The Hidden Hue

Hello everyone!

My name is Matthew Smaldone. I am a writer, director, producer, and actor, but, most of all, I am a Catholic. I have been a part of the secular art world for seven years now, performing on both coasts as an actor and starting my own film production company in my home state of Colorado; all the while I've had the peculiar struggle of trying to reconcile my Christian beliefs with the frequently hostile world of modern entertainment and pop culture. In the search for this reconciliation, I have been blessed to have been able to analyze the nature of art through a Catholic perspective. Beauty, truth, and aesthetics are all fundamentally spiritual concepts and I hope to walk with you through an exploration of these realities through my writing. As an introduction to this journey, I'd like to submit to you the article below entitled The Hidden Hue.

About a month ago I wrapped my second feature film entitled: The Scars of Our Hands. Set in the Rocky Mountains, this story follows two estranged brothers as they trek through the wilderness to find and stop an arsonist. I began writing it early in the life of my company in an effort to produce something of substance. Our previous films were entertaining, but I felt a certain lack of thematic potency in my work. I wanted to say something, so I began writing and the outcome was a film focused on themes of brotherhood, purpose, and sacrifice. It was truly a work of the heart and soul for me. However, once on set, I found myself caught up in the minutia of production logistics. Schedules, equipment, and production concerns began to steal my focus away from the story, from those themes that I had worked so hard to imbue in the narrative. A note to young filmmakers: be the writer/director/editor super-combo, but take a wide birth around the pitfall of the producer.

I found that amidst this maelstrom of catering pivots, equipment damages, and travel plans, the weekends, our days off, were the times I found most fruitful for refocusing my efforts on the story of the film. I also found that the only time I could really sit in silence and sort through my thoughts without the constant distraction of my phone buzzing a hole through my pants was in the confessional line before Mass on Sundays. Thank God that the Sabbath falls on a weekend. On one such Sunday morning, I found myself in the confessional on the receiving end of a very potent question. Through the small confessional window, the blurred outline of a very wise priest said to me, “You turn to sin because something is missing. Do you know what is missing in your heart?”

For the next week, I poured over this question but couldn’t find a suitable answer. I tested theory after theory, but none seemed to fit the missing space in the puzzle just right. That’s when, during adoration the next week, I realized my answer to the priest’s question began not with finding an answer at all, but rather by revisiting another problem. It hit me that my difficulty with maintaining artistic focus on my film and my difficulty in defeating my habitual sins may be linked. It struck me while I looked up at the monstrance holding the precious sacrament. This beautiful housing was set upon a beautiful altar in a beautiful church that stood as a physical gathering place for the most beautiful Church, Christ’s Church, which holds in its history the most beautiful story about the most beautiful person to have ever existed: Jesus. It hit me all at once that a new trinity was revealing itself between art, beauty, and Christ. As a Catholic artist, I have always held a view of beauty as one that is deeply spiritual, but, like many aspects of my faith, that view had yet to drift down from the lofty heights of intellectualism and substantially take root in the soul of application. At that moment, I experienced a strike into my heart, a substantial pinch in the flesh and bone of my spirit. Thankfully, my somewhat dim intelligence was quick to pick up on this, and the gears in my mind began to slowly grind together and then spin.

The purpose of the artist is to recognize, appreciate, and communicate beauty, whether that be by highlighting it through the human experience or promoting its protection by exposing the horrors that threaten it.¹ This cause is as great a cause as any effort of science, medicine, or politics, for, while these noble pursuits answer the hows of sustaining life, art answers the whys of existing in the first place and continuing to exist! However, many artists do not have a solid foundation upon which to create the art that answers these whys. Something is missing. This is what I realized while adoring the blessed sacrament.

The initial realization happened when I was meditating on my life in a state of grace and my life outside of a state of grace. When in communion with God, the colors of the trees and sky seem more vivid. I find myself thanking God more and asking Him less. My passions become more fruitful and my interests more engaging. I find that my very ability to appreciate is strengthened. Contrast this with my life outside of communion with God, I find myself feeling almost restricted from a certain amount of joy. I have been catechized well enough to know where all beauty comes from and so upon seeing, for example, a particularly beautiful vista, I feel almost the same as when one cannot receive the Eucharist because they are in a state of mortal sin. I feel removed. What’s worse, it does not feel imposed by someone else, but rather very obviously self-imposed. I can feel that God wishes for me to enjoy His gifts of life and creation and that I have chosen to betray Him, and, by extension, his gifts. I have removed myself from a right relationship with Him and by extension his creation. I feel somewhat of an incompletion, almost as if I had just gotten in a fight with a loved one and left it unresolved. I believe one of the greatest gifts God has given us is closure: the sense of peace that all of your relationships have been put in right order. Sin is the antithesis of closure. It is dissonance, irresolution. It is the constant reminder that you are not in right relationship, not with yourself, your environment, or God.

