Rollo May has some pretty profound things to say about courage and creativity and the ways that artists (defined broadly) are actually a type of rebel.  Some pieces from Courage to Create:

“When I use the word rebel for the artist, I do not refer to revolutionary or to such things as taking over the dean’s office; that is a different matter.  Artists are generally soft-spoken persons who are concerned with their inner visions and images.  But that is precisely what makes them feared by any coercive society.  For they are the bearers of the human beings’ age-old capacity to be insurgent.  They love to immerse themselves in chaos in order to put it into form, just as God created form out of chaos in Genesis.  Forever unsatisfied with the mundane, the apathetic, the conventional, they always push on to newer worlds.”

And later,

“Recall how often in human history the saint and the rebel have been the same person.  Socrates was a rebel, and he was sentenced to drink hemlock.  Jesus was a rebel, and he was crucified for it.  Joan of Arc was a rebel, and she was burned at the stake.

“Yet each of these figures and hundreds like them, though ostracized by their contemporaries, were recognized and worshiped by the following ages as having made the most significant creative contributions in ethics and religion to civilization.

“Those we call saints rebelled against an outmoded and inadequate form of God on the basis of their new insights into divinity.  The teachings that led to their deaths raised the ethical and spiritual levels of their societies…They rebelled, as Paul Tillich has so beautifully stated, against God in the name of the God beyond God.  The continuous emergence of the God beyond God is the mark of creative courage in the religious sphere.”

So I’m thinking about these things today.  All of them were written in the context of describing and defining courage, and particularly the courage required of artists, of creators. In many ways I feel like the last years of my life have been filled with courage – the courage that it takes to say no to ways of understanding life and self and God that, though destructive for me, nevertheless hemmed me comfortably in with structure and approval and knownness and acceptability in many of my life’s arenas.  It takes excruciating courage to step away from things like that.

But stepping-away courage is only one kind, I’m thinking.  Stepping-toward courage is a whole nother beast.  And living-into courage as well – the kind it takes to solidly embody who one is, not just in the privacy of one’s home, or in the safety of a handful of people who see things the way you do, but in ever-widening spheres of life.

I want to foster these latter kinds of courage.  I want to be more than a clandestine rebel.  I want my rebellion to participate openly in the creation of a more compassionate, more alive, more whole society than the one I currently inhabit.

This entry was posted on Friday, February 4th, 2005 at 4:15 pm and is filed under Books and Art, Healing, Psychology, Mindfulness, Bridge-building, Religion/Spirituality. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.