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Following is the Table of Contents and the Preface from "Creativity: Where the Divine and the Human Meet" by Matthew Fox Copyright 2002 TABLE OF CONTENTS Preface: Creative Spirit, Holy Spirit I. Who Are We as a Species? II. Creativity, Our True Nature III. Where does Creativity Come From? IV. What Happens When the Creative Spirit and We Co-Create? V. Adam and Prometheus, Creativity and the Christ: Is Original Sin the Refusal to Create and Is Redemption the Liberation of Creativity? VI: Revisioning Easter and Pentecost: Rolling Away the Obstacles to Creativity so that the Spirit of Creativity Can Resurrect VII. Tapping into the Creative Spirit: Finding, Honoring and Practicing Creativity VIII. Where Do We Go from Here?--Putting Creativity To Work in Culture and Everyday Life Conclusion: The Coming Dawn: The Hope that Creativity Brings Preface: Creative Spirit, Holy Spirit This book arose from a request from my publisher who heard me speak on the subject of “The Divine Artist Within” at the Unity Church of New York in New York City in June, 2000. Some thoughts offered here also developed from a talk I was invited to give at the Art Institute of Chicago in 1993. I am grateful for the invitation to expand these talks, for in the process of writing this book I feel I have deepened my love and understanding of creativity. I do not know any area of human potential more important if we are to be a sustainable species again. Creativity, when all is said and done, may be the best thing our species has going for it. It is also the most dangerous. I explore creativity here in the following manner: First I ask, how essential is creativity to our human nature? Chapters one and two undertake this question, chapter one by exposing pseudo-meanings of being human, chapter two by proposing that creativity is our real nature. Creativity constitutes the very meaning of being human and our powers of creativity distinguish us from other species. Evil as well as profound goodness transpires through our creativity. Chapter three poses the question: “Where does creativity comes from?” Chapter four speaks of the divine imagination taking us into our creativity, as mystics have always taught and recognized. Chapter five considers two myths about creativity and its consequences: The Prometheus-Hercules myth and the Adam-Jesus Christ myth. Chapter six considers the obstacles to creativity that must be removed for creativity to flow—what is holding us back? Chapter seven considers how we can tap more fully into our creative power; and chapter eight speaks to cultural benefits that will flow when we bring creativity to bear on education, every day life and relationships, politics and worship. Creativity assists us to move as a species to our next level of evolution. When we consider creativity we are considering the most elemental and innermost and deeply spiritual aspects of our beings. The great mystic Meister Eckhart asks: “What is it that remains?” And his answer is: “That which is inborn in me remains.” That which we give birth to from our depths is that which lives on after us. That which is inborn in us constitutes our most intimate moments—intimate with self, intimate with God the Creative Spirit and intimate with others. To speak of creativity is to speak of profound intimacy. It is also to speak of our connecting to the Divine in us and of our bringing the Divine back to the community. This is true whether we understand our creativity to be begetting and nourishing our children, making music, doing theater, gardening, writing, teaching, running a business, painting, constructing houses or sharing the healing arts of medicine and therapy. Imagination brings about not just intimacy but a big intimacy, a sense of union with the cosmos, a sense of belonging and being at home, of our knowing we have not only a right to be here but a task to do as well while we are here. French philosopher Gaston Bachelard says that “great dreamers possess intimacy with the world.” The artist in us and among us shares intimacy, returns one’s intimacy to the world, nourishing the community with one’s inner experience. This process of intimacy shared feels a lot like a sacred experience. An example of what I mean can be found in a letter the psychologist Carl Rogers wrote about his work to theologian Paul Tillich. Rogers was very ‘secular’ in his outlook until very near the end of his life, yet in this letter he confesses as follows: “I feel as though I am somehow in tune with the forces of the universe or that forces are operating through me in regard to this helping relationship.” And his creativity as a therapist elicited awe from him: “I stand by with awe at the emergence of a self, a person, as I see a birth process in which I have had an important and facilitating part struggling to be himself, yet deathly afraid of being himself.” I do not believe that Carl Rogers at work is that different from any of us in our work and relationships. In our creativity, however it is expressed, we can all feel “in tune with the forces of the universe” and the result of our work often urges us to “stand by with awe.” Indeed, we must feel these things if we are to carry on with integrity. The title of this book, Creativity: Where the Divine and the Human Meet, suggests that there is a special encounter with the Divine where creativity occurs. Is any place more intimate than the place where we create? Where we co-create with the Spirit of God and the Spirit of largess that inspires our souls where we love? Where we make love? Where we love others through serving them with our work? Where we love our children? Where we paint our truth? Where we dance our dance? Where we speak our words? Where we work? Where we utter our poetry? The “our” is so big, so immense when we do these things. The ‘our’ includes the hydrogen atoms of our bodies that are fourteen billion years old; the carbon and other atoms in us that are 5 billions years old; the food we have eaten and the drink we have drunk that give us the energy to work; the ideas that have