At the beginning of the month, writer James Cooper posted an article on the Transpositions blog called “Creativity as a Call to Virtue.” Transpositions is the blog of the Institute for Theology, Imagination, and the Arts at the University of St Andrews. St Andrew’s is always dear to my heart – it was the setting for both my master’s degree and my first year of married life (yes, it was mad to undertake both in one year but I can assure you that both have had happy consequences) – so I tend to keep an eye on what’s happening with ITEA.
Cooper’s piece poses questions about the space that a good writer gives characters and about the role of love in our understanding of freedom. I read this a couple of weeks ago, but it stuck with me. Probably because of our crowded house. My parents are visiting right now, as I’ve mentioned. What I might have failed to mention is that we live in a small two bedroom apartment and that they are staying with us. Which means we’re all sort of living on top of each other, but here’s how that works. The kids sleep in the room at the end of the hall in a double bed. We have a crib in there, too, and Plum naps there (sometimes) during the day. My Mum and Dad have our room and we’re on a mattress on the living room floor with Plum. It’s an experiment in high density living in which we’re all finding ways to make space for each other. It’s full of blessing and I’m singing a lot of Hawksley Workman…
I like what Cooper writes about space making. He suggests that love is the best way to think about it. It is love that encourages the writer to limit her own ego and to provide space for her characters to act and interact in surprising ways. When we love, we wish for the other to grow and flourish so we step back a little to let that happen. We don’t clamp down and try to control. We make space and give them freedom. Cooper focuses on creative writing, but I think this works with any creative endeavour. A sculptor loves the material he works with, so he is able to respond to its specific strength and flaws. A chef loves the variety she finds in good ingredients and learns to adjust temperature or seasoning to respect difference rather than being confined by a strict recipe. Parents love their children and give them space to express themselves and to interpret the world for themselves. Because what is loving parenting if not creative? Like every other creative pursuit, it’s messy, humbling and worth every once of energy we exert.
Cooper writes:
“good writing, like all good art, requires a certain un-selfing, an ability to put oneself out of the picture. Or, as novelist and philosopher Iris Murdoch put it, to ‘silence the fat relentless ego’…
Understood like this, being creative is participating in a moral activity. Not that being creative makes you a better person, but that by encouraging self-limiting – this unselfing – these creative activities provide us with “a continual invitation to virtue.”
“The struggle to write well – to be a maker of good art – is of a piece with the struggle to be good: that is, to see and respond to the world as it truly is.”
To see, we need to be open and humble. We need light to see and that’s where God comes in because God opens our eyes to “the world as it truly is” and helps us as we shift our focus from ourselves. In God’s light, compassion and perspective become possible. Then we can respond, and to do that, we learn the disciplines of praise and prayer. And harder ones like confession, gratitude, loving and living closely together. These, too, are creative activities.
I want to claim these tasks for more than just the creative writer. I want to claim this slogan for my parenting, my ministry, my life in community. I want my kids to strive for this as they grow up and I want to strive for it beside them. Let’s be makers of good art like this. Let’s be loving enough to see clearly, alive enough to respond well, faithful and courageous enough to face the world as it truly is.
