I came across this video of Ken Robinson giving a short presentation at the TEDTalks. It is not only very informative, but very entertaining. His basic thesis is that our education is killing creativity, one of the most important things needed to face our uncertain future. At one point he says,
Unless you are prepared to be wrong, you will never come up with anything original.
He feels we are educating people out of creativity because mistakes are stigmatized. You can’t be wrong. Therefore there is nothing original encouraged. Picasso said that every child is an artist… the trick is staying an artist as you grow up.
I believe this to be true in religion as well. Creativity is not allowed because mistakes are not allowed. We are urged to become new creations, while the religious cultures we are a part of add on: “As long as you look like something we’ve seen before!” As one of my favorite artists, David Bazan, sings in “Selling Advertising“:
I know it’s hard to be original.
In fact, nothing scares me more.
Because Jesus only lets me do
what has been done before!
Man those lyrics get me because I’ve heard this used on people, including myself. It is true that as soon as you become unrecognizable, you are stigmatized. When you attempt to chart new territory, you are in for loneliness, alienation and rejection. History says so! Anyway, take a more light-hearted look and listen:
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iG9CE55wbtY]
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Sorry guys. I’m under right now. Sorry. Another painting to hold you over:
So much is happening in my life right now that i really don’t have time to blog today. I’m either seeing people or on the phone with people 24/7. I’m exhausted, frustrated, and saddened by the state of affairs that I find myself in the middle of. I’m so overwhelmed right now with the depth of pain, sorrow, deception and injustice this world gladly bathes itself in that I just don’t know what to say. In a society that delights in caring about and preaching against the million splinters in everyone else’s eyes and we can’t even see the log in our own. It’s fundamental. Change starts HERE. Change is NOW! I AM THE PROBLEM!! So I show you this painting I did this morning. Last night, through my tears, I looked up to the heavens through the trees and wait. Wait is all that’s left for me.
Sorry that I haven’t been posting as regularly as usual. I’ve been very busy this weekend. These three incredible people came to visit Lisa and I and our kids for the weekend. Luckily we have enough rooms in our house to keep them. They are Rik Leaf(left), Marie Josee Dandeneau (right) and Tina Newlove (middle). Rik is a singer-song-writer politically socially involved kinda guy from Winnipeg. Marie Josee is this funky dreads girl from Winnipeg who plays bass like a wild woman and is incredibly playful and funny. Tina is an artist who dances and paints while the other two perform. She works and sells in the Guelph area. They are all bursting with creativity and I loved hanging around with them for three days. Needless to say we had lots to talk about. They played at a couple venues while here. One of them was our church service. They took two hours of just playing and talking. I’m telling you it was an incredible time. I was very emotional through the whole thing. I thought to myself that this is what it’s about. This is what it is! Many others said the same.
When they pulled out of our driveway this morning, I could feel my heart being pulled right out of my chest. Rik and Tina have been here before and we are friends. MJ was brand new. But I fell in love with her and with them all over again. We all live too far apart, don’t we!?
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Well, I’m honored to have receive the “Thumbs Up” award this week from William Lehman of Decloned. Who’d u thunk it?! Thanks William!
I’m tired. I get up quite early every morning, at 6am, and get myself with my first cup of coffee into my studio to paint for a couple of hours. That’s the first thing I do every day. By the way, my art is for sale on EBAY and ETSY. Most of the ones I do are smaller and therefore affordable. The larger ones that I do are cost more, of course. You can find my watercolor paintings, oils, inks, woodcuts and sculptures there. Enough of the shameless self-promotion.
I’ve been told that my art is very minimalist, simple, oriental and contemplative in style. I admit I have been very influenced by Japanese sumi-ink pieces, as well as the delicate and amazing art of woodcut and woodblock printing. Apparently this simplicity and minimalism comes through in the way I think, write and pastor. My art reflects who I am, and who I am and what I do reflects in my art. I think if someone were to look at one of my paintings, they would think that I might be something like that. What do you think?
The watercolor and ink painting shown here is available here and here.
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I was fooling around today and thought I’d come up with a list of 10 suggestions for keeping your sanity in church, or anywhere for that matter. It’s a little on the light side. Have fun!:
- Be suspicious of all authority figures, especially those who bullishly claim to be.
- If you feel herded and corralled like a breeder cow, break rank and fence.
- Trust your animal instincts. Especially if a leader tells you it’s wrong to think that way.
- If someone insists she’s a sheep, sniff for a wolf.
- If you are told it is for your own good, turn on your heels like a spooked coyote and run!
- Don’t be the eternal optimist who, furiously digging through all the manure, exclaimed, “There just MUST be a horse in here somewhere!” There is no horse.
- If you think you smell a rat, you smell a rat.
- If a leader acts like a weasel, then he or she’s a weasel.
- Peacocks and pulpits do not belong together.
- If a leader uninvited roots around in your personal life like a pig for truffles, kick him in the snout.
I’m a pastor so I can say these things.
