The Artisan Soul (3 page)

Seven times in this first chapter of Genesis, interwoven into the narrative of creation, we are brought back to the simple phrase “It was good.” It seems as if the intent of the writer of Genesis is that we not miss the significance of this point. Everything God created was good. The word
good
is used five times in Genesis 2 and three times in Genesis 3, suggesting a subtle narrative that as humanity moved away from God, it moved away from the source of all things good.

Describing each phase of creation as good seems like a gross understatement. I have to admit that I have done one or two things in my life that I thought were better than good, a couple of things I thought might even have touched great, but I have to rethink that against the backdrop of creation being described as good and not great. At the very least, this is incredible restraint when it comes to giving out compliments. Can you imagine describing the
Mona Lisa
as good rather than magnificent? Or describing van Gogh's
The Starry Night
as good rather than exquisite?

It could be that this tells us a lot about the difference between who God is and who we are. For most of us, being great is far more important than being good. Being great is most often a description of our talent, but being good is poignantly connected to our essence. Obviously creation was great, but it is far more important for us to understand that creation is the reflection of the very nature of God. Remember, we can create only out of who we are, and everything we create is a reflection of who we are. So it makes perfect sense that all of creation, every stroke of the creative act, ended with an emphatic declaration that it was good. Creation was good because God is good. Creation resulted in life because God is life.

From the very beginning, the Scriptures describe God as an artist. At his core God is an artisan. On the seventh day he rested not from his work of engineering or his work of teaching or his work of administrating, but from his work of creating. Granted, there was in creation extraordinary engineering, profound teaching, and no small amount of administration. The point is not to contrast these actions, but that all those things happened within the creative act.

It is important to note that even in creation the culminating moment of the creative act emerged when creativity reached its point of deepest intimacy. Six times it was good enough to describe creation as good. But the seventh reference, the seventh occasion where God describes creation as good, is directly connected to his decision to create humanity in his image. It was only when God created us that he upgraded the compliment and said not only that it was good, but that it was very good. To bring light out of darkness, God needed only to speak, but to bring his image alive in humanity, he needed to breathe his life directly into our lungs. The description could not be more intimate or personal: “The Lord God formed a man from the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living being” (Genesis 2:7).

Our story begins with a kiss, mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, God pressing against us. We begin when God exhales and we inhale. This is the level of intimacy and synchronicity for which we were always intended. While all creation declares the glory of God, we humans bear the image of God. The more clearly we reflect the divine, the more we reflect that which is good and beautiful and true. Again, all creation is good because God is good. The entire universe reflects God's essence. God creates out of who he is, and when we are aligned with him, everything we create brings him honor and glory. Imagine what the world would look like if all of us in our essence reflected this most extraordinary good, and everything we created was an extension of that beauty. I love the fact that the same Hebrew word that is translated as “good” is in other places simply translated as “beautiful.”

You are an artist. You were created with an artisan soul. The question is: What kind of art will you leave behind? The reason it is critical to go all the way back to the beginning is that sometimes we get trapped in the past rather than at the beginning. Most of us are still in some small way victims of the Industrial Revolution, whether through our grandparents', our parents', or our own experience. We were raised to believe that our place in life required compliance and conformity rather than creativity and uniqueness. We have been raised in a world where information is deemed far more important than imagination. Adults replaced dreams with discipline when they were finally ready to grow up and be responsible for their lives.

Whether this construct was reinforced on an assembly line, in a cubicle, or in a classroom, the surest path to acceptance in society is accepting standardization, and we more than willingly relinquish our uniqueness. I have wondered if it was actually easier before the Industrial Revolution to understand our relationship with the creative process. Farmers, after all, understood the direct relationship between hard work and creation. They worked the soil; they planted the seeds; they watered the crops; and they watched life happen. They understood that they were integral to the creative act, even though few farmers would have described it that way.

The same could be said for any number of craftsmen—the cobbler, the blacksmith, the carpenter. Their livelihood was not far removed from simple expression of their artistry. I have heard it said that Henry Ford once mused that people can have a Model T in any color they want as long as it's black. This is probably the best summary of the worldview of the Industrial Revolution. Everyone can have it exactly like they want it as long as they want it exactly the way it is. The ideal utopian society is a world where everyone and everything are the same.

Years ago we at Mosaic created a developmental process for leaders, called Yelo. We involved such assessments as the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, StrengthsFinder, and the Character Matrix from my book
Uprising
. The name, though obscure, had real meaning. I would walk into a room of absolute strangers, write a color on my hand, and then tell them we were going to create a cultural color from among the group. Whether there were fifty people in the room or five hundred, it always turned out the same. I would have all the groups seated at tables in groups of eight to ten. Each person was asked to write down his or her favorite color and second-favorite color. Go ahead and do that right now as you are reading.

Then I would have everyone reveal their first choice to the group, and if the majority agreed on a color, that would be the group's color. If there was a tie, they would then move to secondary preferences to determine the group's color. Then I would have the groups of eight to ten merge with other groups, and those groups went through the same process to determine the group's principal color. By the time the process was complete, no matter how individuals began—and there are always individuals who pick anything from orange to silver, from purple to green, from black to white—without exception, everywhere I have traveled, the culture color was blue.

Strangely enough, studies show that blue is the preferred eye color of over 80 percent of people, and over half those surveyed choose blue as their favorite color. When blue is not their favorite color, it is often their second favorite. When people choose what color to wear, blue is once again the dominant choice (just think blue jeans). Pay attention to the main characters in television shows. The characters you are supposed to empathize with frequently wear blue. For whatever reason—maybe it's the imprint of living on the blue planet—blue wins hands down.

