$3.

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EIGHTH DAY OF CREATION |

Gifts and Creativity

by Elizabeth O’Connor

Creativeness in the world is,

as it were,
the eighth day of creation.
Nicolas Berdyaev

“T will be an instrument of God in the

continuing act of creation.”

A growing number of people have made

this affirmation and have joined the
revolution “‘going on in the world today
that is cutting across lines of class, color,
and nationality. It is the revolution of
those all over the world who are in on the
secret of gifts.”

Elizabeth O’Connor has written Eighth

Day of Creation to encourage people to
join the creative forces in the world by
discovering their own creativity and gifts.

She writes, ““We ask to know the will of

God without guessing that his will is
written into our very beings. We perceive
that will when we discern our gifts. Our
obedience and surrender to God are in
large part our obedience and surrender to
our gifts.

“Because our gifts carry us out into the

world and make us participants in life,
the uncovering of them is one of the most
important tasks confronting any one of
us. When we talk about being true to
ourselves—being the persons we are
intended to be—we are talking about
gifts. We cannot be ourselves unless we
are true to our gifts.

continued on the back flap

 Digitized by the Internet Archive
in 2010

http://www.archive.org/details/eighthdayofcreat00ocon
Eighth Day of Creation

Creativeness in the world is, as it were,

the eighth day of creation.
Nicolas Berdyaev
EIGHTH
DAY
OF
CREATION
Gifts and Creativity

Elizabeth O’Connor

WORD BOOKS, Publisher

Waco, Texas
 Eighth Day of Creation

Copyright© 1971
by Elizabeth O’Connor
First Printing, November, 1971
Second Printing, January, 1973
Third Printing, May, 1973
Fourth Printing, February, 1974
Fifth Printing, June, 1974
Sixth Printing, January 1975
All rights reserved.
No part of this book
may be reproduced in any form
except for brief quotations in reviews
without written permission from the publisher.

Library of Congress catalog card number: 70-175725

Printed in the United States of America

Quotations from the Revised Standard Version of the

Bible, copyright 1946 and 1952 by the Division of
Christian Education of the National Council of
Churches of Christ in the United States of America;
The New English Bible © The Delegates of The Oxford
University Press and The Syndics of The Cambridge
University Press, 1961, 1970, reprinted by per-
mission. Scripture quotations are identified in
the text by abbreviations in conventional form.
Mystery and Manners, Occasional Prose of Flannery O’Connor,
selected and edited by Sally and Robert Fitzgerald, copyright
() 1957, 1961, 1963, 1964, 1966, 1967, 1969 by the Estate of
Mary Flannery O’Connor, copyright (€) 1962 by Flannery
O’Connor, copyright (C) 1961 by Farrar, Straus & Cudahy, Inc.
Courtesy of Farrar, Straus & Giroux, Inc.
 To Joseph L. Sheridan,
an evoker of the gift of self

Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your

heart ... try to love the questions themselves
like locked rooms and like books that are written
in avery foreign tongue. Do not now seek the
answers, which cannot be given you because you
would not be able to live them. And the point is,
to live everything. Live the questions now.
Perhap
you will
s then gradually, without noticing
it, live along some distant day into the answer.
Rainer Maria Rilke
Preface

This is another book which

has grown out of the community of The Church
of The Saviour in Washington, D.C. It was originally
written to give guidance to the church’s mission groups
working in such varying areas as programs for the aged,
housing for the poor, life-giving structures for neglected
and abandoned children, polycultural education,
leadership training for ghetto youth, and a coffee house
ministry in the inner city.

Wearesometimes asked what

accounts for the diversity of our community. In
answering we must always speak of the evoking
and exercising of gifts. The classes we give in our School
of Christian Living, the sermons that we preach, the

7
conferences that we hold are often to help us with the
discovery of our gifts. When we describe “Church” we
like to say that it is a gift-evoking, gift-bearing
community—a description based on the conviction that
when God calls a person he calls him into the fullness of
his own potential. This is why “Church” implies a
people; no one enters into the fullness of his being except
in community with other persons. No community
develops the potential of its corporate life unless the
gifts of each of its members are evoked and exercised on
behalf of the whole community.

Gordon Cosby puts it this

way: ‘When each person is exercising his gift, he
becomes an initiating center of life. When we confirm
a person’s call to this segment of the Church, we say by
that confirmation that we will be instruments in calling
the person forth in his totality. The one who joins
assumes that same responsibility for all the other
members of the community. This covenant is implicit in
the celebration of commitment of each new member.
The Church of the Holy Spirit is full of variety. Sameness
and conformity are the demands of alien spirits. No gift
is unimportant. There are no lesser gifts. Each is crucial
to the proper functioning of the Body; each contributes
to the rich diversity needed by the Church for its work
within the total organism of humanity. If there are
ten people in one of the small groups of the church and
each is an evoked person exercising his gift of the Spirit
on behalf of the whole, then you have a group with power
to attract. People gather around it. They respond to it,
they love it, they hate it. Such a group has the power to

8
 heal, to liberate, to tackle the demonic systems and
structures of society.”

And what is the strategy of

these small initiating centers of life when they
move out into the world? Simply to call forth gifts, to
evoke the treasure of personality, to be enablers of
others. Part of the frustration and agony of the poor,
minority groups, the third world countries, is surely
rooted in the fact that they are denied opportunities
to use and develop their gifts.
Ss I m7
| A revolution is going on in the
world today that is cutting across lines of class,
color, and nationality. It is the revolution of those all
over the world who arein on the secret of gifts. At the
heart of it is the gospel, but the Church cannot assert this
in the traditional words of the faith because of a noisy
piety that failed to become embodied in authentic life
styles. In this revolution one gift is neither superior nor
inferior to another. The recognition dawns that the )
exercising of gifts is wrapped up with our needs which /
oe with corresponding needs in the world] The Peace
Mission Group in ourchurch, in the course of its efforts
to help the congregation attain a fuller understanding of
the meaning of Christian nonviolence, learns to deal
with its own violent responses to life. Those who move
among the poor discover and confront their own
conflicts with money and possessions. I write a book and
find in its pages answers to my own questions. We
exercise our gifts and learn that there is a mysterious
law of reciprocity at work in the universe.

9
 As the artist discovers that
there is a direct relationship between the inner
and outer forms of material, so we discover that
creativity in our inner lives has a direct relationship
to creativity in the world. We can never be in the world
only as its benefactors. This does not make for authentic
relationship. All that we genuinely do is very personal
and calls into being our own personality. The covenant
of the Church to call forth gifts is extended to the whole
of mankind. I say to the world, “I will be an instrument
of God in the continuing act of creation,” and the world
fulfills in me its side of the covenant. It brings forth in
me the new creation.

In the end, we have to say

that the exercising of gifts has to do with love,
which is a reciprocal relationship. We are addressed by
love, and we love. The two exercises in this book are
preparation for love and so they are very difficult,
because to love is very difficult. Anything that I have
written can be read in one sitting, but the exercises—
they may take months and years to do. They require a
reflective mind and a contemplative heart. The
selections that follow both exercises suggest areas for
exploration, give encouragement, raise questions, point
out paths. Read a few each day meditatively. Treat them
as guides or teachers, but then leave them and enter into
the solitude of your own life and there ask your
questions and wait for your answers.

