Living Close to Your Center
Living Close to Your Center
Tuesday of the Second Week of Lent - March 10, 2020
When the inner life of the spirit is loosened within a person, there most always follows a burst of creativity. This creativity coincides with the emergence of our soul, which has its own vocabulary made up of images and symbols. Your soul, after all, doesn’t show up in words and eloquence . . . but in pictures, images, symbols.
(This is why most of us are more in touch with our soul when we are in a place of natural beauty . . . a forest, in the mountains, on a seashore, and so on. In these places, words fall flat . . . our soul naturally connects to the more nuanced created world surrounding us.)
The spiritual life makes you more expansive, more open to vastness and that which is Beyond. It does not cause you to be narrower, more protective, or more frightened of the unknown. This openness and expansiveness is the life of your soul.
In today’s reading, Elizabeth O’Connor says that authentic creativity is that which emerges from your center, what I have called soul. This creative impulse cannot be copied or repeated by another if it comes from your center, because no one else has access to your soul. Ideas may be copied, or brushstrokes mimicked, or poetic words, or forms, but they can never duplicate the originality that arises from your soul.
O’Connor, then, she encourages us to live “close to the center of our own life.”
A creative work always has its own life. The painting that comes out of the life of an artist is not repeatable. Others can be influenced by it, but they cannot copy the essence that makes it what it is. The imprint of the creator is not in the subject or the techniques. This is why the true artist can give freely to another artist all he knows. Because he lives close to the center of his own life, he will not be threatened by the success of another. He knows that it does not rob him of anything that is his own. The work of others can only enlarge his horizons and call forth his own gift. He can stand before the work of other artists and receive into his life a newness that will make him different. So while it is true that one creative work cannot detract from another, it does not follow that it may not add to another. It will change the man who looks with beholding eyes.
Sometimes the artist does not remember this. He becomes a critic of the work of others as he grows afraid. It is as though the other were his competitor, or could be, and he has forgotten the mysterious uniting of elements that happens in himself to produce a work. Either this, or he paints in the way of most men, using only observations and techniques and skill. It may, as with the writer, be a very good work, pleasing to the eye, but it is not creative in the profound sense. It has not come from the deep center of himself, where forces within him unite, and something happens which is through him and of him, but which even he cannot cause to happen again. The artist who is operating on the more surface level has reason for his fear. He has many competitors, and they may seek to occupy his place, for after all he is not in his real place, which means that he can be displaced. He is not even in the place of another man, since it is not possible to take a place that truly belongs to another.
[Elizabeth O’Connor, Journey Inward, Journey Outward. New York: Harper & Row, Publishers, 1968.]
For Reflection:
o I consider what it means for me to “live close to my own center.” How do I hear this? What invitations might God extend to me through these words?
o I am God’s work of art (Eph. 2:10), unique and unrepeatable.
o I do not need to compare myself to anyone else. Life is not a competition.
o God invites me to live into my unique personhood, as every other human is invited to live into his/her own unique personhood.
Tuesday of the Second Week of Lent - March 10, 2020
When the inner life of the spirit is loosened within a person, there most always follows a burst of creativity. This creativity coincides with the emergence of our soul, which has its own vocabulary made up of images and symbols. Your soul, after all, doesn’t show up in words and eloquence . . . but in pictures, images, symbols.
(This is why most of us are more in touch with our soul when we are in a place of natural beauty . . . a forest, in the mountains, on a seashore, and so on. In these places, words fall flat . . . our soul naturally connects to the more nuanced created world surrounding us.)
The spiritual life makes you more expansive, more open to vastness and that which is Beyond. It does not cause you to be narrower, more protective, or more frightened of the unknown. This openness and expansiveness is the life of your soul.
In today’s reading, Elizabeth O’Connor says that authentic creativity is that which emerges from your center, what I have called soul. This creative impulse cannot be copied or repeated by another if it comes from your center, because no one else has access to your soul. Ideas may be copied, or brushstrokes mimicked, or poetic words, or forms, but they can never duplicate the originality that arises from your soul.
O’Connor, then, she encourages us to live “close to the center of our own life.”
A creative work always has its own life. The painting that comes out of the life of an artist is not repeatable. Others can be influenced by it, but they cannot copy the essence that makes it what it is. The imprint of the creator is not in the subject or the techniques. This is why the true artist can give freely to another artist all he knows. Because he lives close to the center of his own life, he will not be threatened by the success of another. He knows that it does not rob him of anything that is his own. The work of others can only enlarge his horizons and call forth his own gift. He can stand before the work of other artists and receive into his life a newness that will make him different. So while it is true that one creative work cannot detract from another, it does not follow that it may not add to another. It will change the man who looks with beholding eyes.
Sometimes the artist does not remember this. He becomes a critic of the work of others as he grows afraid. It is as though the other were his competitor, or could be, and he has forgotten the mysterious uniting of elements that happens in himself to produce a work. Either this, or he paints in the way of most men, using only observations and techniques and skill. It may, as with the writer, be a very good work, pleasing to the eye, but it is not creative in the profound sense. It has not come from the deep center of himself, where forces within him unite, and something happens which is through him and of him, but which even he cannot cause to happen again. The artist who is operating on the more surface level has reason for his fear. He has many competitors, and they may seek to occupy his place, for after all he is not in his real place, which means that he can be displaced. He is not even in the place of another man, since it is not possible to take a place that truly belongs to another.
[Elizabeth O’Connor, Journey Inward, Journey Outward. New York: Harper & Row, Publishers, 1968.]
For Reflection:
o I consider what it means for me to “live close to my own center.” How do I hear this? What invitations might God extend to me through these words?
o I am God’s work of art (Eph. 2:10), unique and unrepeatable.
o I do not need to compare myself to anyone else. Life is not a competition.
o God invites me to live into my unique personhood, as every other human is invited to live into his/her own unique personhood.
Comments
Post a Comment