Van Gogh, Creativity and the Midlife Crisis

The idea of a midlife crisis is new. In the western world people only started to think of childhood as a separate stage of life two hundred years ago, when the average life span was thirty-five years. We humans only started to talk about adolescence as a separate stage of life in the 19th century, when the average life expectancy increased to about fifty. And recently as the average age has increased to about seventy-five years, have people started to talk about midlife and a "midlife crisis."

I found sixty-one books listed for the subject "Midlife Crisis" when I did a search on the Internet. If we are to believe these books, any of you who are between the ages of thirty-seven and forty-three are in a dangerous time of life. From the books I have compiled a description of the typical person in a midlife crisis. As I read, you may want to look around the congregation to see if anyone fits the description.

People at midlife often suffer "a profound personal crisis. The symptoms are a feeling of stagnation, disequilibrium, and depression. The daydreaming of a discontented forty- year-old results from the sensation of being trapped in a life structure that now feels narrow and restrictive. People at midlife have a feeling of being caught in an empty, dull, flat life. They begin to feel like trapped animals."

People at midlife are often "afraid of approaching death. Images of aging and death invade waking thoughts. They become aware of the deaths of friends the same age. A feeling of unease sets in with the realization that this is the end of growing up and the beginning of growing old. The road is downhill from now on. Questions such as 'How much time do I have left?' and 'What am I going to do with the rest of my life?' preoccupy them. These questions lead to feelings of malaise, failure and despair."

People at midlife have "a heightened awareness of health problems. They notice their body's decreased efficiency. It becomes more difficult to keep up the appearance of good health. Weight is easier to put on and harder to take off. Fat layers settle around the waist and hips. Hair starts to thin, gray and grow brittle. Hairlines begin to recede. Muscle strength and tone decrease. Tossing a ball becomes more difficult."

People at midlife begin to experience "irreversible changes in the brain resulting from cell death, oxygen deprivation, and chemical changes in the cells themselves. This causes a reduction in the efficiency of the brain's functioning."

People at midlife must deal with "career dissatisfaction. Conscious that their career may have reached a plateau, they experience the anxiety that younger persons will challenge their position. Simultaneously the work becomes more repetitive and less challenging than it was when they were young. Their career becomes a combination of fear and boredom."

People at midlife "daydream about romantic affairs with a younger partner. Frightened by signs of aging, they lose interest in the commitments they have made to their current partner, and seek through an orgy of self-indulgence sex to prolong their youth."

In summary people at midlife are faced with a body growing larger year by year; with brain cells disappearing month by month; with their career having reached its peak. They are running after younger sexual partners on weak knees, with a mind so weak they would not know what to do with them, if they caught them!

We laugh because there is truth in these descriptions. We laugh because laughing is better than crying. The struggles people go through in midlife are not always funny. We struggle with a quest for meaning. We ask, what is the point of it all? Consider one example.

Vincent van Gogh was born in 1853 in the Netherlands, the eldest of six children. His father was a Protestant minister. The early years growing up in the church parsonage were happy, and he loved wandering in the countryside. At sixteen his father apprenticed him as a salesperson to a company that sold paintings.

He worked selling paintings at the company store in London for two years and in the Paris store for one year. Daily contact with works of art aroused van Gogh's artistic sensibility. However, the young man disliked the work of art dealing. He decided to emulate his father and become a minister.

Van Gogh's religious heritage was not (as most of his biographers have claimed) Calvinism. Instead the van Gogh family embraced the ideas of a 17th century Dutch thinker named Jacob Arminius.

Jacob Arminus objected to the Calvinist doctrine of predestination which argued that only those few whom God chose would ultimately find salvation. Jacob Arminus rejected the idea of human nature as totally corrupt and depraved. He said that people had free will to accept or reject the grace of God, and that salvation was available to all human beings not just a few chosen elect. In America during the 18th century, Arminianism was the first phase of the liberal movement in theology, that in the nineteenth century was named Unitarianism. In the Netherlands, it was the belief system that the van Gogh family espoused. They regarded Jesus as a perfect human being but not as divine. Ethically van Gogh's father taught that the primary responsibility of men and women was to create in ourselves the character of Jesus.

