Ethical Living as a Creative Act

The Wake of Those before Us
Leonardo DaVinci is considered one of the most creative men to have lived, dabbling in all areas of art as well as a profound inventor. He was a true artist, whose creativity touched ever area of his life. Oddly, DaVinci slept only 4-5 hours a day, clamming he had more important things to do than sleep. He invented an alarm clock that worked by streaming water from one receptacle to another. When the second receptacle was full, a system of gears and levers raised Leonardo’s feet into the air promptly waking him up.

DaVinci's more modern equivalent was Thomas Edison. Like DaVinci, Edison was an artist but of a different stripe. He put down the pant brush and picked up the wrench. He held over 1500 patents including those for the phonograph, kinetoscope, radio, light bulb, and my favorite, the tattoo gun. Edison was obsessed with maximizing his cognitive ability through thinking with a rejuvenated mind. So he discarded the normal sleep pattern of night day. Instead, he would take many short catnaps throughout a 24 hour period. To make sure he did not over sleep he invented his own simple alarm clock. He would sleep in his chair, holding ball bearings in the palms of his hands. After an appropriate number of z's, he'd relax enough to drop the balls, waking himself up. Then he'd go back to being a creative genius inventor.

Edison and DaVinci where eccentric, some would clam they lived odd or unusual lives. Most see them as the blessed oddities of humanity. Both men where gifted. Both knew the urgency of creative moments. Both shinned with such creativity we still feel the warmth. And In the wake of these two men, we are moved and made to wonder about the importance of creativity. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, professor of psychology at the University of Chicago, notes that:

The world would be a very different place if it were not for creativity. We would still act according to the few clear instructions our genes contain, and anything learned in the course of our lives would be forgotten after our death. There would be no speech, no songs, no tools, no ideas such as love, freedom, or democracy. It would be an existence so mechanical and impoverished that none of us would want any part of it… To be human means to be creative.

From the witness of history, Csikszentmihalyi clams that "To be human means to be creative." Edison and DaVinci are not odd only humans. They lived from the spark of their humanity. They were alive with the understanding of their own creative potential and it kept them up at night.

The Landscape of Creativity
To be human means to be creative? Could it be it’s in our DNA to be creative? Deep down are we artists of the soul? Poet and philosopher, John O’Donohue gives the two reasons why he thinks the artist is an aspect of what it is to be human.

"Everyone is involved whether they like it or not in the construction of their world. So, it's never as given as it actually looks; you are always shaping it and building it. From that perspective, each of us is an artist. Secondly, I believe that everyone has imagination. That no matter how mature and adult and sophisticated a person might seem, that person is still essentially an ex-baby."

O’Donohue is right. The world is liquid. It exists in such a way that we can't help but effect our environment just as it affects us. Step into a river and not only does the river change but you as well. We are artist because changing our world is not optional. Human existence means human involvement. This involvement is not just in our bones it’s in our books. Theologian Paul Tillich said there is no such thing as the immaculate conception of an idea. Every idea came from somewhere else. Creativity is not a matter of conjuring up something brand new. Everything always depends on what went before. Any new way of thinking or looking at things depends on what has gone before and then we simply add a little something more. I have heard it said, "The only reason he could see so far was that he stood on the shoulders of the giants who went before him." One idea plus another idea adds up to be not two, but three ideas. To be human, to live a human life, is to add in some way to what has gone before, to use your life to somehow make a difference in the world, so the world is better off for your having been, all the while, building on the shoulders of those before us. It's always a beautiful view when we look from the landscape of creativity.

The Breath of the Soul
When Edison died in 1941, Henry Ford a friend and fellow inventor captured his last breath in a bottle. We know we can not capture creativity in a bottle, yet there is something of the eternal in creativity. In the Hebrew language ‘ruach’ means breath or wind, it also is used to describe the spirit of creativity that moved over the chaos of creation creating form and beauty where their was only a void. In the Jewish tradition, the same idea is in play to describe the spark of life breathed into humanity to make us living souls. To access imagination was to tap into the breath of the soul, operate in harmony with the creative impulse that ordered the world. The creative souls on who’s shoulders we stand may well have come before us but are to us co-conspirators - breathing the same 'ruach' as us and contributing to a world far beyond present comprehension. In 1917, Frank Baum, the author of The Wizard of Oz, explains it this way:

Imagination led Columbus to discover America. Imagination led Franklin to discover electricity. Imagination has given us the steam engine, the telephone, the talking machine and the automobile, for these things had to be dreamed of before they became realities. So I believe that dreams--day dreams, you know, with your eyes wide open and your brain-machinery whizzing--are likely to lead to the betterment of the world. The imaginative child will become the imaginative man or woman most apt to create, to invent, and therefore to foster civilization.