Try to reserve a half-hour

each day for this work, preferably at the same

10
time and in the same place. You may want to keepa
journal in which you write anything that comes to mind
during this time. Do not censor any of your thoughts or
try to record them in orderly fashion. Write your journal
as notes to yourself. Give special attention to the images
that cross the screen of your mind. Another age called
them visions. They are much more important than we
have ever guessed. Ask their meaning. Then wait, and
watch, and listen.

Many write to us and ask for

materials that will assist them in their individual
and group life. The pages that follow reflect the kind of
search our community is engaged in and the questions
that we ponder in our solitude. Certainly our knowledge
of gifts and creativity is incomplete, a subject to be
pondered and worked through in this and every church
community. We are just beginning to ask the
important questions.

For me to complete a book

requires a gift-evoking community. This volume,
the previously published Our Many Selves, and Search
for Silence’ form a trilogy which never could have been
done without the gracious help of friends. Dorothy Ham
gave generous editorial assistance. Countless sentences
are better for her touch. Gordon Cosby is the one who
gives inspiration and leadership to the whole concept of
evoking gifts in our community. Other patron saints
were Kathryn Campbell, Mary Romeyn, Jean
Senseman, Sonya Dyer, Thelma Hemker, Conrad
Hoover, and others in the house on Cathedral Avenue.

11
And then there is that large company of those who
were not offended because I was lost in the pages of a
book. Among the real costs of exercising a gift are
feelings of guilt for all the things one saw to do and left
undone; but even more for gentle thoughts one did not
take the time to speak; and then for the knowledge that
a work that bears a single name should have written
across it a hundred.
EIGHTH
DAY
OF
CREATION

Gifts and Creativity

Somewhere I heard a story

~ Michelangelo’s pushing a huge piece of rock
down astreet. Acurious neighbor sitting lazily on the
porch of his house called to him and inquired why he
labored so over an old piece of stone. Michelangelo is
reported to have answered, “Because there is an angelin
that rock that wants to come out.”

This story comes to mind

when I think about the gifts or talents given to
each of us. Every person has the task of releasing angels
by shaping and transfiguring the raw materials that lie
about him so that they become houses and machinery
and pictures and bridges. How we do this—how we
“build the earth,” to use Teilhard de Chardin’s
phrase—is determined by the discovery and
the use of our gifts.

13
 Because our gifts carry us out
into the world and make us participants in life the
uncovering of them is one of the most important tasks
confronting any one of us. When we talk about being
true to ourselves—being the persons we are intended to
be—we are talking about gifts. We cannot be ourselves
unless we are true to our gifts. When we talk about
vocation, whether we are artists or engineers, we are
talking about gifts. In a discussion about commitment,
we are on the same subject for the place of our concrete
involvement is determined by our gifts. Serious
reflection on almost any aspect of our lives leads intoa
consideration of gifts.

Whenever we struggle with

what we are to do in life, we are struggling to uncover
our talent or gift. For many it isa lifetime struggle. Few
people feel good about the jobs they hold. The vast
number have no sense of being in the right place and are
always looking for something else without knowing
what it is. The statement is often made to personnel
directors and friends, “I want a job working with
people.” They do not say, “I like people and Ihave
equipped myself to be a nurse, or a teacher.” Most of us
do not have that much understanding of gifts. We
respond ina very general way as almost anyone could,
“T would like to work with people.” Every serious artist
or researcher working at his lonely trade is aware that
one of the sacrifices he makes in the service of his gifts is
the company of others, or at least the development of a
capacity for relationship if this is what he lacks. Actually

14
the statement that we “would like to work with
people” could be an evasion to prevent our dealing
specifically with the matter of our peculiar gifts.

We ask to know the will of

God without guessing that his will is written into
our very beings. We perceive that will when we discern
our gifts. Our obedience and surrender to God are in
large part our obedience and surrender to our gifts. This
is the message wrapped up in the parable of the talents.
Our gifts are on loan. We are responsible for spending
them in the world, and we will be held accountable.
Though it may seem that God leaves us and is not
concerned with what we do with our lives, the parable
makes it clear that this is not the case. Even though we
feel he is away a long time—the absent God—we
perceive his presence in the consequences of our actions.

As with all the parables in the

Gospels, this is a story of the inner life and, like
everything in Scripture, it is not there to address some
minority group, but all of us. Like many of the parables
this one is full of joy and good news. To those of us who
keep comparing ourselves with someone else comes the
word that it is unimportant how many talents anyone
has—two or five. If we use those we have, our lives will
expand and our capacity will double. A message that
sounds throughout the New Testament is here again in
the story of the talents: he who loses his life will find it.
Cast your bread upon the waters and it will come
back tenfold.

1d
 This parable says nothing
about equality of gifts or equality of distribution,
but it does promise the same reward to all—the joy of
being a creator. The man who uses well the two talents
hears the same pronouncement as the man who uses
well the five, “I will set you over much; enter into the joy
of your master” (Matt. 25:21, 23, rsv).

As arule, however, our atten-

tion is not caught by those in the parable who are
exercising their gifts in freedom and joy. It is the one-
talent man who captures our imagination and moves us
to compassion, His cautious, protective measure seems
very reasonable—“I was afraid, and I went and hid your
talent in the ground” (Matt. 25:25, rsv).

Wecan sympathize with that.

So buried away are our gifts that we do not know
what they are. When the Scripture goes on to say,
‘“*..cast the worthless servant into the outer darkness;
there men will weep and gnash their teeth,” we rise up in
protest. How horribly unjust! What kind of God have
we, anyway ? And yet the experience of this Scripture is
in our own lives. If we do not use our gifts, we know an
anguish of spirit that is not relieved by the explanation
that we had parents who did not listen to us, teachers
who demanded conformity, and structures that made us
feel inferior. When the man in the story responds, “I
knew you to bea hard man, reaping where you did not
sow, and gathering where you did not winnow ...” he
explains why he is afraid, revealing at the same time his
terror of authority figures as those who are out to take

16
what is not theirs. The Scripture does not argue about
how aman experiences his world, rather it holds him
responsible for his life and what he is doing with it.

Once more, Christ has told a

story that we can understand—a story to shake
us out of our lethargy. The parable puts us in touch with
our own pain. In unmistakable terms are spelled out
the consequences of not uncovering and spending our
gifts—our failure to be creators. But our suffering can be
our hope if it impels us to give attention to whatis
crushed and dying in us.

When we deny our gifts, we

blaspheme against the Holy Spirit whose action is
to call forth gifts. In every man is the creation story.
Since the first day of our beginning, the Spirit has
brooded over the formless, dark void of our lives, calling
us into existence through our gifts until they are
developed. And that same Spirit gives us the
responsibility of investing them with him in the
continuing creation of the world. Our gifts are the signs
of our commissioning, the conveyors of our human-
divine love, the receptacles of our own transforming,
creative power.

