The Artisan Soul (15 page)

Phil Hansen showed tremendous promise in extreme pointillism, until his intense style caused a tremor to develop in his hand while he was in art school. He was later diagnosed with severe nerve damage. This left him devastated, and he dropped out and gave up on what was once a promising career. Everything changed when a neurologist suggested he “embrace the shake.” The change of perspective was a turning point in Hansen's life, sending him on a quest that has led to new and extraordinary approaches in the field of art. Hansen embraces his personal limitations and seemingly challenges our perceptions of universal limitations. Using unconventional materials such as bananas, matches, and dandelion puffs, and unconventional canvases, such as bandages and even his own body, he merges materials and canvases into the medium of film and time, creating art that is both image and movement. Hansen's art is a reminder that our limitations can become the cutting edge of creation.

Joshua Prager is a brilliant journalist and storyteller who has for a decade expressed his voice as a writer for
The
Wall Street Journal
. I had the pleasure of hearing him speak at the world-renowned TED conference. I was mesmerized as he spoke, hearing his personal story and his reminder that our limitations are often not what we perceive them to be. In 1990, a bus accident in Jerusalem left him a hemiplegic at the age of nineteen. Watching him as he struggled to walk onto the platform and then mesmerized us through his prowess with language was a reminder that limitations are often perceptions and not realities. It all depends on how we allow those limitations to restrain us or refocus us. Certainly paralysis brought dramatic changes to his life, ending possibilities no one would want to lose, yet somehow even paralysis could not prevent him from unleashing his extraordinary genius. I sat there wondering if in fact the tragic end of so many possibilities was not the essential context necessary to such extraordinary thoughtfulness.

Eleanor Longden was diagnosed as schizophrenic, which is a clinical way of saying someone is crazy. And believe me, I know what it's like to be thrown into a box where you are defined by your struggles rather than by your strengths. While all of us are a bit neurotic, the diagnosis of schizophrenia rarely leaves a person with a hopeful ending. Yet Eleanor refused to allow herself to be defined by what was seen as an insurmountable psychological limitation. She showed that hearing voices in her head was not proof of schizophrenia but “a creative and genius survival strategy.” For Longden, hearing voices in her head was a “sane reaction to insane circumstances.” Longden began her psychiatric journey as a patient long before earning a bachelor of science and a master's in science and psychology from the University of Leeds in England. Today the same person who was once misdiagnosed with schizophrenia is studying for her doctorate in the same field that once condemned her as a schizophrenic. She took what others would consider a debilitating limitation and turned it into a platform for creativity and genius. Longden understood that the complex psychological trauma often described as schizophrenia was in fact a creative and ingenious survival strategy. She saw it “not as an abstract symptom of illness to be endured, but a complex, significant and meaningful experience to be explored.”

As I listened to these extraordinary individuals at the TED conference, I was reminded that those who change the world do so not because they are free of the limitations that keep us from achieving our full capacity, but because they embrace those limitations and allow them to be the conduit of unleashing their most creative selves.

It is curious that the Ten Commandments have been used to prove that God wants to limit our freedom. It is true that the driving narrative within the commandments is built on the phrase
do not.
It's much less appealing to be told what not to do than to be inspired about what we should do. Still, regardless of the language of these commands, the intention is clearly not to limit human freedom but to protect it. Often I hear the commandments used as proof that God is way too demanding or even that religion is only a mechanism to control people and limit their enjoyment of life. I didn't grow up with the Ten Commandments, so I must admit being surprised at first that the arguments against them seemed unfair and in fact unwarranted. The Ten Commandments are not an ambitious set of rules. They can in no way be described as an appeal to human ideals.

The Ten Commandments establish what I described in my first book,
An Unstoppable Force,
as the minimal standard for living a humane life. What exactly is ambitious about a command that says, “Do not steal” or “Do not kill” or “Do not bear false witness”? These are not about inspiring. They are not appeals to our nobility but rather attempts to keep us from crawling lower than we had already managed to do up to that time.

Maybe I'm an idealist, but we shouldn't have to ask each other not to kill each other or steal from each other or lie to each other. Imagine a world where everyone lived beneath these boundaries. Imagine a world where people killed when they were angry or stole what someone else had when they wanted it or lied to both friends and enemies when it served their purposes. I quickly realized that the Ten Commandments were not a high bar calling us to an extraordinary expression of being human, but the lowest bar possible, pleading with us to reclaim our humanity.

In fact, the Ten Commandments provide a perfect example of why boundaries are essential for freedom and creativity to find their greatest expression. When we are committed to not stealing, we have to commit ourselves to creating. Often that's a code word for work. When we resolve to never lie again, the commitment to telling the truth drives us to live a life that is trustworthy. When we make a commitment to never kill, we have to deal with our anger issues and learn the power of forgiveness.

The Ten Commandments not only do not restrict human freedom; they protect human freedom. Instead of limiting human creativity, they provide the context from which we become our most creative selves. Even the God of the Scriptures embraces limitations, which is kind of unexpected for a God who is all-powerful, all-knowing, and all-present. Why embrace limitations when the context for your creativity is the omnis? Yet the creative act has within it inherent limitations. The moment we create, we establish boundaries and limitations.

The first creative act described in the Scriptures, “Let there be light,” has no observable limitations. But once God creates light, new rules come into play. This becomes apparent in the next movements of his creative act. He creates the universe, and the universe has rules. In that universe, there are galaxies and solar systems, and those bodies contain their own rules. The solar system has rules specific to this planet we know as Earth—the design of the sun, the relationship and distance between Earth and the sun, as well as Earth's revolution and rotation. Boundaries are set into place—from the rules of gravity to the chemicals to the specific formulas that create water and atmosphere.

