The creative and artistic process requires a willingness to move beyond “I’m not really equipped for this and don’t yet have all the right experiences” to a simple “yes.” …
Category: Creativity
As we near Christmas, we recall both the woundedness of our lives and the joy of the birth of the Christ, who came to bind up our wounds, heal our brokenness and fill the empty spaces in our lives. …
I know that many of you — I would say all of you — are creative people yourselves, involved in writing and art and music and other forms of expression. And if you’re not, I’d encourage you to ask yourself if there might be some work for you to do. As I move forward into the new year, I’m going to encourage that creativity in those of you who read my blog, even as I encourage you to look deep …
May we take our work seriously and ourselves with a grain a salt, with a growing knowledge that we are only instruments waiting to be played, apprentices under the guiding hand of a master craftsman, young players in need of the maestro’s baton, glimmering pieces of shiny glass and refracted light in search of focus and unity, sparkling moments of inspiration awaiting meaning and purpose, self-knowledge that we are moons, not stars capable of our own energy and light. …
I’ve written about mystery and around mystery and have been inspired by mystery. How could I have not? As a person of faith who tries to live a contemplative and aware life, mystery lies at the core of all I am and believe. For in mystery, God resides. …
It’s okay to not be productive for a while (and that’s a tough one for me). It’s okay to simply sit “fallow” with God in prayer, without agenda or even words, knowing that God is plowing and harrowing me, leaving me unsown in order to restore my fruitfulness at the time only God controls. God’s work, God’s time. …
God, of course, is the giver of everything that is good and creative in our lives, even though we tend to call these things “mine.” MY gifts, MY time, MY talents. Carelessly and thoughtlessly, we can convince ourselves that we have earned these things when, in fact, they are pure gifts. …
“The Church must be a poetic community,” theologian Walter Brueggemann once wrote, meaning — in my mind anyway — that if we are going to reach the people around us with the Gospel, we’re going to have to move beyond the standard rhetoric and capture their imaginations through our creativity, poetry, music, and art. …
The creative arts, at least for many of us who profess a Creator God, are acts of faith. When we dare to create, when we “step out the boat,” we move from safety and comfort into an area of uncertainty, for when we begin to create we don’t always know where we are going to end up. …
This power of the word within us is a mysterious and sacred thing, for the stories of our lives are the histories of the movement of God in us over the course of time. To tell these stories of “God within us” is akin to proclaiming the word of God. …