A primary purpose of the

Church is to help us discover our gifts and, in the
face of our fears, to hold us accountable for them so that
we can enter into the joy of creating. The major
obligation of the Church to children is to enjoy them
and to listen to them so that each can grow according
to the design which is written into his being and

17
emerges only under the care and warmth of another life.
One of the reasons we experience so much difficulty
with our gifts is that parents have thought their chief
function in life to be feeding, clothing, and educating the
young. However, their really important ministry is to
listen to their children and enable them to uncover the
special blueprint that is theirs. There is one line in
Scripture that will instruct us in these matters: “But
Mary treasured up all these things and pondered over
them” (Luke 2:19, NEB).

Every child’s life gives forth

hints and signs of the way that he is to go. The
parent that knows how to meditate stores these hints
and signs away and ponders over them. We are to
treasure the intimations of the future that the life of
every child gives to us so that, instead of unconsciously
putting blocks in his way, we help him to fulfill his
destiny. This is not an easy way to follow. Instead of
telling our children what they should do and become,
we must be humble before their wisdom, believing that
in them and not in us isthe secret that they need
to discover.

Eric Hoffer tells a story about

a Bavarian peasant woman who cared for him
after his mother died and during the years that he was
blind: “And this woman, this Martha took care of me.
She was a big woman, with a small head. And this
woman, this Martha, must have really loved me,
because those eight years of blindness are in my mind as
a happy time. I remember a lot of talk and laughter. I

18
must have talked a great deal, because Martha used to
say again and again, ‘You remember you said this, you
remember you said that .. .’ She remembered
everything I said, and all my life I’ve had the feeling
that what I think and what I say are worth remembering.
She gave me that...”

One of the reasons we have

difficulty identifying our gifts is that we have had
no one to listen to us or even to look at us. In Thornton
Wilder’s play, Our Town, after Emily has died she
chooses to return to her home and observe the day of
her twelfth birthday. As she watches the day unfold, she
becomes painfully aware that no one really notices what
is going on. Finally she cries, “I can’t, I can’t go on. It
goes so fast. We don’t have time to look at one another.”

Very few of us have had a

listening, seeing person in our lives. We do not
hear what others—not even our children—are saying
because we, ourselves, have had no one to hear us. We
do not have the feeling that what we think and what we
say is important.

Many of us make this confes-

sion to one another in the small groups of The
Church of The Saviour when we struggle to identify and
exercise our gifts. Such confession helps to dispel one’s
illusion that he is the only one who lacks confidence and
needs confirmation. We begin to see that our need is
every man’s need and that the person who looks so
assured and confident and collected is hardly ever what

19
he appears to be. He wears for us the same mask that we
wear for him. If we think about it, we know that the
reason that he did not give us the confirmation we were
seeking is because he was too busy trying to find
confirmation for himself. As for us, we could not answer
his plea, so concerned were we with our own place in the
scheme of things.

When this happens in a

group, we do not have Christian community or any
other kind of community. We may be sitting ina circle
in the same room, but each of us is living in a separate
world revolving around himself. And what we hear and
see is in terms of ourselves, which is to see or hear hardly
at all. To bea person in community one must both give
and receive, confirm and be confirmed. The Christian
Church comes into being as we come to know our own
gifts and help others to know theirs.

At the point of our gifts we

see how utterly related prayer is to our whole
existence. The silence of prayer is the silence of listening.
Because there was no person who listened to us does not
mean that all is lost. We can learn to listen to ourselves,
and we can learn to listen to each other. What we
discover in the prayer of silence can be used as we listen
at the altar of our own lives. In our wishes, small
urgings, dreams, and fantasies we are given intimations
of the way we are to go. It is our way alone and cannot be
learned by reading books or listening to scholars or
following others. We can learn our way only by taking

20
seriously the sign that we see and the small voice that
we hear. These we must treasure up in our hearts and
ponder over. The code we are to decipher is written into
our genes and sent out to us, as it were, from the core of
our beings.

Whenever I think that there

is a design written into each life—a blueprint that
can be known—I am reminded of those rubbings that
artists make of stone carvings on buildings and
tombstones, I imagine what it would be like if we could
have a rubbing of our lives, a map that would show us
where we are headed and how to get there. Sometimes
I think I would like that. We would have no blind alleys.
Every road would bea royal road; but there would be no
mystery, no work to do, no obstacles to overcome, and
we would not need each other. After all, what are blind
alleys but God’s way of telling us that we missed the
reading of a sign and to go back and start again. And
what are our hopes and “sighing after” but rubbings of
something deep and hidden in us.

We listen for the signs and

hints in other lives in the very same way that we
listen for them in our own. One aspect of our preliminary
preparation for small group meetings in my own
 In a nonthreatening atmos-
phere where there is warmth and acceptance and
someone to receive what we have to give, creativity
begins to flow. Those congregations that punctuate the
sermons of their ministers with “amens” are giving them
untold encouragement. We have a person in our
congregation who nods her head in approval through all
the sermons we unseasoned laymen give. Her
encouragement does not make us think we are better
than we are. It simply enables us to do what we do as
well as wecan. Actors affirm the same thing. They insist
that their performances differ because audiences vary,
drawing a variety of qualities from the performers.

In one sense the encourage-

ment that we give to each other is of utmost
importance. In the Church, Christ is to be formed in us.
As the prophecy of Isaiah was fulfilled in Jesus, so it will
be in us: “He will not snap off the broken reed, nor snuff
out the smouldering wick” (Matt. 12:20, NEB).

While the prophecy must

work out in us if we are to be the Church, we will
be in trouble if we have to have a nodding head and an
“amen” to all our efforts. Another serious injunction is
given in Philippians. After describing the love and
encouragement and compassion that we are to give each
other, the author points out a more solitary way—the
way of the Cross that is also ours, “You must work out
your own salvation in fear and trembling; for it is God
who works in you, inspiring both the will and the deed,
for his own chosen purpose” (Phil. 2:12-13, NEB). The

22
same thought occurs in other places in Scripture.
Whereas we are to help one another carry heavy loads,
“everyone has his own proper burden to bear’”’
(Gal. 6:5, NEB).
The act of creation is always
a solitary one. Others can encourage us to create.
They cannot create for us. The man of ten talents needs
the same courage as the man of one. I once thought that
only great gifts were exercised without continual
confirmation. Darwin’s father may have tried to impose
on him first the career of doctor and then that of
clergyman, but unlike our fathers he could not succeed,
so great was Darwin’s affinity with nature and his
aptitude for discovery.
Surely, I reasoned, it must be
the magnitude of their gifts that enables artists
and scientists and inventors to go on producing when
they are rejected and scorned by their own
contemporaries. Now lam not so sure that the greatness
of the talent has any direct relation to the degree of
persistence with which it is developed. When I become
aware of my own gifts and give my attention to
communicating what is in me—my own truth, as it
were—lI have the experience of growing toward
wholeness. Iam working out God’s “chosen purpose,”
and Iam no longer dependent on what others think and
how they respond. The experience itself is confirming.
The response of others can give me pleasure or pain, but
it cannot keep me from the act of creating. lam content
to be nobody because I know that in the important inner
realm of the Spirit Iam somebody. Through the

23
exercising of my gifts lamin the process of realizing
and communicating my own uncommon self.