Everyone has imagination but it is not common something of the eternal is presence. Humans are the only creatures which have the captivity to imagine. As children we all lived in an imaginal world. For example, when you've been told don't open that door, because there are monsters in there, “Oh! The world you'd create on the other side of the door!” We dreamed ourselves into and out of worlds beyond our today. Yet our educational system trains children to become followers by rewarding them for completing assigned tasks in conventional ways. As Baum notes, If we want to prepare the young for positions of leadership in society, we must nurture their capacity to imagine, to envision a future, to dream. For great leaders are great visionaries and dreamers. I believe that deep in the heart of each of us, there is this imagining capacity and when man ceases to dream he ceases to be alive. Creativity and imagination are necessary for the child to sees an enchanted forest in the backyard and for that child to one day lead people into a better world. The same man who cried "I have a dream" was the boy who played in that dream-world as a child.

The Necessity of Being a Child
In the Christian tradition, Jesus taught that all men should become as a child. He was speaking of childlikeness not childishness. But what is childlikeness? What is childishness? In most spiritual traditions, Childishness and childlikeness are two opposing dispositions toward life. George MacDonald and C. S. Lewis offer some helpful insights into the nature of these two dispositions towards life. Lewis summarizes the two when he writes, "there are only two kinds of people in the end: those who say to God, 'Thy will be done,' and those to whom God says, in the end, 'Thy will be done'"


What is childishness?
In both writers childishness is primarily egocentrism. Childishness is a living from an ego centrality. Where the higher faculties of imagination, reason, and logic are used in the service of unchecked selfishness and egocentrism. The childish person is overly concerned with himself and only relates to his surroundings in terms of self-aggrandizement. Others are important only because of what the childish person can get from them. They view the world as revolving about themselves, often expressed in a lust for power and traitorous behavior or whining megalomania and greed. In Lewis' writings the characters that fit the bill are Edmund Pevensie and Eustace Clarence Scrubb from The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe and The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, Both view the world as revolving about themselves, both begin as thoroughly obnoxious, childish little creatures, mature into spiritually damnable children. Beautifully and receptively Edmund and Eustace have profound personal encounters with Aslan and leading to a humbling self-realization and genuine change in nature.

MacDonald in his book Lilith shows how we trade a inborn moral poster for one more self serving. In the story we find young, relatively uncorrupted children who become more childish as they grow older. As one character says: "If a Little One doesn't care, he grows greedy, and then lazy, and then big, and then stupid and then bad" In addition to egocentricity, other attributes of childishness are spite, pettiness, cruelty, and pseudo-sophistication. MacDonald's insight into the childishness of pseudo-sophistication is worth quoting. "For it must be confessed that there are children who are not childlike. One of the saddest and not least common sights in the world is the face of a child whose mind is so brimful of worldly wisdom that the human childishness has vanished from it"

In our modern age, among the blur of IPods and MTV, designer narcissism and celebrated vanity, many have lost their childlike since of wonder. It passed through the cracks of their lives and now collects dust among all things forgotten (like virtue and Cindy Lopper). Imagination has been assailed by CGI effects and the ‘Gore-fest’ horror movies, not to mention the way the internet (particularly porn) has made the imagination a blind 90 pound wimp. People are unpracticed in the breath of the soul. Becoming adult in all the wrong ways: Choosing escapism over problem solving, Sex over relationships, pessimism over possibility and skepticism over potential. The sad irony is that as many grow up and slowly trade being childlike for being childish. Through this seduction into selfishness they are closing themselves off from the simple resonating joys of being childlike.