Vincent was an intense twenty-three year old who did not do things half way. He began to attend two or three church services every Sunday, and studied religion with his uncle who was a minister and theologian. Vincent dedicated himself to emulating Jesus in living a life of poverty. He was a friend of the poor. He saw the tiller of the soil, the weaver, even the streetwalker as the meek who lived close to the life of Jesus.

When he was twenty-six years old, the young minister went to work among Belgian coal miners to preach the gospel to the poor. He chose to live in a little hovel. He had no furniture. Faced with the destitution he encountered on his visits, he gave away nearly all his clothes. He wanted to give away all that he could live without and be even more destitute than most of the miners to whom he preached the Gospel.

Apparently, however, he was an uninspiring preacher. The Dutch reform and Methodist ministers withdrew their support of his ministry to the coal miners after six months. In doing so they wrote:

"If the gift of eloquence, so indispensable to one who is placed at the head of a congregation, were added to the admirable qualities he displays at a sick bed or with the injured, to the devotion or self-sacrificing spirit, of which he gives constant proof, Mr. Van Gogh would certainly be an accomplished evangelist."

This rejection enraged Vincent. He considered his father, his uncle and other clergy hypocrites. They preached sermons about following the teaching of Jesus. However, in practice they worked to make themselves comfortable, by raising money to support their ministries. In his view they rejected him, who did far more then they to live according to the words of Jesus. He wrote "There really are no more unbelieving and hard-hearted and worldly people than clergymen."

Penniless and deeply distrustful of the clergy, van Gogh returned what he had learned as a salesperson in art galleries. To earn a living, he began to draw seriously and in this way he developed a new vocation. He decided that his mission would be to bring comfort to humanity through art.

His artistic career lasted only the ten years from 1880 to 1890. During the first four years of this period, he developed technical proficiency, confining himself almost entirely to drawings and watercolors.

Van Gogh worked hard and methodically with the same intensity he had given to religion. He sought the guidance of more experienced artists. He visited museums and met with other painters. Gradually his art grew bolder and more assured. Although no longer a minister, he remained true to his belief the poor and the meek were the closest to Jesus.

He painted the peasants' daily life, and the hardships they endured. He painted the countryside, the fields, the trees and the sky, because he experienced God through nature. He painted the world around him as if it were a revelation of the divine presence.

From the study of the works of other painters and from practice, he developed the ability to express a mood by a combination of colors. In Paris in 1886 he met Toulouse-Lautrec, Gauguin, Pissarro and Seurat. They opened his eyes to the latest developments in French painting.

Van Gogh tired of city life after two years in Paris. He left for the southeast of France "to look at nature under a brighter sky." His passion was now for "a full effect of color."

His pictures became more spontaneous and instinctive. He worked with intensity capturing moments with his dramatic use of color. He placed primary colors next to their compliments to intensify both. His built up layers of paint so that the paintings appeared almost molded out of clay. However, they did not sell and Vincent had to depend on his younger brother for financial support.

To reduce expenses and deal with his loneliness van Gogh invited his friend Paul Gauguin to stay with him. Gauguin arrived in October 1888, and for two months they worked together. It was not a happy time. To put it diplomatically, they were temperamentally incompatible.

Christmas Eve 1888, van Gogh fought with Gauguin. Gauguin left and got a room at a local hotel so that he would not have to spend another night in van Gogh's house. Van Gogh went to his room and cut off part of his left ear. We cannot know with absolute certainty why van Gogh cut off his ear. Recently medical experts have suggested that van Gogh suffered from a form of epilepsy, the symptoms of which include blackouts during which a person sometimes does mutilate himself.

Gauguin went back to Paris. Van Gogh returned from the hospital to his house two weeks after cutting his ear and resumed painting. Several weeks later, he again showed symptoms of epilepsy severe enough to cause him to go back to the hospital. At the end of April 1889, he asked to be temporarily shut up in the local asylum so that he would be under medical supervision. Van Gogh stayed in the asylum for twelve months, haunted by recurrent blackouts. He found this experience depressing, but his spirits improved when, between epileptic seizures he could paint.