We cannot listen and speak

and work out of our own centers and at the same
time give our attention to weighing whether or not
others are approving of us. But the fact is that probably
no one—not even the saint—operates continually from
his silent self. One of the certain signs that we are at the
periphery of our lives is our beginning to wonder
whether or not what we are doing will be pleasing to
others. Whenever we begin to act and produce with the
approval of others in mind, there comes the haunting
possibility that we will not live up to their actual or
imagined expectations. To the degree that this feeling
takes over we abandon ourselves, and spontaneity and
creativity die in us. We enter into the sin of judging our
own works, of deciding what is good and what is bad,
when our only task is to be faithful over what we have—
to do the best we can with it and to leave the judgment
to God. We do not have to be better than others, or live
up to their expectations, or fulfill their demands. When
the beggar at the gate of the temple called Beautiful
asked alms of Peter and John, Peter said to him, “Ihave
no silver and gold, but I give you what Ihave...”
(Acts 3:6, RSV). We meditate on Scripture so that we can
be liberated from our own bonds; gifts can emerge and
we are free to do our thing.

One of the fears that binds us

is our fear of rejection. We have our gifts wrapped
up and buried away because we are scared. Many of us

24
have buried them so deep that we do not even know
what they are. This is why so much emphasis is given in
The Church of The Saviour community to discovering
and using our gifts. The teaching-preaching ministry of
the church is to help a person discover the gifts that he is
to use in the creating of his life, in building the Church of
Jesus Christ, and then, finally, for his commissioning in
the world so that he can be “the repairer of the breach,
the restorer of streets to dwell in” (Isa. 58:12, Rsv).

Almost from the time a per-

son comes in touch with The Church of The
Saviour he hears about gifts and is confronted with the
question, “What are your gifts?” Another way of asking
that question is, ““What is your call?” —so often we come
to understand our call by knowing our gifts. All the
mission groups’ of The Church of The Saviour come
into existence in response to a person’s call. For example,
someone may want to work in the area of curing drug
addiction, or in some phase of education. If he can sound
that call so that it comes as good news to others and
they want to work with him in the accomplishment of
certain goals, then we have a new mission group. And
when a new group comes into existence, one of its first
tasks is to identify the gifts of each of its members so
that every person is exercising a gift on behalf of the
group. Each of the Potter’s House (a coffee house
sponsored by our church) groups has a prior, a spiritual
director, a teacher, a pastor-prophet, a shepherd, and
an activist or plowman. Also, each person is givena
specific task for the evening such as cashier,
administrator, waitress, or host.

25
 Bonhoeffer in Life Together
says, “A community which allows unemployed
members to exist within it will perish because of them.
It will be well, therefore, if every member receives a
definite task to perform for the community, that he may
know in hours of doubt that he, too, is not useless and
unusable.” ’ In our own community Gordon Cosby’ is
the person who constantly reminds us of this. He
believes with a passion the New Testament teaching
that to “... each of us has been given his gift, his due
portion of Christ’s bounty.... ‘he gave gifts to men.’...
And these were his gifts: some to be apostles, some
prophets, some evangelists, some pastors and teachers,
to equip God’s people for work in his service, to the
building up of the body of Christ” (Eph. 4:7-13, NEB).
Cosby says that the Scriptures on gifts that we find in
Romans, Corinthians, and Ephesians contain spiritual
dynamite. “If we will take them seriously, they will set
off a revolution in the churches that will bring in a whole
new age of the Spirit.”

To be in earnest about these

Scriptures is a costly business, for they have to do
with gifts and call and creativity, and our reply is that of
the one-talented man—we are scared. Sometimes it
takes a year or two for us to identify the gifts in our
groups. The “new age of the Spirit” is not going to come
without birth pangs. And perhaps those birth pangs will
be our willingness to struggle first to discover what our
gifts are and then to risk investing them in an unsure
world where there is no certain return. If we could be
confident of success and know in advance that someone

26
would eventually say that we could share in the creator’s
joy, we would have no need for faith. But itis not the
good works that we do or the things that we make, it is
our faith that saves us—and this is not easy to know.

In the small groups in our

church the element of fear plays a big part in the
struggle to identify our gifts. We try out one gift timidly,
find out that it is not right, and continue trying out
others until we find the one that we feel good about.
We cannot fool ourselves for long about what we are to
do. Somewhere deep down in us is stored the secret, and
when we are digging in the wrong place, we know it.
The secret wants to be discovered and will not let us go
in peace a way that is not ours.

On one occasion I was in a

group where everyone except fora gracious and lovely
woman had a gift identified. When we went ona
weekend retreat, she told us the first evening that she
was uneasy because she did not know what her gift was.
She was an appealing person whose very presence was a
gift. In one way and another we told her that it seemed
that her gift was just to be among us and to do what she
was doing. “For after all,” we said, “a person isin his
very being a gift.”

We have discovered, how-

ever, that while this is true, we do not experience
ourselves as gift until we are engaged in the act of
creating. The confirmation of a person as gift
acknowledges what is obvious, but it does not give

27
enough attention to what is not as evident—the
unknown potential in a person that can be brought into
existence only through the exercising of gifts. We
cannot use our gifts without having unknown chords in
us played upon in a whole range of effects that bring
us alive.
Our group member found our
response unsatisfactory that she, herself, was
gift. She could not understand this and felt that she
lacked worth as a person because she did not know her
gifts. Members of the group suggested one gift after
the other that she might exercise on behalf of the
mission, but while each one suggested rang true for us
and we might have confirmed her in a number of
ministries, no suggestion connected with anything
deep in her.

One can have a similar expe-

rience trying to interpret another person’s dream
or struggling to find out the meaning of one’s own
dream. When the time has come for a person to know
what a dream is saying and the signs of his dream are
interpreted so that heis in ona part of his life that has
been unknown to him, all his feelings confirm the
interpretation. Whereas, if the signs and symbols of a
dream have been wrongly read or not interpreted at all,
feelings can range from deadness to rage.

One of the most vivid exam-

ples we have of a person’s struggle to understand
the buried longings of his life is Nebuchadnezzar's
search for someone to interpret his recurring dreams.

28
The story begins with the opening sentence of the
second chapter of Daniel: “In the second year of his
reign Nebuchadnezzar had dreams, and his mind was so
troubled that he could not sleep.” Usually we have to be
deeply disturbed to be concerned about our dreams, and
then we are willing to go to great lengths and pay all
kinds of money to discover their meaning, a fact
that is always bewildering to peaceful sleepers.
Nebuchadnezzar summoned the experts and
professionals of his day—the magicians, exorcists,
sorcerers, and Chaldeans. In his anguish he
threatened them with death if they did not interpret his
dream. Out of fear the “wise men” conspired to save
their own lives rather than risk helping the distraught
king, and answered, “Nobody on earth can tell your
majesty what you wish to know... What your majesty
requires of us is too hard” (Dan. 2:10, 11, NEB ).

The king was not fooled. He

knew that his question had an answer and that
the answer was essential for the living of his life. In
anger and despair he decreed that his counselors should
be executed. When Daniel, whose special gift was to
interpret dreams and visions, heard of the sentence, he
begged the king to allow him a certain length of time at
the end of which he would interpret the dream. This
granted, he went home and told the whole story to
Hananiah, Mishael, and Azariah, his own small
community of believers, so that they would pray with
him. Then ina vision Daniel was given the secret of the
dream that could not be fathomed by a purely
scientific, analytical approach. This is what he told

29
Nebuchadnezzar: “There is in heaven a god who reveals
secrets ... land he wants you] to know the
interpretation and understand the thoughts which have
entered your mind” (Dan. 2:28, 30, NEB). “He reveals
deep mysteries; he knows what lies in darkness”
(Dan. 2:22, NEB).

