The Artisan Soul (2 page)

Too many believe the lie that God commands and humans obey. It's just not that simple. This view is destructive and demeaning, a distortion of God's intention for humanity.

To create is to be human.

To create is to fulfill our divine intention.

To create is to reflect the image of God.

To create is an act of worship.

So, who is an artist? Anyone who has a soul. What are the qualifications for being an artist? You guessed it—having a soul. And though we celebrate the way the artisan soul is expressed in those who bring artistry and beauty to the world, this book is not about how to turn yourself into a painter or a dancer or an actor or a writer. Instead, this book is about a process through which you will discover and unleash your personal creativity. For us to journey together, we have to come together with the basic assumption that each human being is uniquely designed to be part of the creative act. To move forward together, we have to realize that life itself is a work of art.

When I first mentioned to my wife, Kim, that I was beginning work on
The Artisan Soul,
her immediate and unfiltered response was, “I'm glad you're doing something that works for you since you're an artist, but it doesn't really work for people like me.” Let me be clear,
The Artisan Soul
is for everyone who cannot escape the gnawing realization that their life is unfulfilled. It is for everyone who knows their life is meant for more than survival or even success.
The Artisan Soul
is for everyone who knows that “doing” is not enough to satisfy our deepest longings and who is desperate to live a life about being. The irony, of course, is that Kim is one of the most creative and artistic people you will ever meet. But somewhere in her past Kim believed a lie she was told—that she was not an artist, that she was not creative, that she was just normal, ordinary, common. I can say as confidently about you as I can about Kim that there is nothing common or ordinary about you.

My son, Aaron, came to me years ago, when he was transitioning from a boy to a man, and said he was unsure if he could join Mosaic. I asked him, with deep concern and confusion, why he felt that way. He said he didn't know if he could embrace our fifth core value:
Creativity is a natural result of spirituality
. He said, “Dad, you have to remember, I spent a few years in a Christian school, and all I have to say is there were some very spiritual people there, and it was an incredibly uncreative place.”

Maybe you're like Aaron. You have seen lots of evidence that not only are spirituality and creativity not inseparable, but in fact they rarely come together. But this is less than the ideal God intended.

Love is the defining mark of the church, but we have far too often fallen short of that mark. Still, we do not give up on love. We continue to make it our ideal. We understand that this is God's standard. We are most human when love is our motive. It is the same with creativity. God created us through the universe's most creative and intimate act. We are the result of a creative act by a creative God. He designed us in his own image; he designed us with both intellect and imagination; he designed us with both reason and passion; he designed us to dream, to risk, and to create.

The church's lack of creativity should never be used to argue that creativity is not our most spiritual act. We must instead go back to the beginning and remind ourselves of who we really are. Art exists to remind us that we have a soul, and all we need to be an artist is a soul.

There are various ways to define the soul, but they always involve an attempt to describe the essence of being human, which separates us from other species. The soul is the aspect of being human that drives our imagination, emotions, and thoughts toward the highest ideals of what it means to be human.

The soul is the part of us that longs for and connects to the transcendent.

Our soul is the space that contains the universe within us.

The soul is the creative space from which humans create the future.

The soul is the essence of being human.

Though we may create many beautiful works of art, the most important works of art to which we will ever give ourselves are the lives we live. No matter what else we produce in life—whether we are painters or filmmakers or dancers or poets, even if we create something that might someday be kept in a gallery or museum somewhere in the world for generations of people to come and marvel at the wonder of our work—we will never create anything more powerful or significant than our lives. The complexity is that we are both works of art and artists at work. At first, our soul is like a canvas where others begin to paint the portrait of who we are. Slowly, as we develop and mature, we take the brush into our own hands and continue painting our own lives. Then we go beyond that, to leave our mark on the world around us. We don't have to convince children that they are creative; all we have to do is let them do what comes naturally. We never have to give a four-year-old permission to color outside the lines or to not follow the rules or to simply draw on the page what they see in their imagination. Yet somewhere along the way, this gets restructured. We become convinced that only those who are drawing inside the lines are doing it right, that the rules are more important than anything else, that we can't possibly allow our unfiltered imagination to be reflected in reality. Creativity is replaced with conformity; originality is replaced with standardization.

We might wonder if it even matters what we think of ourselves. Is it really that critical to embrace the artist within us? I would simply remind you of the insight from the Scriptures: as a man thinks, so is he.

Have you ever been around a person who has chosen to truly engage with a job, investing all his or her creative potential, against the backdrop of all those who are simply doing a good job to make it through the day? Did you ever have a teacher in school who took the life out of literature or made history into mundane memorization of meaningless facts and dates? I know I did. In fact, children everywhere have been the victims of teachers who have sucked the imagination out of whatever subject was sadly entrusted to them.

I have also experienced the wonder of sitting in classrooms with teachers who saw education as an opportunity to express their full creative potential. Filling us with imagination and inspiration, they provoked us to learn and grow. I sat in a master's-level Greek class with Dr. Thomas Urrey, whose eyes filled with tears as he read in Greek from Ephesians. I had rarely felt so inspired in the classroom. I went home and told my wife, Kim, that I could not give that man anything less than my very best and that he deserved an A from me.

Kim is an extraordinary educator. I would walk into her classroom to find third graders sitting in a part of the room that looked like an imperial throne, others reading in an ark they had built, and still others studying in a fanciful jungle. Every semester Kim's classroom was an explosion of imagination, creativity, beauty, and wonder. Every student who walked into her room discovered the love of learning.

