Diplomatic Corps - Tracy Moran

Like Father Elijah, the 49 year old O'Brien has pursued his vocation full time for 21 years, despite discouragement and hardships. Working from his home in rural Ontario, Canada, he has labored in quiet solitude, despite the blandishments of a secular world that has offered him money and fame if he would just abandon the work he knew God had called him to (creating Catholic themed paintings and novels) and pursue secular goals. Both men, Father Elijah and Michael O'Brien, experienced God's love in powerful ways. Both realized their vocations relatively late in life. Both were subjected to the rigors of spiritual warfare and, through their fidelity to Christ's call, have been instrumental in igniting the fire of faith in others.

Michael O'Brien, a delightful, self-effacing writer-poet-painter, is a formidable front line warrior in the war for souls. His weapons are ink and paint, paper and canvas. "In my painting, my primary objective is to create an image of the Kingdom of God that calls the viewer to a kind of stillness before the great mystery," he explains. "The modern world is so bombarded with noise, so a work of visual art can call someone to contemplation, to a sense of the presence of God. In writing, I hope ultimately to express the power of grace at work in human life. My novels are primarily about the mysterious workings of Divine Providence."

Though his spiritual storytelling has been compared to that of Flannery O'Conner and C.S. Lewis, O'Brien neither wrote nor painted until he returned to Catholicism at age 21, following a dramatic conversion experience reminiscent of St. Paul's. "I was at a very low, a very dark period of my life, where existence itself looked hopeless. I cried out to God in a spontaneous prayer, and He answered instantly. He flooded me with a deep peace and light, the first I'd felt in years. With that light came a complete knowledge that Christ was real and everything the Church taught was true."

That luminous knowledge has infused his heart as well as his art ever since. Soon after this experience, he felt inspired to draw. One day, while walking in the woods, he saw a tiny sapling growing out of a pile of rocks.

"It moved me so much," O'Brien says. "It seemed to be a metaphor for my life." Though he had no prior training in art, he began drawing and "the gift just flowered incredibly fast. I'm a self taught artist." Within two years, in 1970, his works had gained widespread attention and he was offered a major exhibit in a Canadian gallery.

"Things took off," he explains. His show consisted of landscapes and faces, "nothing the secular world would have trouble with," he chuckles.

But because his faith in Christ had become the most precious thing in his life, he wanted his paintings to reflect that.

"I couldn't see how one could be a Christian artist," he says, so he abandoned his art and moved west to British Columbia, where he found work in a lay apostolate and met his future wife, Sheila. Shortly after they were married, a deep hunger seized him. After a time of prayer and reflection, he recognized that he wasn't using his gift of art to glorify God and evangelize others. Sheila, pregnant with the couple's first child, suggested that Michael quit his job and pursue painting full time. They could sell the house if need be and live off the proceeds for a time, she reminded him.

"It was really like throwing ourselves over a cliff and hoping God would catch us," says O'Brien. "What a grace!"

Twenty years of "grace and great struggles" followed the decision, but O'Brien considers himself more fortunate than many of his fellow Catholic artists because he was able to support his wife and their six children, largely through church commissioned paintings.

During that time, he amassed a collection of paintings and returned to the galleries, seeking a show. Two major galleries told him, confidentially, they would be happy to give him a show, but first, he had to change his subject matter, which consisted mainly of classical Byzantine icons and scenes from the Gospels.

"Most Christian artists find themselves in the midst of undeclared war," he says. "In this completely secularized culture, you face an incredible struggle." This has been especially true for O'Brien. One gallery curator in Calgary, a Christian, offered him a show. Two months later, the curator was fired. In the 80s, O'Brien was offered a show in November. He was ready to ship his paintings when he got a call telling him the gallery was closing on November 1. At yet another gallery where he had a show lined up, the curator had a nervous breakdown. Result: No show. "For many years I just kept chalking up these mishaps to bad coincidence," O'Brien chuckles, "but year after year after year it became a pattern that was unbroken. Sometimes it was just human fear of public opinion, but some of it was spiritual warfare."

During these years he also began to write fiction. In 1978 he entered a "very religious, Catholic novel" in a "first novel" competition co-sponsored by Bantam Books and Canada's largest publisher. Though chosen as one of seven finalists, O'Brien's story was not published, even though historically, all the finalists in this competition normally were.

"Year after year, I would send this story to publishers," he says, "only to be told that the reading public was no longer interested in the subject matter". (That novel, A Cry of Stone, will be published soon by Ignatius Press.)

O'Brien continuously doubted himself, and wanted to be careful that he wasn't making excuses by considering the publishers and gallery owners anti-Christian, when really his work was not worthy. "Then in the late 80s and early 90s, I began meeting highly gifted poets, authors, and painters, expressly Christian, and we all had the same experiences."

Though "totally discouraged," he continued his commission work for churches and "accepted that Catholic work had been ghettoized, had been exiled from the mainstream of culture."

Then along came his breakthrough work, Father Elijah, which he wrote three years ago, a time when, he notes, "Catholic fiction was practically nonexistent."

"I wrote it in obedience to an interior impulse or grace," he says, "a longing to tell a story. It was an act of fatalism. I didn't think even Catholic publishers would accept it." While working on it, he recalled St. Thomas Aquinas' words that if a work of art is to honor God, God will send an angel to help in its creation.

"Every morning while I was writing it over an eight month period, I would go to the Blessed Sacrament and ask the Lord to send the Holy Spirit and an angel of inspiration for this work. I don't think I missed any days of writing."

O'Brien had written articles for 15 years and knew it to be hard work, but he was "shocked by how easy it was to write Father Elijah."

Ignatius Press, which had been distributing a book of O'Brien's rosary paintings, heard about the novel and asked him to send it in. When Ignatius Press founder Father Joseph Fessio phoned and said he wanted to publish it, O'Brien was "pleased, and grateful by all the positive critical response." "But," he adds, "after 20 years, I think something had been burned out of me. I was detached. I had the strangest sense that it was happening to someone else." To O'Brien's astonishment, Father Elijah exploded onto the scene as a dazzling bestseller, garnering critical acclaim and international accolades for its profound spiritual message.

Most of his time is spent completing this series of six novels and designing their striking covers. He spends each day at a cabin a mile from his home, where he writes on a small word processor. In the afterglow of his success with Father Elijah, O'Brien's followed with the best selling novel Strangers and Sojourners, the first book in a trilogy set in British Columbia charting the four generation saga of a family of exiles from Europe. O'Brien plans to continue to divide his efforts between painting and writing new works.

"Its a source of great joy to me to see a new generation of Catholic writers beginning to be published," he says. "A ground swell is starting to bubble up. It remains to be seen if this wave of renewed creative life will prevail. Much of it depends upon the response of our Catholic people." One thing is certain, though, through his art and his writings, Michael O'Brien, like his best selling book's character, Father Elijah, is a major, if unobtrusive, figure in the struggle of light over darkness. "He came for testimony, to testify to the light, so that all might believe" (John 1:7).