A Crisis of Purpose
Sometimes people think faith is about answering the question, “Is there life after death?” I came to faith because I was wrestling with a different question, the one that drives the biblical book of Ecclesiastes: “Is there life before death?”
There has got to be more to life than the futility of wake, work, eat, sleep, repeat, die.
The current opioid epidemic seems to me to be an expression of a spiritual crisis, a crisis of meaning and purpose. When it feels like our life is going nowhere, we look for an escape. Especially young men very often feel their lives are devoid of purpose if they do not have the dignity of doing meaningful work. I’m not trying to pin the whole drug addiction problem on this one thing (each person has their own story), but there is an existential crisis of purpose in our society. And I’m saying that I believe part of the cause is our souls are undernourished. So let’s start here: We all crave the sense of significance that we were meant to find through meaningful work.
We’re made for more than to be passively entertained. We’re made to be actively productive. We’re made to be more than content consumers, we’re made to be content creators. Unless we’re making something meaningful, or engaging with something that brings more value to our lives, we’re wasting our lives.
This is where thinking about death can actually help us not waste our lives. I don’t want my epitaph to be, “Here lies Tim. He watched a lot of tv.” We only live once. We want to do something worthwhile in the short time we have. That longing is universal. It comes from the soul of the artist within each of us. And that’s the title of this series: “The Soul of the Artist.”
Who is this series for?
Some of us have a natural bent to jump in and make things. If you’re this way then at an early age, you likely saw someone do something beautiful and that’s all the permission you needed to run and dive headfirst into creative expression. Just one witness and you were off to the races. Others of us need a bit more encouragement. And I would love if this series could be that encouragement for those who need it.
If you’re a musician, or a painter, a poet, or a writer, you likely already consider yourself an artist, and (if that’s you) I am writing this series in the hopes that it would be helpful for you. But I also believe that there are elements of this series that will connect with literally everyone because literally everyone has gifts and calling and creative work to do in the world. Even if you don’t consider yourself an artist, you have the soul of an artist within you.
But the most truthful answer to the question “who is this series for?” is that I wrote it for me. My own soul had questions and yearnings that I didn’t understand and that I felt were at odds with the structures and expectations and conventions of modern life. Or maybe they were at odds with voices in my head.
So I wrote. I wrote because I want to thrive. I want to learn how to better do what I am here to do. I want to live while I’m alive. So I listened to my soul and went on a journey of discovery. I hope it will be half as helpful to you as it’s been to me.
Meaningful work is its own reward.
Meaningful work is more than just paycheck work. Meaningful work is, like all good art, “autotelic.” To call something “autotelic” is to say that it has an end or purpose in itself. Meaningful work is its own reward. The goals and values for the work come from inside you, they are intrinsically motivated, and the work is intrinsically valuable to you. In other words, you would do it without the promise of money or recognition. If it gains recognition or compensation, that’s all bonus!
Success is measured in whether you’re happy with the work. You alone are the steward of your heart. No one else can tell you what you like or what you believe in. How other people respond to what you create and what you love can be deeply validating, or it can be deeply demoralizing. But the first rule of art (or life) is that it must be meaningful to the artist first.
This means that if we try to live out the dreams of our parents, our friends, or our heroes, it won’t work. We have to learn how to listen to our own soul.
I’m not trying to suggest that our jobs have to be the place where our meaning comes from. That’s actually a rare occurrence, but I do think that since we live in a free society, we should take advantage of that freedom to try to get as close to the bullseye as we can with what we do for a living!
I recently read that millenials are less interested in how much money a job pays than in whether the work itself is meaningful. And they defined meaningful work as work that makes the world a better place.
There is intrinsic value in the good, the beautiful, and the true. Yes, we need money to eat. But we need more than food in order to truly live, which is why Jesus said,
“Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceeds from the mouth of God.” (Matthew 4:4)
We need meaning, we need hope, and we need purpose. We’re actually designed with purpose in mind. We’re created to be creative. And if you listen to your soul, I think you can hear it saying, “I have to make, create, do, dream, paint, write, build, serve, lead, fix, organize, heal, help, teach, parent, cook, design, contribute…(whatever it is). I have to!”