What we discover is that the closer the creative process comes to creating life, the more rules, boundaries, and limitations there actually are. In that sense, there are fewer rules on Mars than there are on Earth, just as there's less life on the red planet than there is on the blue planet. The rules become more intricate and the context more complex as God heightens his creative expression. When he creates the birds of the air and the fish of the sea and the animals that walk the earth, the boundaries are clearly established—each species with its own limitations, each creative act with its own rules, gills to survive in water, wings to travel the air.

Yet the integrity of the universe is the context in which creativity is best expressed. The canvas does not limit God's creativity but rather celebrates it. The elegant complexity of creation is a beautiful reminder that the creative mind is a disciplined mind, that the creative act is not a struggle to be free of limitations but a demonstration that when we embrace our limitations, creativity has no boundaries.

The culminating act in Genesis 1 is the creation of humanity. In a very real sense, the earlier creative acts were far less limiting than God's final act. When energy is transformed into matter, there are endless possibilities of how that could play out. But in this final creative act, the creation of the first man, there is far more context and thus the creative process is more complex. The canvas is smaller, so the work of art has to be even more detailed. The creation of man could not be based on whim or boundless imagination. The man had to fit the material already created. God took clay from the earth, material that already existed, and created a living being who had to fit the detailed intricacies of the living system he had already created. Creating man was far more complex than creating light. Creating humanity in the image of himself was a far greater creative act than even creating the universe with all its complexity and wonder.

In some ways, we could say that God painted himself into a corner. When God created us, he didn't have a lot of options. We had to be able to breathe oxygen; we had to be able to drink water; we had to be able to eat what the earth provided; we had to fit the canvas. A lesser artist would have felt paralyzed, incapable of completing this masterpiece. For God, though, the opposite was true. He reveled in the challenge. He took great pleasure in creating a creature whose material is the substance of the earth and whose essence is the image of God. And yes, this is a wonderful reminder that we are a work of art, and the limitations that often lead us to conclude that we're only human should move us to celebrate that we are in fact incredibly human.

This is especially powerful when we realize that we are God's medium of choice. Because the created order reflects the majesty of God and declares his glory, nothing in the universe is more finely crafted or better designed for divine purpose than a human being. You are God's preferred medium to express himself and reveal himself. God loves working through people. Talk about choosing a limitation—when we think that God would choose to step into human history and reveal himself as a man, it is hard to imagine a more limiting creative choice for God than becoming human.

Yet here we see that God's most creative act, rescuing all humanity, could be accomplished only when he emptied himself of his limitlessness and took on the limitations of being human. For the singular act that brought salvation to the world, God chose what for him must have seemed the smallest of canvases and the most common of materials. To do his greatest work, he embraced his greatest limitations. Above all, he understood that the intention of the art determines the medium that must be chosen. To save humanity, he would need to become a man; to conquer death, he would need to be crucified; to bring us back to life, he would need to be resurrected; to heal our wounds, he would need to be wounded; to free us from ourselves, he would need to become our prisoner.

The artisan soul understands that if our lives are to be our masterpieces and if life itself is our most creative act, then we must embrace life as a canvas and recognize that the medium we have chosen (or haven't chosen) comes with boundaries and limitations and that these boundaries are not to be despised but to be embraced. For the finished product to reflect our imagination, we must choose our notes carefully, mix our colors skillfully, and respect how the medium informs the process so that we can achieve our most creative outcome. Beauty is not the expression of a universe void of principles; beauty is the masterful expression of creativity despite constraints.

When I was a young boy, I would sneak out of bed after my parents went to sleep, turn on our twelve-inch TV set at the lowest volume, and watch endless episodes of
The Twilight Zone
and
Night Gallery.
I was a huge Rod Serling fan. In 1970, Rod Serling came out with
Night Gallery,
the follow-up to his timeless
Twilight Zone.
Whereas
The Twilight Zone
was an exploration of science fiction,
Night Gallery
focused on opening the dark closets in the human soul. One particular story has stayed with me over the years. Josef Strobe is a Nazi war criminal hiding out in South America—Argentina, I imagine. In spite of his cruel and evil past, his deepest longing is simply to be a fisherman. His history haunts him, forcing him to live in a world that is dingy and bleak, a vivid contrast to his opulent life while in power. Always afraid of being caught and constantly on the move, he is a different kind of prisoner than those comrades who were captured years before and condemned for their crimes against humanity.

He stands in front of a beautiful painting of a fisherman in a small boat drifting serenely on a still mountain lake, imagining himself as the man in the boat, free from all the problems that he has created for himself. Josef is drawn to the painting over and over again. He asks a forgiving God to give him another chance, a chance to survive, but in truth he is asking God to absolve him from his sins while he abdicates all responsibility for his actions.

As he dreams of being the man in the painting, he wonders if, by concentrating all his mind and all his desire, he could enter that picture, leaving behind the life he has created to enter a life he could only dream of. It's clear, though, that Josef has never known contrition. In the midst of his anguish, he runs across a Holocaust survivor who recognizes him as a former guard. Josef kills the Jewish man and tries to escape by leaving town.

Instead, he is captured after some tense moments. He escapes and sneaks back into the museum, rushing toward the painting that holds the world he longs to live in. It is dark not only from the lack of light but from the ominous presence of the moment. He prays to God to allow him to enter into the painting, then suddenly disappears. Rushing into the room seconds later, a security guard and a museum official hear muted screams where Josef had stood. The picture of the mountain lake is gone, and the curator explains that the painting of the mountain lake was a loaner. In its place hangs the image of a man crucified in a concentration camp. Slowly the camera scans to the picture, and we realize that Josef has taken the place of the person who was crucified. In a twist of irony, Josef Strobe has found his way back to the world he created.