What is childlikeness?
Together they give us three aspects of childlikeness. The childlike personality is marked by humble perception and self-less memory. MacDonald understood childlikeness to be a kind of innocence akin to humility. He often ties humility to selflessness or self-forgetfulness: "To be rid of self is to have the heart bare to God and to the neighbor--to have all life ours, and possess all things. I see, in my mind's eye, the little children clambering up to sit on the throne with Jesus." The innocence way a child can get lost in a story or gives themselves at play without one thought of themselves is what he is getting here. It follows that He also held this humility to be characterized by unpretentiousness: "He who will be a man, and will not be a child, must--he cannot help himself--become a little man, that is, a dwarf. He will, however, need no consolation, for he is sure to think himself a very large creature indeed” Unpretentiousness in this way lacks the prudishness of the religious egoist and the holds a kind of honesty about ones stature, about who they really are. Childlikeness is marked by the humility of knowing your size. Every normal child conserves himself as truly bigger than the last line on the wall but not bigger than a mountain. They are innately aware of their smallness, frailty and true scope of the self in a world infinitely larger than they. Take a child crowned king he still must sup at this mother’s breast and when they rule it is as if it were a game. No child known their greatness even if the Titans rest in their shadow. It coaxes inquisitiveness out of its shell. Remember when you'd ask questions like why is the sky blue or where does God live? It is imagination that gave feet to your curiosity and humility that allows such questions to be perceived and breathed into the world. Children have the humility to see the real question and humility to ask the honest question when the prideful blindly keep their questions inside for fear of looking foolish or for love of appearing smart. The inquisitiveness of a child is the three-way conversation humility and curiosity have with imagination.

The second mark of a childlike personality is a spiritual longing. This longing is a grounded yearning for more than what exists. It is something of a romantic yearning for something more. Yet it is much more than just mere sentiment. In Corbin Scott Carnell's book, Bright Shadow of Reality: C. S. Lewis and the Feeling Intellect, he looks at this longing from a holistic perspective calling it the feeling intellect. Carnell used the German word 'Sehnsucht' to get at how this longing interwove thought and feeling. 'Sehnsucht' means "an underlying sense of displacement or alienation from what is desired” This sense of longing is a universal experiance; it is the experiance St. Augustine wrote of in his confession. "Thou hast prompted him that he should delight to praise thee, for thou hast made us for thyself and restless is our heart until it comes to rest in thee." Like a conductor taps on his stand to prompt the orchestra to attention God as made man in such a way as to prompt all humanity thought the restless longings of the soul. Lewis puts it this way, "If I find in myself a desire which no experience in the world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world." This longing is in every temporal pleasure as the fulfillment of that the temporal pleasure promise of satisfaction. Is such an eternal longing morbid? Lewis responded sighting that boy who reads about enchanted woods does not then become depressed about his own world: "He does not despise real woods because he has read of enchanted woods: the reading makes all real woods a little enchanted. This is a special kind of longing . . . The boy reading the fairy-tale desires and is happy in the very fact of desiring" this is more than just the joy of the hunt but a spiritual awareness of transcendent beauty.

Living in childlikeness does not mean embracing of sentimentality and gullibility with the castigation of logic and reason. Children have a great capacity to think logically. One child psychologist described the child’s soul as made up of three parts: the natural child, the adapted child, and the little professor. This little professor is the part of the child's soul that contains an unschooled wisdom that is logical, profound, and creative. We are born as little professors to logically and skillfully think within the storyline we have been given.

It is in such story lines that feelings and intellect meet. This felt intellect element comes from the fact that stories are the key to realizing this longing. The imagery of a pilgrim and journey is appropriate when understanding this idea for it is framed in story form. Our longing is always on a journey for the eternal shores are farther than life. This longing is rooted in the narrative way we are all frame life. Think of it this way, in our very beings - we are all stories! People are stories! We are more than ideas or facts, biology and protoplasm; we are a story, with narrative ands plot. This longing we speak of takes a narrative form, just as we take a narrative form. A redemption form of narrative is found in all good stories. In a nut shell here it is, there is peace, there is a problem, there is a solution, and there is resolution. This patter resonates with meaning even in this peanut of a form.

Particularly for Lewis the stories of MacDonald bring us to long. "[MacDonald's myths arouse] in us sensations we have never had before, never anticipated having, as though we had broken out of our normal mode of consciousness and 'possessed joys not promised to our birth.' It gets under our skin, hits us at a level deeper than our thoughts or even our passions, troubles oldest certainties till all questions are re-opened, and in general shocks us more fully awake than we are for most of our lives" Stories of redemption or good wining our have the power to wake something up in us. G. K. Chesterton makes the point this is why the fairytales are more real than the evening news.

