The End of Hope (Part 5)

The End of Hope (part 5)

So in the end the end is joy. Joy encompasses everything: the pleasure of attaining a personal goal or dream, the experience of great community and culture, and the mystery of the zeitgeist, knowing is good right now.

Joy is capable of withholding immediate knowledge, a skill very important to the joyful. There will be many occasions where the rationale for certain things won’t be there. At this level, things are self-justified, or beyond justification. They just are.

And the authority for doing such things is self-evident. It comes from within, ultimately from God if you can swallow that. No man can bestow it upon another. It is completely independent. Joy in this sense is for the brave individual.

But courageous individuals in this experience can share it with others. That is the real beauty. Our joy must be found within us, but can be shared and amplified outside of us. There is a rich tapestry of share joy, which ultimately becomes hope.

**But it must start within us. And unfortunately evidence of the gift is usually found in restlessness and passion. It is the consistent feeling of being off balance, without the comfort of a home. It is a necessary restlessness.

This is the dying to oneself that must be first. This is the dedication to the process. This is the allegiance to the end. At the time it does not feel good. It does not have a sense of hope and ultimate purpose. It feels rather horrible and hopeless actually.

There is a grieving process. We must lose our “right” to getting something “out” of the process. We are simply committing our whole selves to it. We have no idea at the time what that means. There is no master plan or career path highlighted.

It is simply death to oneself and commitment to one’s gift, to the thing that was implanted in us without us. It is a surrender to the process of growing this fledgling seed into whatever it is to become, which we can at best vaguely intuit.

***That may sound like a deterministic sort of will power. “I will do this come what may.” It sounds like a fierce sort of discipline. But for the creative the journey through death into life is not a matter of mere will power. There is much else going on.

First of all there is the obvious call into the process. Where does “it” come from? “It” is not some idea we conjure up. Though some may try to take credit for “it.” The truth is we do not create the invitation. “It” comes from another.

And not everyone hears “it.” No matter how hard we try to explain to someone who has never heard this call we come up short. It is very similar to the attempt to explain a vivid dream. No matter how soon after we wake up, the brain can’t piece it all together.

Even if we can, it sounds ridiculous. The other person may politely listen but there is absolutely no way they can feel the intensity of the thing we just experienced. That’s how the call to create comes. It overwhelms us then sneaks away.

The End of Hope (Part 4)

The End of Hope (part 4)

For most creative people the answer to that question (see The End of Hope Part 3) is governed by your imagination and gifts. Woven into your fabric is sort of a pesky dream, a lofty one seemingly out of the realm of possibility or reason (thus secluded to the imagination). Most mistakenly assume that's a place of “make-believe.” On the contrary the imagination is the home of reality before its public debut. The imagination alone is the human faculty capable of vision, seeing outside of what currently is.

Our gifts also help focus this intent dreaming. Although we did not ask for our gifts they are there, and they are demanding. However dormant certain ones may lie, the imagination has a way of rekindling them, utilizing them without our permission.

It’s almost as if the imagination has free access to mobilize our gifts when we are asleep. They conspire together to #StartAWar in us, to shake us out of our dormant comfort and securities, to mess with us - in the best way possible.

The gifts in us will not always make sense. Some will seem completely disconnected from the others. We will think we have figured out everything there is to know about a certain one, but then another develops and the context is completely changed.

Our gifts do not always match. An intense love of rock music with intense curiosity about entrepreneurism, for instance. Many would look at the two things and say either “pick one” or “those two things are interesting but unconnected."

The good news is our job isn’t necessarily to connect them. We do not force some strange intersections (in this example “how to ‘start up’ your band project”). We simply pursue each interest area to see where it may lead us.

It will not always be a sensible place with a clearly defined path. It shouldn’t be. If we are intently listening to our gifts it will lead to some strange new territory. And the divergent paths may not connect nicely to one another.

*That’s where life itself sort of picks up the difference. At times we will get consumed in discovering and almost “producing” our gifts for the world. It is work in the best sense of the term. But, it is still work. Work without rest is exhausting.

There will be rest! And play! These things done in community give life the layers that creative people need in order to sustain “gift production.” We willingly exhaust ourselves for our self-defined goals and initiatives.

That is not the point. The point is the sustained cultivation of a creative life. We don’t want to be one and done. We don’t want to be one-hit wonders. We also don’t want to be meat-grinder artists who for commercial exploitation are put through the ringer.

That leaves life in all its beautiful mystery. The exploration of beauty, friendship, community, God, love, support, truly caring for and encouraging one another. This is and has been the only key to sustaining creativity since the dawn of time, literally! 

The End of Hope (Part 2)

The End of Hope (Part 2)

Hope refuses to be boxed in. Hope stretches what we conceive of as reality. Though many learn to accept limitations (and there is definite merit to such), hope pushes at those boundaries, redefines them, renegotiates their finitude.

The reality is that humans settle. We have been “settling” America for the past two hundred and almost 40-some years. Of course we still pioneer but mostly in engineering better ways to enjoy comfort or to increase our security.

Settling puts walls up, fences up, security gates, locks, etc. It solidifies the fortress so the inhabitants are “safe.” The problem we never suspected, perhaps, is that safe is not so great. Safe has a whole new set of problems it comes with.

The more “secure” things are, the less in many ways people appreciate or understand that security. There are millions of benefits, of course (like the freedom to write in this journal), but we must be honest about the challenges of being safe.

Also dangerous, of course, is the weight of continually pushing. It is not our “job” to constantly push at boundaries. It is our “job” to BE. As we truly grow in grace the knowledge of BEing, our capacity naturally expands.

This mission of sledgehamming self-induced walls is not something outside us, it is not a duty we grudgingly commit to. Though certainly there are aspects of it that require sacrifice and discipline, those things result from something inside, namely hope.

Getting to hope is really the work we are about. It is largely an inner work. This inner work itself pushes and pulls us beyond the walls of safety, walls we emotionally put up to ensure our “happiness,” the other great enemy of the Spirit. Hope knows the absolute silliness of being happy, or striving for happiness. Hope knows happiness is an elusive mistress, ultimately illusion. Happiness by definition is a by-product, a result of temporarily satisfying some need now.

Hope takes the longview of happiness. It is not the immediate gratification of some need. Hope by nature is deferred gratification, or intentionally postponed gratification of some need, whether by choice or even at times by circumstance.

Hope creates a set of priorities that do not reflect our immediate wants. Hope differentiates between what is needed and what we are simply used to. Hope challenges us to boldly disappoint those expecting from us.

Hope welcomes sacrifice in the near term. It understands the process for which goals are achieved. It knows there are no shortcuts, but that life gives enough rewards along the way to sustain us. It is not about being a martyr, it is about waiting.

Hope is waiting with patience for the rest of life to catch up with our inner vision. In other words, we see something, we have a vision, we know the potential of something, but we are alone in that at first. We do not know the outcome, yet.