penetrated our minds and impregnated our imaginations; the language we learned to speak so many years ago; the beauty and the pain we have absorbed through our days on earth. It is intimate because it is us most truly, spontaneously and totally. It is also intimate because it is Spirit working through us in so profound a way that Eckhart says God becomes the space where we want to act. Creativity is not a noun or even a verb—it is a place, a space, a gathering, a union—a where—wherein the Divine powers of creativity and the human power of imagination join forces. Where the two come together is where beauty and grace happens and indeed, explodes. Creativity constitutes the ultimate in intimacy for it is the place where the Divine and the human are most destined to interact. The word “where” contains its own sense of the infinite as well as the intimate. We speak of “somewhere,” and “everywhere,” of “nowhere” and “anywhere,” of “elsewhere” and “wherever.” The word “where” offers an invitation to the imagination to stretch to extremes of nothingness and everythingness…and beyond. We might say that Divine intimacy is experienced as creativity and New Creation that is accompanied by risk, surprise, and the courage needed for both. New Creation brings renewal, resurrection and forgiveness with it. Creativity as Divine intimacy flows through us and is bigger than we are, urging us to go the edge and grow larger. And our growth in turn delights God. “God is delighted to watch your soul enlarge” says Eckhart. I began this book intending to write on creativity but--as so often happens when the Spirit of Creativity has its way with us—something more was born. An insight about a theology of sin and grace emerged as I came to realize, during the course of its composition, that something else lay behind a recovery of a spirituality of creativity. To my surprise, I found myself writing a chapter on the meaning of Original Sin and Redemption, of Easter, grace and a Theology of the Holy Spirit. Prometheus, Hercules, Christ and Sophia were showing up. And yes, the historical Jesus as well. I propose that we do inherit an original wound and that wound is directly related to the ambiguity of our very creative brains: Will we use our creativity to destroy or to bless with? Original sin means the repression of creativity and redemption ought to be understood as liberation from our fear of creativity; salvation is the return of creativity which is the return of the Spirit. And Jesus (among others) died teaching and living these things. Easter becomes the resurrection of creativity itself and the overcoming of the fear of death that interferes with creativity. Pentecost becomes the sending of the Spirit of creativity which is the Holy Spirit. I probably should not have been as surprised as I was. For if speaking of creativity constitutes speaking of our true, God-like, nature, it would stand to reason that the great stories of our history would address issues of creativity in their mysterious and mythical fashion. Why wouldn’t a discussion of creativity unleash stories of guilt, fear of death, challenging the Divine Creator, envy, sin, redemption and grace? Why wouldn’t creativity challenge the Divine itself to be threatened and even envious as the Prometheus story tells us? The great African American mystic Howard Thurman once wrote that Christianity has “betrayed Jesus.” Philosopher Thomas Sheehan writes of how “The Kingdom of God Became Christianity” and scientist Peter Russell talks of “truth decay.” There has been much “truth decay” in the church’s imperial (Constantinian) ambitions which gave birth to agendas on original sin and redemption and “the only Son of God” that wandered far from the message of the historical Jesus. To say nothing of the church’s often loud silence about our powers of creativity and imagination and its condemnations of the same. Chaos reigns in our world today. Indigenous peoples and ancient forests are being exterminated along with an estimated 30,000 species per year. Gaps are widening between the haves and have-nots of the world. Economies are faltering world over. AIDS is spreading voraciously especially in Africa where entire nations are being swallowed up by a disease that is wasting one out of three persons. Transnational companies are exporting American capitalism and its value system to cultures that are thousands of years old and that succumb quickly to fast-food outlets and media invasions of Hollywood cinema and television sitcoms. Events at the World Trade Center, when thousands of people died in a vicious attack, remind us of our species’ vast capacity for evil and hate and negative use of creativity. As do threats of bioterrorism. What do we do with chaos? Creativity has an answer. We are told by those who have studied the processes of nature that creativity happens at the border between chaos and order. Chaos is a prelude to creativity. We need to learn, as every artist needs to learn, to live with chaos and indeed to dance with it as we listen to it and attempt some ordering. Artists wrestle with chaos, take it apart, deconstruct and reconstruct from it. Accept the challenge to convert chaos into some kind of order, respecting the timing of it all, not pushing beyond what is possible—combining holy patience with holy impatience--that is the role of the artist. It is each of our roles as we launch the twenty-first century because we are all called to be artists in our own way. We were all artists as children. We need to study the chaos around us in order to turn it into something beautiful. Something sustainable. Something that remains. African American philosopher bell hooks talks about the need for an aesthetic revolution and proposes that our times offer an opportunity either where ties will be severed or “new and varied forms of bonding” can occur. We can make new and unheard of connections between classes and differing races and cultures by way of the aesthetic. How is this possible? Because the poorest of the poor are “thinking about aesthetics.” Hooks says: “On the terrain of culture, one can participate in