about faith in art more, more explicitly from the through the Christian lens over there on Substack, it's called Arts Open Door,
Joshua Johnson:awesome. Well, Meredith, thank you for this conversation, thank you for actually bringing the love of God and the love of your creativity here into this conversation. Really enjoyed meeting you, talking with you, and this conversation was great. So, thank you.
Merideth Hite Estevez:Me too. Thanks again.
Unknown:Bye.
