20 Catalysts for Creativity

So this is funny. I'm posting a link to a blog post about creativity because I don't have anything creative to say. Eh. We have a world wide web of resources so why not use em?

An interesting post on the Guardian blog

Where did all the Christian writers go?

For All You Creative People Out There

On Saturday I went to a forum at our church for people in creative industries--musicians, architects, artists, writers, graphic designers, etc. Wow. Not only was it interesting, but I'm impressed with their resolve to help people figure out how their vocation and their faith work together.

It was put together by a comedy writer and an artist, both members of the larger church group we're in (called "Co-mission churches"), both people who decided that it was worth the effort to get up at an early hour on a Saturday morning, buy some croissants and fruit to share and plan a couple of talks and group discussions to get the church talking about what it means to pursue a "creative" vocation as it corresponds with our faith. Because it's no secret that for the last few hundred years and especially within the last fifty, evangelicals have spewed dragon fire on the idea of art in church, especially visual art, reviling it like a form of idolatry and excessive luxury. Modernism was all about the Word so while we did have literature and rhetoric, visual art wasn't considered worth our time or money like it was in the early ages of the Christian church. (Even then if it was included, it had to fit a certain "church" mode and follow specific "church" guidelines. If you couldn't do stained glass, your art would not be included in the canon of church beauty. If you didn't have magnificent wood working skills to carve an altar or pew out of the surrounding oak trees, then you were doomed to whittle away your time to secular causes. Because if it wasn't displayed in church, it wasn't worthy art.)

While I think that some churches today, especially the emerging churches, are doing a better job of encouraging drama and visual arts, people who desire to make a vocation out of their creativity still often feel the need to justify their choice. Why? Because we're not doctors or fireman, lawyers or policeman, professionals who make the survival of humankind possible. We're luxury. We're excessive. We're a vanity.

As our speaker pointed out, it's tempting to believe this lie because we have our priorities wrong. Somehow the evangelical church has gotten the idea into our heads that our main priority as Christians is to introduce people to the saving love of Christ. Evangelize evangelize evangelize. Well, surprisingly, it's not. Of course it's God's will that all of humanity will come to know him, but God put us on this earth for a greater purpose: to give him glory. To worship him as he made us to worship him: as humans. The act of creation is human, and there is no other reason we should have to give.

God made the world unnecessarily beautiful. Look at the thousands of birds in the world. Visit the Canadian Rockies. Get married and experience passionate sex the way God designed it to be.

Not only is our world beautiful, but so is His Word. The first words that Adam spoke after he saw his wife for the first time was not a theological sermon but a love poem. A simple love poem. The Bible is filled with poetry and metaphors and stories and parables and powerful symbols that point to what? God's unnecessarily beautiful love for us--the kind that never dies, no matter how often we hurt him.

I find it interesting that the first mention of a character in the Bible who is "filled with the Spirit of God" is an artist:

"The Lord said to Moses, 'See, I have called by name Bezalel the son of Uri, son of Hur, of the tribe of Judah, and I have filled him with the Spirit of God, with ability and intelligence, with knowledge and all craftmanship, to devise artistic designs, to work in gold, silver, and bronze, in cutting stones for setting, and in carving wood, to work in every craft."

Tragic "Art"

Of course it's difficult to define and qualify aesthetic value. But this? This is a Derrida-inspired comment that mangles the meaning of existence into a coagulated pulp. Art celebrates life. This is not art.

Yale Abortion Girl

Why the Arts?

“The source of all art is the human psyche’s primal, pre-linguistic need for the resolution of stress and discord through beauty and harmony, for the use of creativity to revive a life deadened by routine, for a link to reality through our instinctive, sensory feel for the truth. Like music and dance, painting and sculpture, poetry and song, story is first, last, and always the experience of aesthetic emotion—the simultaneous encounter of thought and feeling. When an idea wraps itself around an emotional charge, it becomes all the more powerful, all the more profound, all the more memorable . . . life on its own, without art to shape it, leaves you in confusion and chaos, but aesthetic emotion harmonizes what you know with what you feel to give you a heightened awareness and a sureness of your place in reality. In short, a story well told gives you the very thing you cannot get from life: meaningful emotional experience. In life, experiences become meaningful with reflection in time. In art, they are meaningful now, at the instant they happen.”--Robert McKee

Rowling Admits to Christian Themes in Harry Potter

I've always loved Harry Potter. I remember the very first time I picked up the first book--probably because I was very reluctant. My fourth grade brother loved them and they were children's books, so I didn't think there was a good chance they'd hold my attention. Luckily for me my family happened to be on a two week camping trip to Alberta, Canada and the long car hours forced me to experience the joys of Harry Potter's wizarding world.