critical dialogue with the uneducated poor, the black underclass who are thinking about aesthetics.” She finds great hope and energy in this possibility of engaging different classes and ethnic groups around aesthetics. “It’s exciting to think, write, talk about and create art that reflects passionate engagement with popular culture, because this may very well be ‘the’ central future location of resistance struggle, a meeting place where new and radical happenings can occur.” Hooks is advocating putting imagination to the use of transformation. I concur. I do not see any way out of humankind’s multiple dilemmas except that one route that got us here in the first place: Our powerful creativity. But to apply our creativity at the service of justice and compassion—that is the lesson taught by all spiritual traditions and it is a lesson of survival for our times. As the Dali Lama has put it, “we can reject everything else: religion, ideology, all received wisdom. But we cannot escape the necessity of love and compassion.” To allow creativity its appropriate place in our lives and our culture, our education and our family relationships, is to allow healing to happen at a profound level. The intimacy of creativity corresponds to the mystical experience itself. Mysticism bespeaks union and there is an on-going union of us and the Divine precisely during the process of giving birth in any form whatsoever. We lose track of time and of place, we move into a timeless time and a placeless space when we are in a creative state. Afterwards, we know we have tasted something worth remembering, something that will last. And often we have a special gift to bestow on others because of the journey we have undergone in our creative work. A French philosopher once commented on the work of painter Lapicque in the following manner: He “demands of the creative act that it should offer him as much surprise as life itself.” Our creativity is meant to surprise—just as life does. Furthermore, art means “an increase of life, a sort of competition of surprises that stimulates our consciousness and keeps it from becoming somnolent.” The alternatives to creativity put to the use of intimacy, surprise and compassion are not only to wallow in passivity or luxury living and cynicism while the earth burns all around us a la Nero on a planetary scale, but also to turn our divine powers of creativity over to demonic uses. This is strong language—divine/demonic—but it is necessary language for stating the truth of things. The truth is that our creativity is so powerful, so without precedent in the history of evolution, that it is literally taking over the planet. Scientists now tell us that evolution has been supplanted on this planet by culture. Human culture moves at so rapid a pace that is has far outrun and outstripped the natural processes of change and adaptation. This means we are already playing God whether we want to or not, whether we admit it or not. We have taken over the processes of evolution on this planet. How are we doing? Not very well from the looks of things. No one can consider twentieth century history and not see the demonic in human creativity that was birthed in that era. The first and second world wars with their wiping out of civilian populations on an unprecedented scale; the making of the first atomic weapon (“now we know evil” spoke Oppenheimer, the father of that project), the amassing of nuclear weapons and delivery systems; the invention of gas ovens to more efficiently exterminate an entire race of humans; the genocide in Cambodia under Pot Pol; in Rwanda; in Stalin’s Russia; the gradual warming of the planet as we dumped more and more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere oblivious of its consequences for other species and other generation; the fouling of our rivers, oceans, fisheries, ozone protection, forests, soil; and terrorism in the name of fundamentalist religion. All these actions took creativity. They all took imagination. They were misuses of our imaginations. Can we learn the lesson of that? Can we come to grips with our divine/demonic power this century? We must. We have no other choice. Whether our species is sustainable or not depends on our wrestling creativity back from the brink of its demonic potential. To move our divine powers of creativity from serving the demonic to serving the Divine is to move from art for art’s sake and art for advertising sake and art for power sake to art for compassion’s sake. Art for the sake of planetary health and well being. Art for celebration’s sake. Art for building bridges’ sake. This constitutes an aesthetic revolution which is a non-violent revolution. In this book I end up re-constructing Christianity and Culture around the number one survival issue of our time: the sustainability achieved when creativity is honored and practiced not for its own sake but for justice and compassion’s sake. This is the way of the Holy Spirit who is the Spirit of Creativity and Compassion. And who was present hovering over the waters at the beginning of creation and is present still at the continuance of creation (Aboriginals call this the “Dreamtime”) and who is present in the mind of the artist at work—which is each of us. And is the presence that melts the Tower of Babel, that is, the divisions between cultures, religions and peoples. Hildegard of Bingen taught about this Spirit in the following manner: Who is the Holy Spirit? The Holy Spirit is a Burning Spirit. It kindles the hearts of humankind. Like tympanum and lyre it plays them, gathering volume in the temple of the soul…. The Holy Spirit is the life of the life of all creatures…that gives existence to all form…. The Holy Spirit resurrects and awakens everything that is. May our species be resurrected and awakened by the Spirit of Creativity for this coming century. May we be ennobled to carry on the next stage of our evolution. May this book make a modest contribution to that effort. October 4, 2001 University of Creation Spirituality Naropa Oakland Oakland, California |
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