C.S. Lewis gives us the third mark of childlikeness: Awe-full imagination. The childlike personality is evidenced in the proper operation of the imagination. Such people are to be marked by a sense of awe that is at its core an enthusiastic delight in surprise rising from an imagination without borders. In the essay "On Stories," Lewis reflects on how stories affected him. They produce "a feeling of awe, coupled with a certain sort of bewilderment such as one often feels in looking at a complex pattern of lines that pass over and under one another" Another way of saying this is that an Awe-full imagination gives us vision. Imagination filled with awe enables us to see, even if momentarily, that there is more to life than the physical reality about us. Such vision is terrifying and refreshing; terrifying in that we are left to ponder the possibility of unperceived dimensions of life, and yet refreshing because we are exposed to the unexpected flash of hope that the predictability dullness of our own world is not all there is.

As a part of an Awe-full imagination, Lewis explains that awe as an enthusiastic delight in surprise. Children don't get tripped up by curiosities about plot and the like. They seek the real beauties and delight in just enjoying the story for its own sake. Children, he writes, "understand this well when they ask for the same story over and over again, and in the same words. They want to have again the 'surprise' of discovering that what seemed Little-Red-Riding Hood's grandmother is really the wolf" The pleasure of the unexpected draws the childlike reader back time and again to a well-worn story. Just because, it is a good story! And like all good stories not everything is predictable and mundane. We entertain the possibility that another world exists on the other side of the wardrobe, we could blink and no longer see a train station but find ourselves on the shores of a whole other world.

In the essay, "On Three Ways of Writing for Children," Lewis elaborates how this is a work of the imagination. In defending his own love of fantasy, he takes issue with how "the modern critical world uses 'adult' as a term of approval. It is hostile to what it calls 'nostalgia' and contemptuous of what it calls 'Peter Pantheism.' Hence a man who admits that dwarfs and giants and talking beasts and witches are still dear to him in his fifty-third year is now less likely to be praised for his perennial youth than scorned and pitied for arrested development". The childlike Imagination is not offended by the seeming impossible but delights in it. Lewis' homey Tolkien description of a fairy-tale makes this point: "The magic of Faerie is not an end in itself, its virtue is in its operations: among these are the satisfaction of certain primordial human desires. One of these desires is to survey the depths of space and time. Another is . . . to hold communion with other living things" The childlike imagination can soar as far as the story can take it, and in some cases even beyond or back into the physical world somehow redeemed from the blan-vanilla-whitebread-bullshit called 'adult'.

Proper childlikeness enjoys a healthy imagination, in service of a greater good. Through it we see a more constructive side of ourselves--the abilities to sacrifice self, to wonder at life's mysteries, and to yearn for a world somehow cleaner, somehow more compelling than our own. Such Imaginations act as a muse for faith. Imagination posters the soul to be open to possibility, mystery, and the infinite. It call us to faith by opening us to the drama of possibility that "could be - if only" we would act.

Breathing out questions
Breathing is important. we all need it to live. If you stop breathing you stop living. Its important! But rarely do we think about our breathing. Back in our little lives, we do not sit in down to think about our breathing. Normal people don't think about breathing. Only, weird eyed skinny people in India do that. Or rich white upwardly mobile women doing expensive starching do that. Stoned surfer dudes from California do that. But Normal people, we forget about our breathing. In fact, some people may have never been aware of their breathing at all. Until now! We all take things for granted. Breathing is just a common one of those things till we stop breathing. A choking man appreciates what its like to breath. It is so essential for life yet we only think about it when something goes wrong.

Could the same be true of the moral imagination in us all? We have in us an eternal creativity, a breath of life. We come into this world to be artisans of the soul. Even if you draw stick men and your last good idea was a year ago, your deepest self longs to be creative. If we are artists then what is it that all men are to put forth this inner breath towards? I would propose the childlike making of ourselves. Creativity and Imagination are ethical categories. We ought to give ourselves to becoming the best human we can be. Living is a creative act. An individual life is to be a work of art and we are commissioned to creating our lives. We are all artisans of our own growth into something beautiful. Plato once asked, "What is the good life? What does it mean to be a good person?" Such questions are just the articulated "ruach" of being human.

When our eyes fall on a life that elevates, and ennobles our own soul with some palpable excellence – we call it beautiful. From King on the steps of the Lincoln memorial to Mother Teresa caring for the dyeing in Calcutta, the profound nature of there lives rises from the simplicity and trajectory they set their lives by. This is how a life speaks and gives ennobling words to something we are doing. As artist, they created a life worthy to be a living synonym of beauty. The art of moral living creates a better world in the very act of being moral. How you ask? When an acts of kindness, an event of moral courage, a movement of justice in grace, passes by our eyes, our 'Rauch' whispers, "I have just seen God!" In those moments such virtues are born in us. As moral truth is felt, as human destiny perceived, as moral trajectory is discovered what it means to be human is whispered to us and life born in us afresh. When the highest beauty a soul can imagine is putt on display, creation happens, art is born in us, and virtue is cultivated. The ethical breathing of a soul begins in asking what is beautiful before our eyes and where do such glimpse of beauty point?