Woven through Daniel’s long

explanation of the symbols and signs of the dream
is the message that Nebuchadnezzar’s kingdom couldn’t
last. The king, a man given to intense fury, might have
had Daniel killed for such an interpretation, but the
news rang true. Nebuchadnezzar had known it witha
large part of him already. It was the basis of an anxiety
that he could not understand. Now instead of being a
vague knowledge, hidden away where he could not
come to terms with it, it was out in the open.

More than that, Daniel, a

prophet and interpreter of dreams, was also an
evangelist and brought him the good news of Jesus
Christ—the Kingdom of Heaven is at hand. His precise
words are, “... the God of heaven will establish a
kingdom which shall never be destroyed; that kingdom
shall never pass to another people; it shall shatter and
make an end of all these kingdoms, while it shall itself
endure for ever” (Dan. 2:44, NEB).

The kingdoms that any of us

build are destructible and are always under threat.
No wonder we feel so vulnerable, so easily shaken and

30
disturbed by feelings that we cannot understand. No one
whose life is not in touch with a transcendent order can
possibly exercise his gifts with abandonment. It is only
when our lives quicken to the news of the Advent of
another Kingdom and we invest ourselves in its coming
that we can be sure what we do endures forever. For all
his shortcomings, Nebuchadnezzar in this instance was
enough in touch with his feelings to know that they had
a message of importance for him.

Though Nebuchadnezzar’s
story seems far removed, I was reminded of it by
the woman on our retreat who was asking for an
interpretation of her feelings. She told us in her own way
that we had misread the signs of her life but did
not threaten to banish us from her sight. Even though
she had not been able to identify her gift, she knew we
were wrong. We had named the gifts that were obvious
to her as well as to us, but she was seeking to know
something more hidden.

One reason for difficulty in

our lives is that others have confirmed in us the
obvious or what they, themselves, wanted to see. To
please them, or to get ahead, or to make more money—
we then developed those gifts, meanwhile putting aside
and forgetting the gifts which were neither so evident
nor so valued by others. If our unused gifts have any
strength or power of their own, they cry out for
recognition—to be given a name. They are not only
disturbers of our sleep; they make our days uneasy.

31
 As Daniel had asked his
prayer group to pray with him, our group mem-
ber asked us to pray with her so that she could discover
the gift that she was to use on behalf of the mission.
In the closing session of the retreat she told us that in
her imagination she had role-played all the gifts we had
suggested, but that none of them had felt right. Out of
her praying, however, had come the feeling that she had
a gift for intercessory prayer. She knew that it mattered
to her that other people were praying for her that
weekend, and she began to know that she would enjoy
praying for others. She had the conviction that her
prayers would count and even began to think that she
might have something to say to those who were deeply
questioning the value of intercessory prayer.

The group had no difficulty

in confirming her as an intercessor. Confirmation
of her gift did not mean that the rest of us would give up
our prayers of intercession for each other and the group
and its mission, but it did mean that we now hada
person who would spend more time at the work of
intercession. Perhaps hers would always be a hidden
work; on the other hand she might become a teacher.
In any case, if the parable of the talents is true, her
capacity for intercession would grow.

Confirmation of a gift also

carries a responsibility to others. Part of this is to
hold the person accountable for his gift. Again this is
in the parable. How does another person know that we
have taken what he has said with any seriousness if we
do not ask what he has done with his gift? The reason

32
our groups go through the process of naming our gifts
and making explicit our covenant is so that we can grow
in responsibility and move toward authentic freedom.
The person whois seriously interested in investing his
life does not perceive the time of accounting as
something to be anticipated with dread, but as a caring
which supports and encourages him in what he wants
to do.

Gifts that are accepted with

difficulty into awareness can very easily slip out
of consciousness. They need to be remembered and
tended. Confirmation of a gift by the members of a
mission group means a willingness to be obedient to the
person at the point of his gift. This is the basis of the
lines of authority in a group. If a person names his gift
and is willing to be responsible in the area of his gift,
those who confirm him recognize his authority. They
have listened to him and heard his gift as an
articulation of his life.

In our hearing lies our obe-

dience. Just as the person’s hearing of his own gift
brings him under its authority—obedient to what it will
ask of him—so the community’s hearing of that gift
brings its members under obedience. The gift is a gift of
the Holy Spirit. The Spirit calls it forth and the power of
the Spirit becomes visible in its exercising. The Spirit-
filled community is a community where each person is
exercising his gift or gifts on behalf of the whole.

One of the first gifts that we

name in a group is the gift of prior or moderator.

33
No group comes into existence unless there is a person
who has this gift and is willing to exercise it. The prior
has many responsibilities, but perhaps the chief call
upon him is to bean enabler or evoker of gifts. His special
responsibility is to see that every person is either
exercising his gift or grappling with the naming of it.
He is, of course, not alone in this charge any more than
he is alone in his other responsibilities.

The person with the gift of

intercession prays daily for every single person in
the group that each one may discover his gift and
exercise it in freedom. The pastor-prophet of the group
will comfort, encourage, and challenge members of the
group as they try to use their gifts. In asense, the
members of the small groups of the church are the
patrons of gifts—patron being defined as “one chosen,
named, or honored as a special guardian, protector,
supporter, or the like.”

A patron is much more fun-

damental than we have thought to the discovery
and emergence of gifts. Very few people creatively and
happily engaged in their work can look back without
seeing behind the evolving of their gifts the faces of
their patron saints. It is probably just as well that we
have not always named these saints, for if Petru
Dumitriu is right, we would lead them into the
temptation of pride and vanity and they would have to
go instantly into hiding. As it is now, the churches are
endangered because they do not know the necessity of

34
saints for the emergence of gifts and flow of creativity.

Two of the reasons for the

poverty of patrons in the world are our jealousy
and envy. These emotions lie close to us all and arein
evidence when we have an unfolding life. The more full
of promise a life is the more it is apt to evoke
uncomfortable responses in others. If acommunity is to
exist at all, it must learn to deal openly and creatively
with feelings of jealousy and envy.

Many of the communes that

young people today began with such high hopes
have not survived because of rivalry and jealousy
among the members. The Church is not exempt from
having to struggle with these emotions if it wants to be
a genuine community with structures for freedom and
wholeness. My guess is that we have so little real
community in our churches because we have chosen to
keep life on a polite, superficial plane rather than suffer
the agony of coping with the problems that arise when
we commit ourselves to any close covenant relationship.
These problems become compounded when the
community is engaged in the creation of structures that
bring out and develop the gifts of its members. As long
as we keep our discussion of the “calling forth of gifts,”
which is the term we use at The Church of The Saviour,
on a theoretical plane, we experience the concept as an
exciting one, even challenging. When we begin actually
to put it into practice, we encounter some of the
difficulties involved. Certainly high on the list are both
jealousy and envy, which must be raised into full

35
consciousness if we are to move through them to
actualize our own gifts, to become patrons of gifts, and
maybe even patron saints.