Despite all the negative responses Harry Potter has received from the Christian population, I read the books for what they were: a fantasy revolving around the hero's journey to overcome evil with good. It's a basic plot that reveals itself in most literature. As a Christian I appreciate these plots because they demonstrate that humanity seems to instinctly understand the story of our redemption, or at least to wish one for themselves. The hero's journey is always a story of sacrifice and redemption, which parallels our own redemption through Christ.

The last book in particular, The Deathly Hallows, made me wonder if Rowling deliberately included Christian themes throughout the series. I read an article in Christianity Today about an interview in which Rowling would only reveal that she did believe in God--she could say nothing more about her religious beliefs, she said, because that would reveal too much about the ending of hte 7th book. Well, now that the 7th book has been out, Rowling has admitted to Christianity being an inspiration for the books. She admits that she struggles with faith and belief in an afterlife, but clearly says that the Christian faith is a theme in Harry Potter.

Honestly, it doesn't make me love the books more or less, because whether or not she deliberately inserted the Christian storyline into her books, it was there for all to see. I think it's too obvious to miss, personally, and actually I wonder if it would mean more if she hadn't done it deliberately. But still, it's nice to know that millions of readers out there aren't corrupting their minds with trashy wizarding literature. Whew.

Click on the blog post title to link to the article about Rowling's interview.

We Can Teach Them To Sing

Let choirs sing well or not at all. Otherwise we merely confirm the majority in their conviction that the world of business, which does with such efficiency so much that never really needed doing, is the real, the adult, and the practical world; and that all this culture and religion (horrid words both) are essentially marginal, amateurish, and rather effeminate activities. --C.S. Lewis

Dusty Boxes

It's day two of my return to Reno. After a three week vacation in which I camped at Lake Tahoe with my parents and brothers, housboated on Lake Shasta with our youth group, and then camped again at Tahoe for a church retreat, I'm finally able to swing back into regular life--as regular as life can be, that is. Vacation reminds me that life should never fall into a predictable routine--we should have a party all the time! Still, I should never take a vacation from writing and I did these last few weeks. The last post I wrote was quite awhile ago and I never finished the thought process. I left you hanging with a question: what does creative nonfiction have to do with worship? I believe the answer is found in the formation of creative nonfiction and worship, and from creative nonfiction, I believe worship could learn a thing or two.

Creative nonfiction has existed since the origin of time, whether it was in family storytelling or oral history preservation. Worship of God also began at the beginning when Adam and Eve walked with God in the garden. But as history proceeded to stomp through the earth, human systems and agenda began to take priority. Soon we had a name for everything, a system for routine, formulas for our problems, and practical goals to attain. As a result, storytelling is now labeled and put away in the proper box: screenwriting, novels, poetry, non-fiction, etc. Worship is also labeled. Traditional, contemporary, spontaneous, spirit-led, liturgical, etc.

Labeling and boxing is one thing, but putting those boxes away into the attic and doing everything by memory is tragic. I say we take down the boxes, brush off the dust, and ask some important questions, just like some of the new literary thinkers have done. They weren't happy with the genres as they were. The labels were too limiting and left necessary art forms homeless on the street. For example, what about the memoir? Where is the art of factual human experiences? Where's the story we're forgetting in people's lives? And TA-DA!! a mix of many of the genres was named creative nonfiction, and it is now appreciated and a part of our life. So when it comes to worship, I say we do the same thing. We take down the boxes, brush off the pages, and ask important questions. Why do we do what we do? Why is worship structured the way it is? Why is it worth the effort? To what extent do our real beliefs govern the way we worship God?

I'm going to take a coffee break now.