Sin is an incompletion. It is a stoppage in the otherwise strongly flowing river of life. Sometimes it is simply a boulder or log causing a diversion, other times it is a concrete dam, completely cutting us off from the source of life that is the water of the river and threatening the health of our entire ecosystem. Just as the trees and animals downriver from an artificial dam are negatively affected, so too are our entire beings affected when our souls are out of sorts. Sin is not content to confine itself to the spiritual realm. The older I become, the more I realize that everything is connected, rightly so, as God has designed his world to act as an ecosystem, a community. Just like the spirituality of an individual is always incomplete without the community of a Church, so too are our many faucets – spiritual, physical, mental, and emotional – designed to live in communion, and are incomplete without relation to one another. Therefore, when one has fallen into sin, every aspect of his or her life will be damaged. The father will find connecting with his children difficult, the carpenter will find his cabinets rough and askew, and the young filmmaker will lose sight of the vision of his film.

To take note from Saint Aquinas, while sin has disastrous effects, it does not technically exist on its own. Evil is simply the privation of good. Without good it cannot exist.² Therefore, it stands to reason that habitual sin is the erosion of the soul that creates a lasting gap. Cue the question from the wise priest in the confessional. Once the gap has been established, it must be filled by something. We have two choices: more sin or God. While the sin is familiar, comfortable, and often pleasurable, it is fleeting. Sin is smoke. Its nature is to dissipate, to seek total dispersion. Conversely, God is a living tree. He is substantial. He does not move once planted. The amazing Fulton Sheen once related the tale of a young boy speaking with his mother about sin. She told him that every sin was a nail and that confession, and, by extension, forgiveness, was the process of removing the nail. However, even once the nail was removed there was left a hole. Sheen then pointed out that this is why we need penance. Penance is what fills the hole. I believe his beautiful analogy can be applied to the wise priest’s question as well. Sin is the nail. Once it has burrowed into your heart it leaves a mark. Even if the sin is removed by confession, the hole still exists and will be filled with sin once again if not filled by something else. What is missing? The answer is Jesus.

You may think, “Well that sure was a lot of paragraphs for what is, more or less, the thesis of every single Sunday homily.” To an extent, I would agree with you. Sometimes, it can seem that our weekly catechism can sound like a broken record scratching over the oft-repeated phrases Jesus is the answer and God is Love. They seem to lack the grit, complexity, and real-world application that we can read in the writings of the great saints. Honestly, They can seem like Christianity-and-water to borrow C.S. Lewis’ turn of phrase. Simply, they seem too simple. However, let’s not make the mistake of missing the buried treasure for the simplicity of the sand. Like all true Christian teachings, what may seem simple actually holds within it great complexity and depth.³ God is love theologically, applicably, communally, essentially, and teleologically. Likewise, Jesus is the answer to the hole in our hearts for a variety of beautiful and satisfying reasons. This knowledge is the key to everyday life and is essential to our understanding of our own substance. Jesus is the satisfaction of the heart. He is the window, and eventually, God willing, the gateway into the reality of being.

Let us now come back to thinking as artists. The purpose of an artist is to recognize, appreciate, and communicate beauty, in other words, to know beauty, for when one truly knows something, he or she cannot help but be a witness to it.⁴ To know beauty necessitates fundamentally experiencing its reality. The more deeply we can experience that reality the more nuanced, subtle, and beautiful our art will be. Therefore, why should we not look to the source of all reality for that experience? To illustrate this, let’s examine Heaven: the true home of all believers and the final Kingdom of God.

In C.S. Lewis’ book, The Great Divorce, the protagonist, a wayward soul, finds himself on a brief trip to the outer planes of Heaven. Upon stepping foot on that most holy ground, it became painfully obvious to him, and to his fellow tourists, that they were but specters - phantoms, at least when compared to the overpoweringly substantial reality of Heaven. Grass blades did not bend under their feet and raindrops would prove as deadly as bullets to them. A truly terrifying reality indeed if it weren’t for the beauty that it held. C.S. Lewis employed the same tactic that G.K. Chesterton wrote about in his essay "Ethics of Elfland," where he illustrated that fairy tales, with all their wonder and beauty, are so important because they shed light on the beauties of the real world. They enkindle appreciation for creation and inspire wonder as to its maker. However, Lewis took this a step further. Instead of examining wonderous fiction to instill appreciation, he led the reader into an exploration of a reality even more real than our own, one that makes ours look like nothing more than a shadow, one to inspire us to pursue the next. Our world is but a mirror, one that reflects, in some imperfect way, the perfect and truly substantial reality of Heaven. Heaven is not the afterlife, but instead what we are living now is the beforelife.