Neither the Old nor the New

Testament makes any effort to minimize the prob-
lem for the community. The Genesis story brings it
clearly into focus when it discusses the gifts of the
brothers of the first family: ‘““The Lord received Abel and
his gift with favour; but Cain and his gift he did not
receive. Cain was very angry and his face fell. Then the
Lord said to Cain, ‘Why are youso angry and cast
down”’ ” (Gen. 4:4-6, NEB).

The question seems like an

easy one for Cain to answer. After all, he was a
tiller of the soil and had brought the fruit of his labor as
a gift to the Lord. Is there anyone who would not feel
rejected under these circumstances ? God did not wait
for Cain to answer the question. He went right on to
say, “If you do well, you are accepted; if not, sinisa
demon crouching at the door. It shall be eager for you,
and you will be mastered by it” (Gen. 4:7, NEB).

Wecan only deduce that Cain

was holding back. He had not yet discovered the
gift within his deeper self. The warning was that if he did
not apply himself to the task of finding himself, his
feeling of jealousy would take over and rule him.

A similar theme runs through

many of the stories that we remember from the

36
Old Testament. The brothers Jacob and Esau turn the
envious eye on each other. Joseph, outfitted in color
and style, confident of his future and certain that he is
born to rule, stirs his brothers to jealousy by telling
them dreams that constellate all their fears about his
favored place in the scheme of things. These are stories
of the young, starting out in life under all kinds of
pressure in a modern, rapidly changing society.

We talk about violent change

in our life situation, but what could be more rad-
ical than to be catapulted out of a quiet, secluded garden
where all one’s needs were provided into a world of
unlimited possibility where nothing was known? Cain
and Abel could not have escaped absorbing some of the
anxiety of the parents. Surely as mankind and men grow
older they gain a heart of wisdom. But no. Envy and
jealousy—sin, in other words—are not the disease of the
untried young. The words spoken to Cain outside the
garden come true centuries later in the life of King Saul,
who in his middle years is mastered by his envy of the
young man David. The heart of the story is in a few
passages: “At the home-coming of the army when David
returned from the slaughter of the Philistines, the
women came out from all the cities of Israel to look on,
and the dancers came out to meet King Saul with
tambourines, singing, and dancing. The women as they
made merry sang to one another: ‘Saul made havoc
among thousands but David among tens of thousands.’
Saul was furious, and the words rankled. He said, ‘They
have given David tens of thousands and me only
thousands; what more can they do but make him king?’

37
From that day forward Saul kept a jealous eye on
David” (1Sam. 18:6-9, NEB).

Neither age nor success in

themselves take care of the problems of jealousy
and envy. Because the old and the successful have
kingdoms to think about they are ina position to be
even more threatened by the emerging gifts of others.
The New Testament opens with the same theme that we
find in the opening pages of the Old Testament. This
time it is a king who fears the potential wrapped in the
life of a baby. Thirty-three years later jealousy and envy
succeed in mobilizing the powers and forces that seek
to eliminate all the threatening possibilities of that life.

In that first mission group of

twelve—up until the very end of his ministry with
them—Jesus is helping the small church to deal with
problems of rivalry and jealousy. The same question
that is raised in the halls of government and in the
established church is asked also in the intimate circle,
“Who amongst us will be greatest?” In the Gospel of
John the last recorded conversation of Jesus is one in
which he is trying to focus the attention of Peter on his
own destiny. He has just disclosed to him the manner in
which he, Peter, will die, and then added, “Follow me.”
If ever there was a time for Peter’s attention to be
riveted on his own life, this was it, but the account says:
“Peter looked round, and saw the disciple whom Jesus
loved following—the one who at supper had leaned
back close to him to ask the question, ‘Lord, who is it
that will betray you?’ When he caught sight of him,

38
Peter asked, ‘Lord, what will happen to him?’ Jesus
said, ‘If it should be my will that he wait until Icome,
what is it to you? Follow me’ ” (John 21:20-21, NEB).

At times it is appropriate for

us to compare ourselves with others to help under-
stand our own task. Comparisons also help us to
determine the wrongs in society and gain an
understanding of inequalities that come through
discriminatory practices or the misuse of power. This
creative use of comparison enables us to redress wrongs.
Envy makes another kind of comparison. Envy does not
have one’s self as the subject of attention. It makes the
other person all important—his gifts, successes, and
achievements, what he does and what happens to him.
As long as my energy is spent in watching the life of
another, I do not have it to give to the consideration and
realization of my own potential. The gold that we spend
in one place we cannot spend in another. Also, if lam
threatened by a person’s gifts, Ido not want to see them
emerge into any kind of prominence. I may even go so
far as to put obstacles in my imagined rival’s way and
make things hard for him.

As one person in a mission

group confessed, “I wanted to be the administra-
tor, but at the same time | didn’t want the responsibility
that went with it. Icouldn’t say yes when it was
suggested to me; at the same time 1 knew I was going to
make it hard for anyone else to fill that role.” This
confession was the beginning of his being able to give
attention to the creating of his own life. It also helped

39
the group to deal more honestly with resistances to
leadership. As contemplative prayer has a direct
bearing on the unfolding of our gifts, so has confession.

In his book The Ways of the

Will, Leslie H. Farber has a chapter entitled, “The
Faces of Envy,” which is extremely profitable reading
and concludes with this statement: “It seems to me that
the most pressing concern, for the patient or for
ourselves, in regard to so damaging and disturbing an
affliction as envy, is not so much to ponder when, or
even why, it may originally come into being, as to
discover it now where it is, to outwit its distractions
and disguises, to measure its fear of being called by
name,”’®

Helpful in dealing with our

envy or jealousy is the knowledge that these feelings are
giving us clear warning that we have abandoned
ourselves. If we keep our attention focused on the other
person, we only increase our pain and anxiety. Envyisa
symptom of lack of appreciation of our own uniqueness
and self-worth. Each of us has something to give that no
one else has to give. When we can stay at home with
ourselves and give what we have, we will not be
threatened by what others have to give.

If our own envy keeps us from

the work of uncovering our gifts, so does our fear
of the envy of others. Sometimes, all unconsciously we
live our lives in such a way as not to gain the attention
of others. We dread the possibility that someone else

40
might want what we have so we take our gifts and hide
them away. Wecannot protect ourselves or others from
envy by pretending that we are not the possessors of
gifts. As we find courage to confess our envy, so we must
find courage to confess our gifts. Only the exercising of
our own gifts enables us to become patrons of gifts in
others and to participate in the coming of that new day
when “Bonded and knit together by every constituent
joint, the whole frame grows through the due activity
of each part, and builds itself up in love”
(Eph. 4:16, NEB).