I don’t know if you’ll be able to make a living as an artist, but— if you’re an artist— you won’t live unless you make.
Ephesians chapter two, verse ten says that we are God’s handiwork, God’s “poema,” God’s poem. We’re God’s artwork, created in Christ Jesus for good works that he prepared in advance for us to do. There is a fit between the form and the function. It’s like cinderella’s slipper, it only fits her. You need to find your function, the thing you were uniquely designed and created to do. God didn’t make us in a factory, which means that the call on our lives wasn’t made in a factory either. Each of us has God’s fingerprints all over us because we’re each made by hand. And we’re called to live homemade lives from scratch, not store bought lives from a box. The little boxes of society will imprison you, if you let them. So we need to swim against the current. If we order our lives to please someone else, but it isn’t authentic to who we’re created to be, it can end very badly. It can warp us out of shape.
The Bible tells the story of David fighting Goliath as this unlikely, small, young man. It is the quintessential underdog story. When all the other soldiers were cowering in fear of the threatening taunting bully, Goliath, David stepped forward and said, “I can’t go along with this.”
King Saul offered David his fancy armor, since a shepherd wouldn’t have expensive armor of his own. But when David tried it on, it didn’t fit. I imagine it looked like one of those goofy inflatable sumo wrestling costumes people wear to fight each other. David said, “This isn’t me! I can’t do this! Let me do it my way.”
So there he goes, down to the creek to expertly pick out five smooth stones of the right size and shape. Only five. And he only ended up using one. It turns out that David was deadly with that sling. He’d been perfecting his craft in secret, with no one watching but the Lord, for years. And you know how that story ended, even if you’ve never heard it before. The underdog defeated the giant with his sling and stones and his faith in God.
Some of us will never find the place we fit it in until we learn how we’re meant to stand out.
To have integrity we have to stand back after all the other voices have spoken, and return to our compass. If too many creative visions with different values try to steer a project, or a life, it usually doesn’t work that well. The proverb is true that he who hunts two rabbits goes hungry. In art and life, we want to develop a strong enough sense of self that we know who we are, where we’re going, and what we’re here to do. Otherwise, people who are going somewhere else will steer us where we’re not called. And the worst thing is that we might end up there.
If the work pleases people, wonderful. To share something you find meaningful and have others draw life from it is hugely gratifying! But pleasing people isn’t always possible. Poet John Lydgate famously said,
“You can please some of the people all of the time, you can please all of the people some of the time, but you can’t please all the people all of the time.”
But even if what you make provokes people and they hate it, it’s not the end of the world. In fact, you may have done perfectly. People rejected and killed Jesus, remember? He said that the false prophets were popular and the true prophets were hated. I’m not saying we should view rejection as evidence we’re on the right track. But I did once hear about a comedian who said his intention was to please no more than half of the audience and to disorient and challenge the other half. If everyone loved his work, he felt that he had failed, because his goal was not to entertain, but to change how people think and live. So follow your calling, not the one that you think will gain the approval of others.
Many things that are possible are not probable. The american thing to say seems to be, “If you work hard, anything is possible,” but the truth is that it is extremely unlikely that your art will be your primary source of income. If you made it into the top 3% of Youtube channels and had 1.6 million views per month, you’d still only barely scrape past the United States poverty line and pull in $16,800 a year from ads. In terms of music, I’ve always said that some of the most incredible musicians in the whole world are completely unknown “weekend warriors” who work regular jobs all week long. So should we “regular people” quit making videos and music just because our work won’t provide us with fame and fortune! Well that depends. Do you love what you make?
Though our creative work may not bring enough external benefits to justify the personal cost at the surface level of feeding our ego and filling our bank account, it will serve a far more important function of bringing us more fully into a life worth living if we love the work for its own sake.
