Here’s something that may make you bite your fist. (Feel free to substitute “artist” with just about any job or vocation you care about enough to do well):

One must have devotion to be an artist, and there’s no way of minimizing its cost. But still, just as in religious contexts, there is a kind of devotion that is, at its heart, escape. …

If you’ve never been consumed by an art, it might seem strange to think of it in these terms—as an antithesis to life, almost, or at least as a kind of parasite. But the fact is, art can compromise, even in some way neutralize, the very experience upon which it depends. If to be an artist is to be someone upon whom nothing is lost…then it follows that to be an artist is to be in some permanent sense professionally detached. An artist is conscious of always standing apart from life, and one of the results of this can be that you begin to feel most intensely what you have failed to feel: a certain emotional reserve in one’s life becomes a source of great power in one’s work. …

Given all this, it’s not surprising that some religious poets have felt a difficult tension between their devotion to art and their devotion to God. [Gerard Manley] Hopkins actually renounced poetry for a number of years. His reason was that poetry wasn’t consistent enough with the seriousness of his vocation, but you don’t need to read much Hopkins to realize that the real reason was that the intensity of his creative experiences competed with the intensity of his religious experiences, and he felt himself presented with a stark choice. … Though Herbert sometimes linked poetry to God and experienced grace through words, he was conscious of some secular element at the very heart of making art, some necessary imaginative flair in himself that needed to be subdued, or at least tidied up and made fit for sacrifice. …

I once believed in some notion of a pure ambition, which I defined as an ambition for the work rather than for oneself. But now? If a poet’s ambition were truly for the work and nothing else, he would write under a pseudonym, which would not only preserve that pure space of making, but free him from the distractions of trying to forge a name for himself in the world. No, all ambition has the reek of disease about it, the relentless smell of the self—except for that terrible, blissful feeling at the heart of creation itself, when all thought of your name is obliterated and all you want is the poem, to be the means wherein something of reality, perhaps even something of eternity, realizes itself. That is noble ambition. …

Art needs some ultimate concern[.]

~ Christian Wiman, My Bright Abyss