William F. Lynch in his book

Images of Hope’ gives three important steps in
moving beyond envy to freedom. The first is the
recognition of being envious; the second, a deep
acceptance of the feeling; and the third, its mastery
and self-control. The first two steps, without which the
third is never reached, are very difficult because both
envy and jealousy are considered such unacceptable
and inferior feelings that the confession of them seems
impossible. The shame connected with these feelings
is so great that we disguise them from ourselves. If we
do recognize them, it is usually because the intensity of
our pain stabs us awake; then we feel alone and
humiliated, rejecting ourselves, unable to confide in
anyone, unless our sufferings finally drive us to seek
help. Most of us, however, do not suffer this much,
and so we save ourselves from having to confess our
humanness, We handle our feelings by withdrawing
from threatening situations. All that we know is that
we are uneasy in groups. We never ask the question,

41
why? If we do not build walls around ourselves, we
build them around others, or we may be more
aggressive, and undermine in devious ways the
enemies of our peace. We say that we belong toa
gift-evoking community and do not guess why the gifts
are not evoked in ourselves or in others.

The identifying of gifts brings

to the fore another large issue in our lives—the
issue of commitment. Somehow if Iname my gift and it
is confirmed, I cannot “hang loose” in the same way.
I would much rather be committed to God in the
abstract than be committed to him at the point of my
gifts. Becoming specific detracts from the spiritual
purity of my communion with the Lord. As with visions,
so with gifts, Ihave once again the job of uniting in
myself the opposites—heaven and earth.

The level of earth brings into

consideration disagreeable aspects of life such as
accountability. Can you imagine tying up something so
earthy as accountability with something so lofty as
gifts? Jesus came to set men free and hereJamina
community that wants to put me on the hook of
accountability. But it is even worse than I imagine.
When one really becomes practical about gifts, they
spell out responsibility and sacrifice.

If I develop one gift, it means

that other gifts will not be used. Doors will close
on a million lovely possibilities. I will become a painter
or a doctor only if denial becomes a part of my picture of

42
reality. Commitment at the point of my gifts means that
I must give up being a straddler. Somewhere in the deeps
of me I know this. Life will not be the smorgasbord I
have made it, sampling and tasting here and there.
My commitment will give me an identity. When asked
who lam, I will be reminded that the answer lies in the
exercising of my gifts. I will have to answer, “Iama
writer.” “Iama prior.” But Ido not like the sound of
this. Ido not want to be boxed in. “‘As for me,” says the
man of common sense, “I would rather keep the quest
for who lam onamore spiritual plane.”

A friend of mine tells a story

about commitment and identity that is helpful for
me to remember when I find myself resisting the naming
of my gifts. He had attended a variety of churches over
a long period of time. “I could tell you,” he says, “what
was good about them and what they would do well to
change. I did not think too much about my own
commitment. I knew that I was ‘for Jesus,’ but then I
was also for a lot of other good things, like equal job
opportunities and poverty programs. When the Poor
People’s March on Washington took place in 1967, I
was pleased to be a part of the crowd, though I was
careful to avoid carrying any of the banners or signs that
my church had made for I was much too cautious to be
publicly identified with what those signs said. I was
standing off to the side—like a camp follower—when the
crowds began to move toward the Lincoln Memorial.
A contagious, happy feeling of excitement was in the air
and suddenly I was caught up init. We were moving
down toward the memorial eight abreast when I looked

43
up and saw the TV cameras! I looked around quickly
and found an excuse to get out of the path of their lenses.
I was in the march for as long as it didn’t count, but
when I was about to be identified with it, I slipped out.”

When the day was over, he

was no longer feeling good, A day that had begun
with his knowing a sense of aliveness and buoyancy
ended with his feeling “half a person.”” When he
reflected on the march and relived the moments of his
desertion, they became—as Peter’s betrayal had for him
—the turning point that moved him toward
commitment. Whenever a person becomes committed,
he is willing to say who he is and who his friends are, and
even to lay down his life for them. Our commitment
gives us identity and makes us whole. We are saved
from hiding who we are.

The struggle with commit-

ment is not settled once and for all. New oppor-
tunities and different stages in life call on us to use
different gifts and to make different contributions. As
Peter Drucker said in a conversation, “Here lam 58 and
I still don’t know what I’m going to do when I grow up.”

One evidence of an evasion

that is used from time to time is an exaggerated
concern about where other people are in their lives and
about how much they are willing to give. One man took
all of the meeting time of our group week after week
trying to determine how committed everyone else was
to a project that involved the purchase of a building.

14
Wecould not get him off the subject. Then in a moment
of enlightenment he was able to see that he did not know
how he stood himself in relation to the project. He was
determined to find out how responsible everyone else
planned to be, since he was not to be counted on. The
insight was liberating because he was able to switch his
attention from his struggle with the commitments of
others to a struggle with his own, which was more
profitable to him and was fraught with less anxiety.

Whenever our participation

in a group is dependent on another person’s being
there, or on what another person does, then we areina
real sense at that person’s mercy. If my decision is
dependent upon the commitment that someone else
makes, Iamina vulnerable and precarious spot. Iam
unpredictable enough myself without having also to
contend with the unpredictableness of another human
being. If Icome to my own free decision to participate
in bringing a project into being, what others do, or fail
to do, does not weigh as heavily with me. Their actions
can mean failure or success for an undertaking, but they
do not create division in me nor make me the accuser of
others. My life does not fall and rise on the moves that
others make, When I have dealt with what Iam willing
to risk or sacrifice to make something possible, lam
willing to leave the other person to struggle with these
same questions and come in his own time to his decision.

In a class in Christian Com-

munity that my church offers we use role-playing
to illustrate how mission groups are formed. Everyone

45
 knows that at the end of the two-hour session the groups
will dissolve. Because we are not “playing for keeps,”
there is a spontaneity among class members that is not
as evident on other occasions when we talk about
mission.

The class begins with five

4
z

minutes of silence during which time each one is

to think about a mission that he would like to carry out.
qe
I

At the end of that time those who have thought of a

r=

project which excites them issue a call to members of

{}

som

the class. Those who are not ready to sound their own
we

call are asked to listen to the calls of others to see

CALLA Ch SVASS
roe

whether they can respond to any one of them. A class of

sixteen will usually form three or four mission groups.
UOTE YNQ TECtay

And each new group is given the assignment of

identifying the gifts of its members: prior, spiritual
director, shepherd, teacher, etc.; and then of deciding
f

the strategy and disciplines essential for the

a

accomplishment of the mission.

lef Oo
j

In this process we make all

kinds of discoveries about ourselves. Some groups
are so excited about their missions and their gifts that
it is not at all unusual for them to continue to meet and
explore mission. Frequently, people who have been
around for years and have never felt pulled by anything
are attracted by a number of possibilities. When what
we say does not bind us toa long-term commitment and
we are not under pressure to succeed or please others,
we are free to experiment and explore outlandish
possibilities. Eric Hoffer says that “We are more ready

46
to try the untried when what we do is inconsequential.
Hence the remarkable fact that many inventions had
their birth as toys. In the Occident the first machines
were mechanical toys, and such crucial instruments
as the telescope and microscope were first conceived
as play-things.”

As the patron of gifts, the

church must provide an abundance of unthreat-
ening situations in which children from one to one
hundred and one have an opportunity to play and
consider for themselves all manner of ridiculous and
absurd adventures. When we are ready, however, to put
aside our important play and take up the matter of
exercising our gifts day by day in the solid reality of the
world, another important aspect of the subject of gifts
will loom for the creative person—the possibility of
failure. As long as we are repeating ourselves, we havea
certain confidence that what we have done once we can
do again. But when we use our gifts to create something
out of nothing, the element of risk is present. We can
lose our time, our reputation, our money, even the
friends who value us for our achievements.

