The Call to Create: Pursuing Depth in Art and Life

a few honest thoughts about the creative's struggle with authentic expression, entertainment, meaning, and spiritual growth

Writing is a net good for me—to settle down life’s swirling activity enough to get the words out is a worthy endeavor. Yet, it’s a real struggle, not for want of desire or effort, but for time. My brain is constantly having to make the judgment call: if I do THIS, I will have to delay THAT. I thought I was fairly good at managing my time, but maybe not so much. Have I tried blocking out time? Yes. Have I cut out all but the essentials? Well, sort of.

I want to flex certain creative muscles but other demands are demanding NOW. Or maybe it’s just that I want to accomplish/experience too much in too little time (let the reader understand: I am impatient. Lord help me.) The pains of the writer’s life is not always what you’d assume…sometimes just getting to the blank page is a battle.

[Bear with me…I’m feeling very honest today.]  

I tried a new thing last night. Well, not entirely new, but unfamiliar, uncomfortable, and FUN. I’ve had a specific image in my mind for about a week that keeps asking to get out of my mind (or whatever bay holds the creative ideas as they patiently wait until we are ready to launch them into the great wild and blue ocean), and I took the few minutes to type it out. It was hard. Writers each have their own process, but we tend to fall into two camps: the brain dump and edit later camp (reasonable) and the meticulous “painter” camp, editing as we go, slow and painful, little brush strokes at a time until we feel satisfied or give up or keel over (do not recommend). Can you guess what my natural inclination is? I wrote as fast as I could and got the scene down in some form, and it was good. Not the writing, mind you, but the experience of flexing the new muscle of writing fiction. 

[More honesty, brace yourselves.] 

I can’t stand the easy acceptance of mediocrity in the arts. You can call me a snob, and that’s fine (won’t be the first time), but that’s not how I see it. I once had a debate with a friend over our differing tastes in fiction. She insisted that the mass market fast-paced thriller novels that she picked up at airport bookstands was all she needed to unwind (with a glass of red, of course) at the end of a stressful day and she had no desire to read anything more “difficult.” As she made her case, I laughed and shook my head, “The last time I tried to read one of those, I literally chucked the book in the trash!”

I love my friend but I don’t understand why a person would waste time (and money) on fiction that makes me feel dumber after reading…but that isn’t how she experiences it. What I view as disappointing, mediocre storytelling is, for others, a relaxing experience. We each have our tastes and preferences, of course, but inwardly I am asking my friend…don’t you want more from your reading? Is temporary entertainment the only thing gained from the time you’ve invested? Why be satisfied with a pairing of Cheetos with your wine when a thousand day aged gouda is right there, on the table, for the taking? I’m trying not to be judgy about it, I promise. 

The creative arts have lately been associated with a kind of escapism, a way to numb or medicate the pain or simply “check out” from real life. And maybe this is where “the arts” in my mind begin to morph into a clinical and cold idea of “entertainment.” Like so many other girlies of my generation, I find myself “prescribing” entertainment when I feel tired or sad or whatever…who hasn’t re-watched Pride and Prejudice to soothe an anxious soul? Or binged Love Is Blind to kind of switch-off for the day? (Oh the irony of “unplugging” from our real life via a streaming app!)

I’m not sure why these ideas feel opposing, but I’m trying to untangle the thread of artistic beauty-as-balm versus a sort of creatively packaged lidocaine. Maybe it’s about the origin or source: one seems to be a healthy outpouring of a creative soul and the other is a product to sell or means to an outcome. The former wakes something up in us; the latter puts us to sleep. 

[I finally got a full night’s sleep last night…can you tell?] 

Similarly, I despise a certain kind of moral and spiritual temperance that says, “Let's not lose our heads over this God-stuff…” as if we must hedge our bets in case the house of cards comes falling down. What kind of faith is that? Who wants to live as if our eternal hope, that spiritual life-force that is Truth personified, might actually turn out to be a laughing phantom? 

In his Scottish novel, Sir Gibbie, George MacDonald writes, 

“Let him who understands, understand better; let him not say the good is less than perfect, or excuse his supineness and spiritual sloth by saying to himself that a man can go too far in his search after the divine, can sell too much of what he has to buy the field of the treasure. Either there is no Christ of God, or my all is his.” 

I grew up in a home that recognized God as Creator and Father and Judge, but it wasn’t until the person of Jesus Christ came to me in the darkness of my late twenties and extended an invitation–for me to come to know Him, and to become someone renewed, open, submissive, willing to hope–that the spine of my world was cracked and realigned for true healing to occur. Before that experience, I would have called myself Christian, but it was a guarded kind of religion. Now, I knew Him to be true, and uncompromising, and more authentically good than anyone I had ever known. That season of meeting and knowing Him in that way marked me forever; everything else in my experience was now measured against this new standard.

If you have encountered Christ as I have, you know that the plane of our very existence–not merely our individual histories and experiences–but all of the whole and actual universe rests on the foundation of who he is. His reality is Reality. This is what the writer of Colossians was getting at when he wrote, “He is before all things, and in him all things hold together” (1:17). The grand scope and minute detail of my life (and yours, astonishingly) derive from His being and doing. But we Christians sometimes act (and especially create) as if we were apologizing for something that might not be true. Is it true? Does our art reveal what is hidden in our hearts? Do we need to repent of unbelief? 

My faith journey has long been interwoven with my experience as a creative, as yours is too, I bet. In every season of my life I have gone to the page to work out my emotions and understanding with words (maybe you do this with a guitar or paintbrush). We wrestle with the meager tools we have been given. We offer up a sacrifice of thanksgiving, in forms of color and language and song. This is our spiritual act of worship: to give, with our creativity and energy and skill, that life that was first given to us in Christ. 

What if we went onward down this line and understood the creative arts as a translational gift; a means of coming home to Reality?

What if our unique gifts of creativity–music, dance, theater, sculpture, architecture, storytelling–became doorways for us to invite others to come home, too? What does it look like to reject a shallow, two-dimensional spirituality (shrugging off that comforting cloak of skepticism) and to sniff out the poisoned pill of an easy, euthanizing entertainment? What if, instead, we embrace a process of spiritual formation through the creative mode that leads to healing, growing and maturing, contributing to our communities, and true enjoyment? Perhaps the arts, in the variety of expressions, are available to be a kind of ministering to the weary, the hopeless, or the lost (be that ourselves, at times, and our neighbors, often.) A cure for the existential soul.

If we believe what we say we believe, surely our art will call deep unto deep—Lord, make it so! In the joy of our creativity and in our everyday wrestling of the calendar, it comes back to this simple truth (as MacDonald prays): Either there is no Christ of God, or my all is his.

Until next time,

SBL