Jesus insisted that desire for human approval and love of money will always work against integrity, and anything that erodes integrity thereby erodes quality of life. This is why loving the work and staying faithful to our own inner vision must come first. In life, and in art, we need, more than anything, integrity. And integrity is costly. There is a high price to living a meaningful life. No many will be willing to pay it unless they’ve fallen in love.
I love the work. The Lord sometimes broods over me as I work. He seems to enjoy my enjoyment of it. Many of us need to have our concept of work redeemed. So let’s go back to the very beginning. This is a two point sermon, and point number one was that artists love their work for its own sake. The second point is this:
Artists make cosmos out of chaos.
1 In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. 2 The earth was without form and void, and darkness was over the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God was hovering over the face of the waters. 3 And God said, “Let there be light,” and there was light. 4 And God saw that the light was good. And God separated the light from the darkness. 5 God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And there was evening and there was morning, the first day. (Genesis 1:1-5 ESV)
The American composer Leonard Bernstein drew this insight from chapter one and two of Genesis: God’s creation was done by ordering the disordered. And because of God’s image in us, our innate mandate as creatives is fundamentally the same. Artists are grasping for the meaning of things that seem disordered. That’s our vocation! Isn’t that what you do so often? Aren’t you trying to understand? Aren’t you putting the story together, aren’t you looking for pieces that help you make sense of the pieces you’re already holding? Aren’t you asking, “Where does this go? How does this fit with that?” And whether we’re talking about building a home, organizing a room, planting and harvesting crops, folding clothes, writing a poem, or helping a friend through a painful loss, we are here to make cosmos from chaos. That is our vocation. That is what we do. It’s what we must do.
See, creative work is deeply embedded in the very meaning of our lives. We’re here to bring order out of disorder, creation out of chaos. Read Genesis 1, verse 2 very carefully. I was taught that God created ex nihilo, which is latin for “out of nothing,” but that’s not what it says. The biblical creation story doesn’t start with nothing, it starts with the breath of God hovering over the surface of the lifeless dark oceans. All that potential just waiting to happen, latent in the raw materials.
Picture Genesis 1, verse 2 like this: A child gets out all the playdough and sets it on the kitchen table. “Now what are we going to build today?” Or maybe picture verse 2 like this: A painter assembling all the colors on the pallet but they haven’t put brush to canvas yet, and they stand back, looking at an image with the eyes of their heart that is the template for what’s about to take shape in the material world. Or maybe one final image of what’s happening in Genesis chapter one, verse two. Picture a rough marble slab sitting there in front of the sculptor on her studio floor, and in the slab, she sees something there that you and I cannot see unless she creates cosmos out of chaos. So she thinks and stares at the huge cold rock for a long time. And then she steps forward, raises the hammer and chisel, and goes to work.
“Work.” Strange, isn’t it, how similar the artist at work is to the child at play.
And then in verse 3 God says the coolest thing into the darkness: He says the first four words of creation: “Let there be light!” and it explodes into brilliant colors that cause the observes to shield their eyes pull back in awe. It’s the greatest fireworks display of all time. And the child, and the painter, and the sculptors hands and clothes are now splattered with playdough and paint and dust, and each of our four artists survey their work with a detailed eye. And as the dust settles, he stands back — God stands back — and takes a long look at what he’s made, and then he nods. The scripture expresses the divine Artist’s assessment nicely: “And God saw that it was good…And there was evening and there was morning, the first day.” And so the playdough goes back into the containers until tomorrow’s work begins anew.
Later, at the apex of the story, God forms us out of the dust, breaths his breath into us, and places us in a small corner of the garden and said, essentially, “Do here in this small space what I’ve just done in this outer space. Bring order from the disorder. Shape, mold, cultivate, create, be fruitful and multiply, cover the earth and make art everywhere until the reality inside you finds its full expression around you. Heaven is inside you. Make the outside match the inside. Make the visible kingdom express the invisible kingdom.”
This is what we do. This is who we are…because each of us carry within us the soul of the artist.