I’m reading the most amazing book about creativity and spiritualty: The Artisan Soul: Crafting Your Life onto a Work of Art, by Erwin Raphael McManus. He talks about things in ways that I experience but have never been able to adequately put into language. The back cover author bio calls him “an iconoclast known as a cultural pioneer for his integration of creativity and spirituality.” Artist, entrepreneur, and thought leader, he is the founder of MOSAIC, a community of faith in Los Angeles, CA.

He brings scripture and logic to bear in talking about things that I’ve only been able say in “airy-fairy” ways. I almost never use this space for long quotes from someone else, but there’s no other way to adequately share this with you. So bear with me. It’s worth it!

He places creativity at the very heart of spirituality. Creating is the most god-like thing we do, therefore the most essential to our soul’s journey. We are the artisans shaping our lives, crafting our soul’s journey.

I love the resonance this adds for those of us with “Creativity” or “Artist” or “Spotlight” in our Life Purpose or Life Lesson. Crafting our soul’s journey is a LARGE artistic vision! If any of you are still resisting being an “artist,” try that one on for size!

Whether you were brought up inside or outside of a religion, you probably have a very complicated relationship to the word “spirituality.” When I googled a definition, this is one of the many I got: spirituality is that which gives meaning to one’s life and draws one to transcend oneself.

“That which gives meaning to one’s life…” —that’s a pretty big deal. All the more important that you feel free to not just explore your spirituality, but to make it come alive in the most profound and satisfying ways. 

For me there is nothing as profound and satisfying as entering into the energetic space of creativity: the space where you connect to both inspiration and expression. Good stuff coming in, good stuff pouring out. But no one ever told me this related to spirituality. So for me reading the following was extraordinary:

“Is it possible that the human imagination is the playground of God, that […] our imagination was always intended to be the place where humans could interact with God?” (p.100)

“One of the challenges in my early journey of faith was the seemingly perpetual war between creativity and spirituality. The faith journey seemed more a product of education and information than of imagination and passion. To be perfectly frank, I have never met God by studying a doctrine, but I have met God over and over listening to my dreams. The life of faith is less about gathering information than it is about expanding imagination. The movement Jesus started was a movement of dreamers and visionaries, not a movement of academics and theologians. The soul feeds on the imagination; the artist lives in the imagination. Imagination always precedes creativity. To engage in the creative act, you must be comfortable working with invisible material. It’s about moving imagination into image, transforming the invisible into the visible.” (p.101)

I don’t know about you, but I thought that was cool!

Coach’s Challenge: Sometime this week when you are in that amazing creative space, (and remember, creativity is NOT a craft. It’s a state of being,) notice how it feels like sacred space. My mother enters that space riding up hills on a bicycle, thinking of new lyrics for old songs. My friend Kate enters through numbers. You might enter that space while chopping garlic in the kitchen, working in your garden, or quilting. Maybe it’s tuning up your car, your bike, programming computers. It’s not the activity. It’s the energetic space—your state of being. Leave a comment to let me know if you’ve known all along that creativity and spirituality are so closely intertwined, or whether this is a new insight for you.