The fine art photograph is the creation of my friend Mark Hemmings and is from his Snow Monkey series.
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Yesterday, instead of me speaking (since I’m taking a break from it for a while), we invited anybody to read something they’d written. For about an hour several people got up front and read what they’d written. Everyone was astounded. The quality of writing was amazing. There was poetry, journal entries, song lyrics, short stories, proverbs, and things that just can’t be categorized. The youngest to read was my daughter Casile, 15 years old, and the oldest was Joyce, in her 70s. There were people up there who are normally quite vocal and play a pretty visible and audible role in the life of the community. They weren’t surprises. But there were others who never make a peep and hide in the shadows who got up and read some of the most amazing stuff. We were shocked!
This is what I think: when you do something that doesn’t follow the norm, like reading personal journal entries in a religious setting, then something happens. It’s like all of a sudden things are being said that don’t sound religious, don’t have religious overtones and aren’t even at all moralizing. Some of the poetry that was read had to do with physical abuse of a child. Another of the beating of a woman. Some had to do with our blatant disinterest in Darfur. Some had to do with love. One had to do with the death of a sister. One had to do with wanting to die. One had to do with atheism and doubting, questioning and abandoning a god that never seemed to exist to begin with. One had to do with a tubal pregnancy and grieving something that was never even seen. One had to do with wanting to stop this race and just enjoy the view from here. One was a friend’s tribute to another woman in our congregation just diagnosed with Altzeimers. One had to do with depression. And I can fairly say that although they didn’t contain religious vocabulary for the most part, they were very religious in the sense that they testified to something larger than themselves. We all left amazed, encouraged and filled with a sense of awe. Everyone left feeling more creative or the desire to be.
Creativity cannot and should not be edited or controlled or directed. I don’t think most of the people who read thought, when they were writing, “What would God want me to write?” They just wrote what was heavy on their hearts at the time. As a result, it was free, risky and incisive. But because of that it did something. It crossed boundaries. It walked through walls. It altered our reality. We left changed.
The fine art photograph is the creation of my friend Jorgen Klausen.
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Beauty. Recognize and appreciate the beauty. Respect it. I had a few people mention the fine-art photograph I had on my post yesterday, Living Without A Goal. This piece of art is beautiful. The comments people gave are thoughtful and beautiful in their own right. But it goes further than flesh and form. When someone comes into our community, do we see them as they are, sure… with all their struggles and weaknesses… but what about their own beauty. Each one is beautiful. Is each one seen? Is each one respected?
When beauty is recognized and appreciated, then our urges to change it become redundant. With the photo yesterday, if you really see it and appreciate it, how would you want to change her, or change Howard’s photograph? When you see a beautiful flower, how would you want to manipulate it into anything else other than what it already is? I am surrounded by people who have been under pressure to change. I have been under pressure to change, to conform to someone else’s expectations, to their vision they have of me. What that does is tell the person that in fact they aren’t beautiful at all but ugly. Appreciate and respect the beauty in other people. But first you have to see it. So we try to create an environment where people can freely blossom in the good soil of love and respect.
The fine art photograph is the creation of my friend Jorgen Klausen.
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I’m reading an interesting book, James Ogilvy’s, Living Without A Goal
I have come to believe that a life enslaved to a single Goal, no matter how noble, becomes a mechanism rather than an organism, a business plan rather than a biography, a tool rather than a gift.
I do realize that we set some goals for ourselves, such as when to set the alarm clock for, what direction to go to work, whether to use oil on canvas or watercolor on paper, what degree to apply for, whether to stay happily married to this girl or not, etc. However, as Ogilvy would agree, to set an overarching Goal that we enslave ourselves to leads to a mechanical kind of life. A friend recently told me they read that we should live our lives like a clock. Set goals and arduously meet these goals no matter what! Schedule every minute of your day and achieve what you intend! That’s a mechanical lifestyle that I think is intended for mental illness or leads to it. Rather, we can live our lives artistically. Creatively. Spontaneously. Mysteriously. Not all our actions have to be a means to some end. Instead of trying to manipulate the world, we can begin by appreciating it.
In fact, I would argue that the most creative life is the kind of life that doesn’t enslave itself to a Grand and Comprehensive Goal because the creative urge isn’t sublimated to this Goal. My most creative paintings happen when I just start painting without the end product in mind. Often, when I do plan and plot a painting, it becomes dry and artificial. Manufactured. I happen to believe that the most original and imaginative art is filled with what I call happy accidents.
This applies not only to my personal life, but to the corporate life of our community. The best moments in the life of our community have been accidental. Unplanned. Spontaneous. They have been creative moments, both in their inception as well as in their fruit. This doesn’t mean we don’t plan to meet, say, on Sunday morning. But we try to leave what happens that morning quite open and loose. Even the overall life of the community: we plan to stay a community, but how we live that out is full of adventure, risk and surprise.
The creative fine art photograph is by my friend Howard Nowlan.
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David Hayward is a pastor artistically stripping to the essential.