Have you ever had the misfortune of going to a dentist who was uninspired by his profession? I have never been able to get images from the movie
Marathon Man
out of my brain. If you are too young to remember, it stars Dustin Hoffman and features the single worst encounter with a dentist known to mankind. Watch that movie and you will let your teeth rot out before you allow a dentist to say, “Open wide.” I am absolutely certain I have been to dentists that are direct descendants of the one in
Marathon Man
. I have lived my life in fear of dentists and have probably paid the consequences.

Fortunately, in the last few years I have been given the gift of not one but two dentists who saw dentistry as the context of their creativity. The first was Dr. Dan Romo, who is listed on the StrengthsFinder assessment as having the primary strength of empathy. In his practice, they give you a headset playing music that you enjoy, dip your hands in hot wax to reduce your stress (leaving you with very soft hands), speak in calm, soothing voices, and somehow make dental work nothing less than a work of art. Dan Romo is a poet with a drill, and I am grateful that I could be his canvas.

My present dentist, who sings to the music playing over the intercom while performing oral surgery, is as careful to minimize your pain as he is to maximize the aesthetic quality of his work. On my last visit, he informed me that he also designs bow ties. Suddenly it all made sense. My dentist is an artist; for him, dentistry is simply the context for him to express his artisan soul.

Far too many of us have had the misfortune of working for companies whose values reflect a utilitarian philosophy and a view of people as commodities. Far too many of us live in a dehumanizing context where standardization and conformity are the measures of a good employee. And just as many of us have experienced that at our places of work, even more have experienced it in their places of worship. How did it happen that religion and conformity became bedfellows? Far too often, spirituality has been replaced with standardization, and discovering the unique divine image within each person is replaced with a version of discipleship from the Industrial Revolution. I have met many people whose search for God ended in disappointment when they found themselves losing their humanity rather than discovering what it means to be fully human.

What gives me great hope is the number of companies that have broken away from the Industrial Revolution vision of people as cogs in a wheel to see people as the organization's greatest resource. All over the world, companies and organizations are radically redefining work as a place where people no longer simply fill a slot but are empowered to bring their best selves and unlock their full creative potential. I am thrilled to discover that communities of faith have also made this transition. All around, it seems, there are churches that understand discipleship to be not a system of conformity but a process of unleashing the creative potential in each person.

Ironically, this concept should not be foreign to the church, since Paul wrote two thousand years ago that each person is given different gifts and each of us has a unique place in service and a unique part to play. The Scriptures have never been about conformity, and certainly Jesus's early movement was never described in terms of standardization. Jesus's early followers formed a movement of dreamers and visionaries. It's exciting to consider where this kind of framework could lead. What would happen if the closer we got to God, the more we discovered our full creative potential? What would happen if the deeper and more profound our spiritual journey, the more we felt free to express our creative essence and embrace our personal uniqueness?

When we are freed from the rules and regulations that are so often imposed on us in the name of God, we discover that creativity is the natural result of spirituality. And if this is true, then our soul is the primary material for all artistic expression. In other words, we create out of being.

All art is an expression and extension of ourselves. There may be no virtue more admired by those who understand themselves as artists than authenticity. Art finds its deepest value when it is the authentic expression of a deep human experience. Art becomes profound when it exposes us, explains us, or inspires us. We have all experienced artistic expressions that somehow left us flat and unmoved. We instinctively know when a film or a painting or a song is essentially soulless. Yet there is something breathtaking about a work that is genuinely original and authentic to the artist. We may not always have the language to explain it, but somehow we know the difference between art and imitation. And though we may be fooled from time to time, most of us quickly learn to distinguish between art and propaganda.

Art in its purest form is an extension of the soul. This is exactly what life is supposed to be. Which leads us to this realization: the only art we can create is that which authentically reflects who we are. Our soul is the material for all we create. Thus, to nurture the artisan soul, essence is far more important than talent.

Jim Collins has done us a great service and inspired a great many of us through his work
Good to Great
. Certainly we should all aspire to reach our highest level of execution, both personally and organizationally. Note that the journey he recommends is from good to great—not from bad to great or from evil to great. Even in the journey to greatness, the assumed starting point is that we have already found our way to good.

Collins points out the importance of moving to a level of excellence that elevates an organization beyond the life of its founder. He gives us keen insights into sustainability and leadership. These are critical insights, but context matters in the use of this language.

There is a subtle side effect when it comes to the language of
good
and
great.
Good
has become less than
great.
Good
has become “above average.”
Good to great
has become the same as
better to best,
when in fact they are of different qualities altogether when it comes to essence.

The linguistic dilemma is that we have an inclination to relegate the word
good
to a secondary state of being that is inferior to greatness. The contrast reinforces a critical misperception about the nature of
good.
We need to rediscover the essential nature of the good.

Great
is about execution and achievement;
good
is about essence and ethos. The artisan soul aspires to do great work but never neglects the importance of being inspired by all that is good and beautiful.

When it comes to the soul and the creation of life as a work of art, the danger is to aspire to greatness while neglecting the critical nature of the good.

It has always fascinated me that in the first and preeminent act of creation, the focus was on the good and not the great. In Genesis 1, we find ourselves in the moment when God creates everything out of nothing. The all-too-familiar six days could be better described as six movements, six motions within a single creative act. God begins by creating light out of darkness and finishes by breathing life into man. Everything in between is nothing less than extraordinary. Within each movement, there is a single intention, whether it is the creation of the solar system or the unique design of this planet's ecosystem. Every stroke within this creative act carries the intention of creating life. Every creative act for which we can take responsibility pales in comparison to the wonder and power of the revelation of God's immense creativity as demonstrated in creation. As impressive as creation is, however, it is not once described as “great.” Yet certainly, if anything deserved the designation of greatness, it would be this work of art. Instead, at the end of each day, at the point of reflection and evaluation, for each stroke there is one simple summarizing description for the nature of all that just happened: “And God saw that it was good.”