This is where Jesus comes in. It is only through belief and worship of Him that we may know that this world is but a shadow. Through Him, the veil can be lifted and we can see the mirror reflecting the true reality of Heaven, a reality only made true by its Lord. For it is only the Lord of Heaven which makes it so perfect. It is not Heaven that is perfectly substantial, but Jesus who resides there. It is through His steps that that great world is made so real, for only the most substantial earth could support our most substantial Lord. Jesus is who is completely substantial. He is who is the most human, the most God. He is reality in itself, perfected. Truly, He is Who is.

Now we see. Now we see Him truly as the Living Water. He is the source of life in the ecosystem. Through Him the trees and grasses are waters and the animals find shelter and drink. He is the life of our souls. With Him, the forests of our imaginations will run vibrant with inspiration and life. Without Him, when we drop boulders of sin in the stream and erect dams of vice, we dry up. We have no inspiration. We can only reflect in our art the dryness of the dirt and we writhe in futility trying to pull meaning from it.

In Wes Anderson’s film, The French Dispatch, one of the stories focuses, in part, on a police chef: the best in the world. In an attempt to save the life of the police captain’s son, the chef cooks a poisoned dinner for the kidnappers, which he must eat first. Thankfully, he does not die, but in his hospital bed, he tells a journalist that the poisonous food had an entirely new flavor to him, something he, in his great experience as a master chef, had never tasted before. Despite it being poisonous, it was still wonderous because it was a forward step in the exploration of reality.⁵ This is the goal of all artists: to find the spark of humanity that has yet to be grasped. The sculptor seeks to carve the most accurate form. The poet seeks to pen the most heartbreaking verse. The chef seeks to cook with an unknown flavor and explore its mysteries. Artists are all painters looking for the hidden hue: that which would cradle the human heart more dearly than anything before.

There is the answer. Who can show us how to cradle the heart most dearly? The maker of all hearts and all dearness. Jesus is the key to the most perfect art. After all, he is the All-Poet, the Master Craftsman, the King Artist: Creator of the Universe. He is the Word made flesh. As a writer for film, turning my words into flesh-and-blood stories that can be captured on film is my greatest goal. However, all of my stories are fiction. Just as Tolkien points out that the ancients used mythopoeia - the creation of myths to express truths - so too do modern artists create fictional stories to explore the human condition. And just as only God, by his incarnate Son, could create a true, divine story in reality, so too can we as artists only discover true, real, human beauty by appealing to the source of all reality, all truth, and all beauty: Jesus. He is the Soul of all Substance. He is the Hidden Hue.

1 The beautiful doesn’t have to be pretty; it has to be true. Once, during a visit to Poland, I visited a WW2 underground newspaper museum. Here were held examples of underground newspapers from resistance forces used to give the people of Poland information, and, more importantly, hope during the Nazi occupation. One front-page image seared its way into my memory forever. It was of a street in Warsaw, except instead of cobblestones this street was paved with the frozen corpses of the Poles that the Nazis had executed. There were so many bodies that they created a somewhat flat surface, only broken up by the fist of a murdered Polish man, frozen upright in an immortal act of defiance, frozen as an eternal testament to the unkillable human spirit to resist oppression at all costs. This image was gruesome, horrifying, and one of the most beautiful images I have ever seen.

2 This is why we can have ultimate hope. Good can stand tall, proud, and complete on its own, but evil cannot exist without the good to pervert. Only one can exist without the other, and that is good. Evil cannot hope to destroy good because then it would destroy the very ground which it stands on, it would kill the food it so greedily eats up. There will come a day when evil will die away and only the righteousness of God will stand, but there will never come a day when evil will stand without good to combat it. A dark and dank hole cannot exist without the fertile and beautiful earth around it.

3 Always be cautious of anyone who touts the “beauty of simplicity.” Neither Christianity nor beauty are simple matters. They are deep and rich, but, most importantly, complete. It is this completeness that most confuse for simplicity. Never forget that all beautifully complete things are only complete because they stand on strong and deep foundations. The old man sitting in retirement on the dock with a line in the water is not simple, he is complete. Beneath the simple image of his day fishing lies a life filled with love, relationships, faults overcome, faith, and stories. Is a simple-minded automaton preferable to that? I should think not.

4 Look no further for an example of this than to the saints, or even better, to Mary, for she so knew God in the perfection of her spirit and her submission to His will that she became the greatest witness of all. She brought the Lord to others, not just evangelically, but physically, through her very body.

5 Let’s not mistake this as an argument for hedonism, that is, the exploration and justification of all vice to complete our knowledge of the human experience. Our heroic chef gained the just reward of experiencing a completely new flavor not due to the poison, but instead his heroic sacrifice. So too does the sweetest love only come from sacrifice. Perhaps this is why God allows bad things, for without heroes, we would never know of any new flavors.