Once the room has gone through this rigorous and tumultuous process, and we discover that the cultural color is blue, I have someone come and read the word that I wrote in ink on my hand before the process began. To the dismay of the room, the volunteer reads out loud, “Blue.” Everyone is shocked that I knew beforehand the cultural color of the room. Part of the learning process is talking to the people whose favorite color is red or aqua or yellow about how it felt to abandon their preference so they could belong to the whole—how it felt to have to stand up in a room and, instead of proudly saying “I am pink,” to join the majority in declaring blue. For some, neither their primary nor secondary choice is blue. For them, strangely enough, the experience becomes profoundly visceral, a moment of realization that they are being stripped of their uniqueness, their core self. But in reality they have lost nothing. It's just an exercise. They can reclaim their silver and black the moment the exercise is over.

Of course, this is the whole point of the exercise. We are creatures who live in tension between blue and yellow. All of us, whether we admit it or not, want to be at least in part blue. We want to be accepted; we want to belong; we want to have things in common with those whose opinions we care about. But we also want to be yellow. We want to preserve our uniqueness; we want to be uncommon. We hope that in some small way we can be original.

It's kind of ironic that if we mix blue and yellow, we get green, because in our most unhealthy state we become green envying those who are naturally blue, who easily fit into the expectations of the majority and win their admiration and affection. At the same time, we are envious of those who have the courage to stand apart in their own yellow space, who seem comfortable as iconoclasts and somehow have risen above their need to be accepted by the majority to leave a unique mark on the world.

When the Industrial Revolution pulled us out of an era fraught with difficulties and challenges we hope to never face again, it also stripped us of a core part of our humanity that we need to reclaim. Let me be clear: good things happen when we find a blue space where we can all walk together, where we can share common goals and values and be united by what makes us the same rather than standing apart because of what makes us different. Certainly I am not advocating that we all be different for difference's sake. There is no virtue in being out of step with others for the sole purpose of walking alone. The artisan soul is not about rebellion but about resonance. It is about being true to who we are and allowing that truth to inform and form us.

After Kim's initial push back on the theme of the artisan soul, I asked her if anything about being an artisan appealed to her. She said, “Yeah. Artisan bread. I like artisan bread,” which roused my curiosity. What exactly is artisan bread? What is bread when it is not artisan bread? What are the distinctions and characteristics of artisan bread, and do these characteristics translate to the artisan soul?

What I expected to find was quite the opposite of what I did find. Somehow I thought that I would have to weave my way like a secret agent through the artisan bread community to find someone willing to divulge secrets. If artisan bread is better than nonartisan bread, certainly the process and the ingredients would be locked in a vault somewhere. After all, in this cannibalistic and venture-capitalist world there are an endless number of corporate vultures ready to steal the homegrown secrets of the independent artisan.

Without knowing much about bread, I did have a sense that whenever something is described as “artisan,” it is usually identified with something small and local and intimate. What I found was quite a pleasant surprise. The secrets of artisan bread were readily available. I expected an endless number of secret ingredients, several of which I could not pronounce, but I found quite the opposite. The ingredients were simple and pure, four to be exact: yeast, flour, salt, and water. As best I can tell, those ingredients are available to everyone. Nonartisan bread, in contrast, normally has more than twenty ingredients, many not easily recognizable and impossible to pronounce. The defining characteristic of artisan bread is that the ingredients are simple and pure—pure in their essence—and everything goes in the direction of simplicity.

The second characteristic of artisan bread is the process. Here you find the distinction between artisan and not. Artisan bread is the result of a craft; nonartisan bread is nothing more than a product. The process distinguishes what is mass-produced from what is crafted and created. For a bread to be considered artisan, it must be handcrafted. Artisan bread comes from a process and environment that reflect imagination and intimacy. Artisan bread is normally crafted in small bakeries with small ovens and is always the result of an artisan's personal touch. With artisan bread, no two loaves of bread ever look the same.

It strikes me that this may explain why so many people I have talked to over the years have such a visceral resistance to what they would describe as megachurches. Far too often the megachurch experience moves from a process that is intimate and hands-on to a process that feels mass-produced. The truth is that many megachurches are far more committed to intimacy and simplicity than small churches that are closed to outsiders. But the point remains: the human spirit, as it moves toward spiritual health, knows intrinsically that the artisan process is better for the soul than any process that moves toward mass production.

The artisan soul moves toward purity of ingredients, understands the power of simplicity, makes life a craft and not a product, and treats people as unique individuals rather than commodities. The artisan process reminds me of God's words to Jeremiah in chapter 18: “‘Go down to the potter's house, and there I will give you my message.' So I went down to the potter's house, and I saw him working at the wheel. But the pot he was shaping from the clay was marred in his hands; so the potter formed it into another pot, shaping it as seemed best to him.” Later God describes to Jeremiah his relationship to his people: “Like clay in the hand of the potter, so are you in my hand” (18:6).

Sometimes the hand of God presses against us and creates unwanted discomfort. Like clay in the hands of a potter, we may feel God's pressing against us as intrusive and disruptive, but we must never lose sight of the fact that God never chooses to give up on us or to put us on an assembly line and treat us as a commodity. He always presses against us. His process is always hands-on. And with each of us he avoids standardization, working to form each person into a unique image of God.