Today to be human is often unconsciously defined by economic forces. We are conditioned to be consumers for the free market or producers for the state. We have in many ways lost what it means for a soul to move forward in time as a creative act. We have forgotten what it is to be an artisan of living, to think of life as a creative act. We are so strange and we lose sight actually of how strange we are. I have never met a human — I meet humans looking for all kinds of things. If you ask someone, "What are you looking for on this day?' you never hear, 'I'm looking for yesterday. Where did yesterday go to?" We just take it for granted that it goes into nothingness. And that's on one side. The other side is that we have no idea what will land on the shoreline of tomorrow. So we are always actively involved in receiving and shaping.

The Freedom of Living Artfully
When it comes to becoming human the ability to imagine is important. Without it, growing in virtuous character and in spiritual trajectory of personal ethics are stunted. That is why, it is better to imagine a possibility than to know a fact. Albert Einstein once wrote, "Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited; imagination encircles the world." By this he meant that thinking like a scientist and knowing facts will not help you if it stays in your head. In ethics facts are important but being an artist of the soul is more important. Imagination will allow you to use the facts for the good of humanity and the cultivation of your own soul.

As we create a life out of what comes to us in the flow of time we take that raw material afforded us by providence and begin to re-form a life for ourselves. The two key factors in this ethical renovation are our community and our childlike imagination. Our chosen community will helps us deconstruct what needs renovation and build what needs remodeling. It is true of community: Where we live molds us. Who we rub shoulders with sharpens us. What group we give ourselves to changes us. Our childlike imagination will help us by opening us to a world unseen in which strength and hope are as abundant as sand. It will give to those who use it an inner vision to see the end from the beginning, for without such a vision the path towards transformation is daunting. It is true of childlike imagination: Where we rest our hearts quickens us. What we ponder transforms us lives. Who we focus on we become like.

Through this building plan, we learn to embody the character of one who is childlike in freedom and virtuous in substance. This is the context all ethics is done and the place all life is lived, In-between the moral agent and the fielded of action. Thus human life happens at the intersection of personal character and life trajectory, also called the corner of human nature and human destiny. Ethics is often thought of as rules and but it is a journey to find the human in us all. It is a personal journey on public roads. It is creative but not formless, for true creativity is always from void to order, from clear canvas to visionary beauty. G. K. Chesterton in Orthodoxy reminds us:

It is impossible to be an artist and not care for laws and limits. Art is limitation; the essence of every picture is the frame. If you draw a giraffe, you must draw him with a long neck. If, in your bold creative way, you hold yourself free to draw a giraffe with a short neck, you will really find that you are not free to draw a giraffe. The moment you step into the world of facts, you step into a world of limits. You can free things from alien or accidental laws, but not from the laws of their own nature. You may, if you like, free a tiger from his bars; but do not free him from his stripes. Do not free a camel of the burden of his hump: you may be freeing him from being a camel. Do not go about as a demagogue, encouraging triangles to break out of the prison of their three sides. If a triangle breaks out of its three sides, its life comes to a lamentable end. Somebody wrote a work called "The Loves of the Triangles"; I never read it, but I am sure that if triangles ever were loved, they were loved for being triangular. This is certainly the case with all artistic creation, which is in some ways the most decisive example of pure will. The artist loves his limitations: they constitute the thing he is doing. The painter is glad that the canvas is flat. The sculptor is glad that the clay is colourless.

No man can free himself from himself. We are artists of living and as such the natural laws of life train our journey for the good. The experience of creation stirs imagination to ponder a greater majesty than the mountain, a grander beauty than the splendor of kings, a truer beauty than the splendor of a sunrise. In the end, we are made to breathe the high and lofty air of moral excellence and feel the deep truth of who we are. So are you living artfully using your moral imagination to build clocks that wake up the world or are you still sleeping warm and snug in the covers of moral mediocrity? As one Christian teacher and mystic has exhorted.

Awake, sleeper,
And arise from the dead,
And Christ will shine on you.
Therefore be careful how you walk, not as unwise men but as wise,
making the most of your time, because the days are evil.

Eph 5:14-17