Notes From ‘The Artisan Soul: Crafting Your Life Into a Work of Art’

As someone who has applied the title “world’s least creative creative” to myself, Erwin McManus’ ‘The Artisan Soul’ was a refreshing and encouraging read. McManus argues that to say we are “not creative” is an incorrect statement, as it’s our nature to create:

Creativity should be an everyday experience. Creativity should be as common as breathing. We breathe, therefore we create.

… and that creativity is directly tied to our spiritual life:

we are inherently spiritual creatures, we are by our nature creative beings, yet we live in the fear that if we aspire to be more we will discover ourselves to be less. We live in fear of failure, convinced that failure will prove us to be frauds. We have bought into the lie that creative people never fail and hence failure is proof that we are not creative. So we get back in line, our dreams in check, and condemn our souls to a slow and painful death.

Not only should we not limit our own creativity, but we shouldn’t put a limit on what we think of as creative acts. One example? Dentistry:

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.

McManus laments that “Creativity is replaced with conformity; originality is replaced with standardization.” Not only does this make life boring and limit our ability to see ourselves as artists, but it’s out of line with what Jesus taught:

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.

…and continues by saying:

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?

As he breaks down by creativity and story is so important to us, he touches on the very concept of my love for “extratextuals” as he waxes poetic on the beauty of interpretation:

…all truth, all human experience, every narrative and every story, in the end changes us only after we have engaged it and interpreted it through our own story. Truth finds its way into the inner recesses of our soul only through interpretation. In the end, only we can decide if another person’s story will cause us to believe in God. In the end, we decide which story becomes our story.

…and describes his beautiful belief in a world where meaning is all around us:

Everything is created with intention. Nothing is arbitrary or meaningless. Humanity is God’s culminating act of creativity, designed with the highest intention to reflect most personally the likeness of God. Ironically, we who were created with the highest intention were also created with the capacity to deny, betray, or demean that intention. Whereas a horse will always live as a horse is intended to live, humans may live inhumane lives.

So what is required of us to be creative? Taking a look at the story of Solomon building the temple, the requirements are different than we might think:

David’s admonition to Solomon is not “be inspired and creative” but “be strong and courageous.” Certainly the building of the temple was one of the most inspired and creative endeavors known to man. History proves that Solomon was never lacking in genius or ingenuity. Here, though, we find the secret to his success and perhaps the secret to ours: to do our greatest work, we must overcome the temptation to be afraid or become discouraged, engaging the creative process with strength and courage.

…God calls us to have strength and take courage, with whatever it is he calls us to do:

You can be an architect, but to be the architect God created you to be requires strength and courage. You can be a teacher or an attorney or a financial planner, but to be the teacher or attorney or financial planner that God created you to be is going to require strength and courage. You can be a writer or a dancer or a painter, but to be the writer or dancer or painter that God created you to be is going to require strength and courage. Because if talent requires discipline to reach its highest expression, all the more does becoming the person God created you to be.

The book is full of powerful stories of people who have found that strength and faced adversity. I appreciate that not every story has a perfectly happy ending, as following a creative path doesn’t necessarily lead to one. He ends with a charge that I think is worth reading, again and again:

If this book is of any value at all, it is my hope that you will once again see yourself through the eyes of a child, or at the very least see that you, too, were no ordinary child — that you are, in fact, divine material. Just as the Lord God told Jeremiah that before he was born he knew him and while he was still in his mother’s womb he called him out, this same truth applies to you. In the full meaning of the word, you were born a masterpiece, a work of art, an expression of the divine imagination, but you are both a work of art and an artist at work, and this is why the life you live and the choices you make are critical. We can deny who we are and say that we are not creative, we’re not artistic, we’re not imaginative, but this doesn’t excuse us from our responsibility. You have been given a great gift, and that gift is your life.

That’s a belief worth placing faith in.