Van Gogh returned to Paris in May 1890. Four days later he went to stay in a village community north of Paris where he painted peasants' cottages, the village church, the town hall and the fields around the village.

On a Sunday in late July 1890, he returned to the Inn where he was staying. It was late in the evening. He walked bent down holding his hands on his stomach and went up to his room. The innkeeper followed him up and asked if he were ill. Van Gogh lifted up his shirt and showed a small wound in the region of the heart. He said "I wanted to kill myself." The painter died two days later.

Was van Gogh's death from suicide at the age of thirty-seven the result of what we now call a midlife crisis? Apparently just before he died, he went into a deep depression. We will never know the exact reason for the depression. We do know that his brother, who had been his financial supporter was himself in serious financial difficulties. We know in one of his last letters to his brother, van Gogh wrote of his "sadness and extreme loneliness." We can never know for certain what caused van Gogh to die of suicide. However, I can imagine that his failure to marry, his failure to support himself with his painting, and the recurring blackouts due to his epileptic seizures all helped push him to the point that he saw death as a way to escape his pain.

In October I spent an hour at the van Gogh exhibit at the National Gallery. Seventy-two paintings are on display, nearly 10 percent of the 750 canvases he painted. I had first seen these paintings in 1969 when I was eighteen and spent the summer in Europe. Back then I knew little about van Gogh, but I loved some of his paintings more then any other paintings I had ever seen. The bright colors, the choices of subjects, and the thick way he had applied paint to give his paintings a three-dimensional texture all attracted me. This three-dimensional quality makes it impossible for any reproduction to show the power of his work.

I enjoyed seeing the paintings again after twenty-nine years. They are arranged at the National Gallery in chronological order. One of the first paintings I saw as I walked into the exhibit was the Potato Eaters. This rough, earthy painting reflects van Gogh's experience as a minister to the coal miners. It is the largest canvas he ever painted. Dark and somber, sometimes crude, the painting expresses his intense desire to bear witness to life as he saw it among the miners in Belgium. These people, he felt, are the people who come close to living the life of Jesus.

Walking farther into the exhibit, I saw some of the works he painted when he was in Paris, including self-portraits and a copy of a Japanese print. Still farther on, are many paintings van Gogh created when he was in southern France. There on one wall is the painting of his bedroom with the swirling brush strokes and intense yellows, greens and blues.

And in the last room are the paintings he did in northern France just before his death. The final painting is the fabulous Crows in the Wheatfields. The wheat is saturated with bright yellow paint below a dark sky.

People filled the exhibit. To see the exhibit you must arrive at the National Gallery at 6:30 in the morning and stand in line to get tickets. As I looked at the paintings and then looked at the crowds, I thought: If only van Gogh could see this. This man believed that at the age of thirty-seven his life was a failure. None of the women he had loved would marry him. He had been unsuccessful trying to sell art. His father and other clergy had rejected him as a minister. He had never made a living as a painter. In a deep depression of sadness and loneliness he shot himself in the chest. If only he could have survived. By 1910, when van Gogh would have been fifty-seven, his paintings were growing in popularity in France and elsewhere.

I came out into the sunlight with a simple, but powerful idea. Whenever I meet people who are discouraged, who feel like failures, who hate their job, or who are without a job, people who regret not having a family or feel that they have somehow failed in their efforts to raise a family, when I meet people who are depressed by the hardship of illness, or because they have lost a job, I will think of Vincent van Gogh. I will think of his despair and depression and I will think of those crowds that today line up at the National Gallery to see his works.

This is the simple message I have today. When we are feeling down, when we are feeling like failures, we should remember that, with all our faults, each of us can give joy and meaning to the lives of others. More important, each of us gives far more joy and beauty to others than we realize. If you are suffering from a middle age crisis, or a teenage crisis or an old age crisis, I invite you to visit the National Gallery to see not the paintings, but the crowds lining up to see the paintings of van Gogh. I invite you to remember that this man killed himself because he thought he was a failure. And I invite you to remember that you too have given and will give joy to people that you may never have met.

Although it does not feel that way all the time, your life, and the life of each person in this room, is of great value. That is the message that Vincent van Gogh the minister and the painter has left for all of us.

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