The shameful and tragic display of domination that we are witnessing today in the world is changing our spiritual landscape, simply because nobody who engages in a spiritual path lives in isolation.
The scope of the havoc, the destruction, and the confusion caused today by evil might be unprecedented, or at least it feels huge, as we somehow believed that the world was achieving a level of civilization that never existed before. The international order embodied by the United Nations — with all its imperfections — since 1945, the progress in the civil rights of women and sexual minorities in the last 50 years, educational systems that banned racism, bullying, and sexism… none of these seem to hold firm.
I believe that we are called to thoughts and actions equal in depth to the catastrophe that we are living through. For me, such turmoils take place at the same time that I moved to a new place in the countryside (see my DMs of last week), so this turn toward the depths is marked very strongly as a kind of spiritual coincidence. But even those who cannot profit from such a coincidence and whose external circumstances remain the same may do well in choosing to work spiritually at increasing levels of depth.
The Power of Community: How Cuba Survived Peak Oil Documentary (trailer) After the fall of the USSR in 1989, Cuba was left without critical energy supplies. Social scientists are still studying the revolution in organic and sustainable agriculture that followed. See the full film HERE.
In the first chapter of his book Creativity: Where the Divine and the Human Meet, Matthew Fox elucidates who we are as a species. The list he offers may help each of us individually to identify those areas that deserve attention and deep spiritual work.
We Are Not Consumers: How many of the wars of domination that are being fought are about earthly resources? Are we fighting against our reduction to consumers, which justifies predatory wars? Matthew suggests looking at the fact that our species invented agriculture, but this was an ambiguous conquest, as it led to the increasing exploitation of the soil.
We Are Not Addicts: Addictions of all kinds are fostered by companies, because they are very profitable for them; unfortunately, as Matthew explains, addiction comes from surrendering our real powers, that is, the powers of creativity… It is as if we want to turn our power over to others. This is a kind of “design flaw” of our species, which can also be our spur and blessing: it’s hard to be disciplined, i.e., harnessing our own power, to be creative and make our own life a work of art, but when we succeed, the results are splendid.
We Are Not Passive: Our passive screen time has doubled or tripled in the course of a few years, to the point of becoming a new certified addiction from which we must get free; those like me who have previously underestimated the attractive power of “scrolling” need to pay attention.
We Are Not Boring, and We Need Not Be Bored: Boredom in the active and passive senses is a signal that something is going wrong in the way we spend our precious time; and yet we accept to be bored at school, at church, etc., thus becoming boring in the process.
We Are Not Cogs in a Machine: We can, of course, feel that we are just that, but when it happens, it is exactly the moment to ask ourselves how we can recover our sense of sacred purpose within the cosmos, leaving behind our mechanistic upbringing — it’s a long work to free oneself from the worst of the modern mentality.
We Are Not Lazy: When it looks as if we are lazy, we need to look deeper again; when teachers accuse students of being lazy, very often either the teacher is boring, or the scholastic system engenders boredom despite the best efforts of the teachers. In any case, laziness is a symptom.
We Are Not Destroyers: It really does not look like that today, does it? But the point that Matthew makes is that creativity is the most peculiar human power, that which can be employed either for destruction or for art, beauty and relationships. We still have a choice. Each of us individually, and all of us communally.
Banner Image: “Sitting in the Grass.” Photo by Nicholas Githiri on Pexels.
Queries for Contemplation
How can we not be consumers, addicts, passive, boring/bored, cogs-in-a-machine, lazy, destroyers? (The point being the “how” for each of us). Can we go with our imagination to a sacred time when we were not all these things, and recover our native freedom of being something else?
Related Readings by Matthew Fox
Creativity: Where the Divine and Human Meet
The A.W.E. Project: Reinventing Education, Reinventing the Human
Creation Spirituality: Liberating Gifts for the Peoples of the Earth
Natural Grace: Dialogues on creation, darkness, and the soul in spirituality and science
Sins of the Spirit, Blessings of the Flesh: Transforming Evil in Soul and Society
Confessions: The Making of a Post-Denominational Priest
4 thoughts on “Deep Sources of Creativity”
Thank you, Gianluigi, for that list of what “we are not” at the core of our being. The sad reality, though, is that the outer shell of our true selves is precisely all that—consumer, addict, passive, bored, boring, and cog of a destructive machine (as Charlie Chaplin in Modern Times). The first step of any healing process is to admit that the issue we wish to heal from is real. Whether I am horrified or not by what I see and hear in the news, I must admit that a great deal of those wars aims at keeping me “what I am not”: a passive oil and gas consumer-addict, a taxpaying cog of a war machine, etc. Even wars on drugs are ways to blame the provider rather than admitting and addressing the illness of the consumer.
Regarding addiction, Johann Hari’s TED talk seems to sacrifice truth and reality to sensationalism by describing as a breakthrough what has been known for decades: besides its undeniable biochemical dimension and its probable genetic connection, addiction is a soul illness rooted in object constancy perturbations in infancy and their resulting impact on the capacity to establish healthy human bonds, to deal with anxiety, etc. Denying the addictive effect of some medical drugs also amounts to denying the opioid epidemic.
Our personal and communal spiritual journeys are interrelated because at our deepest levels of identity and essence We are All unique conscious eternally evolving divine sparks of Our Co-Creator~Source with-in Our Loving Diverse Oneness of Our multidimensional/multiverse eternally evolving Co-Creation~Cosmos….
Raising my kids, we were without a TV more than we had one. We played board games, read books, and spent time with friends. It gave us ways of looking at and engaging with American culture not guided by the collective gestalt.
When we did have a TV, I told my kids that anything they saw advertised on TV was something they didn’t need. If it needed advertisement, people didn’t need it. Someone was just trying to make us believe we needed it.
I’m a reluctant TV-streaming watcher now. Life is full of compromise and my life partner is addicted to screens. I never watch TV during the day, but each night from about 7 to 10 or so, we stream a series together. Recently, I bought a 1,000-piece puzzle so we can occasionally do something different.
Now, reading the NYTimes, watching Stephen Colbert, engaging with Prescott Indivisible and Facebook, keeps me posted on most current trends; but sometimes I’d rather be out of touch. It gives one an alternative perspective.
All the things that we are not are like default positions, because it takes some insight and some energy to recognize our creative strengths and to practice and experiment with them. It is just easier to “go along”. Regarding Cuba, it is in even more dire straits with hunger and lack of energy for powering electricity widespread. The Presbyterian Church USA is calling for community prayers for Cuba from 7:30 tonight.