I have always been impressed

by the large number of plays that open and close
on Broadway in the early months of their performance.
The plays are chosen by people who have been in
theater all their lives, have read hundreds of plays in
preparation for choosing one, and have often produced
countless others. With a few exceptions all the persons
involved in the production of a play—director, manager,

47
actors, actresses, scene designer—are seasoned
artists and the choice of the experts. Thousands of
dollars are invested before the production ever opens,
but no one can know in advance whether the exercising
of all this talent will cohere in a creative act of the
imagination, let alone become a play successful enough
to run an entire season, Yet such highly visible
failures in this and other areas do not help reduce the
demands for achievement that the ordinary man
puts on himself and his friends.

When we do not allow our-

selves the possibility of failure, the Spirit cannot
work in us. We are controlled by perfectionistic
strivings that inhibit the mysterious meshing of
divergent lines within us. Spontaneity dies and the
emergence of the unexpected ceases tobe a possibility.
Weare literally tied and bound. In her book, Centering,
Mary Caroline Richards writes that at one time she
grieved because she could not make a close-fitting lid
for a canister, a teapot, or a casserole. Then a friend,
who was obviously a patron of gifts, sent her an ancient
Korean pot, saying that he thought she would like it
because it looked like something she might have made.
She loved it at once. “Its lid didn’t fit at all!”’ she writes.
“Yet it was a museum piece, so to speak. Why, I mused,
do I require of myself what I do not require of this pot?
Its lid does not fit, but it inspires my spirit when I look
atit and handle it. So I stopped worrying. Now [have
very little trouble making lids that fit.” °

48
 In our culture we are so suc-
cess-oriented that we have little understanding
of the creative act. We want to know in advance that
what we do will measure up and be judged acceptable.
We applaud those who are successfully repeating
themselves, while the innovative person is, at best,
tolerated. Even if the creator should succeed, heis in
difficulty because the new is threatening in that it
differs from the norm.

We cannot exercise our gifts

and at the same time be defenders of the status
quo. Our gifts put us in tension with things as they are.
Often the creator takes us where we do not want to go,
trampling over our stereotypes in an effort to show us
what we have not seen before. This is another reason
why the creative person needs a patron saint who will
not only comfort and protect him from envy, but will be
around to encourage and support when the exercising
of his gifts evokes fear in others.

Ultimately the fear of failure

must be conquered in ourselves, I doubt that one
ever wins this battle without having learned humility.
We must be content to be who we are and not to put
our sights so high that they do not correspond with our
gifts. Also, while we listen soberly to our critics, we will
do well to remember what William Blake told us—that
we are not better for another man’s praise nor worse for
his blame. This is hard for a creator to know, especially
in the early stages of a work when there are no real lines

49
of separation between who he is and what he has made.
Wecannot make something where nothing existed,
whether it be a poem, a house, ora painting, without
breathing life into it so that it may itself breathe—each
is bone of our bone and flesh of our flesh. “Then the
Lord God formed a man from the dust of the ground
and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life. Thus
the man became a living creature” (Gen. 2:7, NEB).
So it is with the continuing act of creation.
“Creativeness in the world is, as it were,
the eighth day of creation.” *

In the beginning we must

quietly hover over and protect the nascent or
germinating thought until it has toughness and
durability. New and emerging ideas that have not been
nurtured in their own seedbed should not be spoken of
at great length, if at all. They will not survive if they
are exposed too early, partly because they are too
vulnerable to resist attack or even questioning, and
partly because words give them a form and launch them
prematurely, taking from the creator the inner necessity
eansiienn 7 :
the parent does a child. We may never respond
indifferently to attacks upon it, but we will not feel
that we ourselves are being attacked. We acquirea
detachment, which enables us to turn to the next idea
that is hovering at the edges of sight waiting to claim us
for the work of creation.

The phrase, “work of crea-

tion,” raises a whole new subject that anyone
seriously concerned with his gifts must consider. As we
named gifts in our community we found that many of us
were under the illusion that if a gift were really ours
and we were engaged in doing what we were intended to
do, no pain would be involved. As for any agony—this
was certainly a sign that we had misheard directions. If
some of us found ourselves laboring to accomplish a
goal, or with large obstacles in our way, we were quite
ready to conclude that we were obviously not called to
work in this area and that we had better withdraw in
favor of someone whose calling it was.

We look at a completed work

—a painting, a piece of writing, a gourmet dinner,
and we think that, like Minerva, it sprang full-grown
from the creator’s head. At the very most, all that was
required of him was a certain number of hours at the
canvas, typewriter, or stove until the work emerged. In
the New York Times Book Review recently was a
cartoon by H. Martin showing a typewriter clicking
away by itself while the author stood at the door calling
to his wife, “Edna, come quick! I’ve got a book that’s
writing itself!” That fantasy about the creations of
others is not at all uncommon. Such an illusion makes

ol
us feel inferior. We want to take our little talent and
bury it away. This attitude also contributes tothe
problems of those who toil to develop their gifts, for the
rest of us make heavy demands on them. When we have
not exercised our own capacity to create, we do not
know what it is to wrestle with the angel, or we believe
that once the blessing is given it lasts forever. When
something needs to be done, we say, “So-and-so is good
at that. Ask him to doit,” not having the vaguest idea
what we ask.

The only purpose innocence

can serve is to keep us from knowing the price of
the “work of creation,” but then neither do we know the
joy. We never find fulfilled in ourselves the words,
“Enter into the joy of the master.” Having no
investment of pain and labor, we have no return of
self-worth and love.

If we are to be creators, we
must begin to think in terms of a whole new work
ethic. The reward will not be in higher wages, another
rung on the ladder, the acclaim of our peers, but in
creative forces which flow within us and accomplish
in our own lives the gracious work of transformation.
Weexercise our own gifts and somewhere along the
way we ourselves become patron saints of gifts.

o2
Exercise I

This week the exercise is to

become more aware of your special talents—the
gifts through which your real self can be expressed, the
gifts that will let you know whatit is you are to do and
become. Our talents are the conveyors of personality.
They hold our reconciling acts. As we become aware of
them and listen to their demand to be exercised, they
enlarge the self and give depth and height to the inner
world. If they are not used, they atrophy, and the self
is diminished.

If you do not know what

gifts are yours to exercise at this stage in your
life, ask for the gift of the Holy Spirit, and practice for
five minutes the withdrawing of your attention from
all outward and inward considerations.’ By will,

o4
concentrate your attention deep within yourself. When
you have reached a place of quiet, begin to think about
your gifts. Pay attention to the images that pass across
your mind. Write them down and ponder their meaning.
Fantasy what you would doif you could do anything
in the world you chose. Watch yourself doing what you
would most love to do and name the talents essential for
that fantasy to become real. Then see whether you can
discover those talents in yourself. What we would most
love to do is astrong indication of what we have the
potential to achieve.

When you have named your

talents or gifts, list the risks that you will have to
take in order to actualize them. What will you have to
give up if you are to develop these gifts? What are the
obstacles that you foresee?

After you have given deep

consideration to your own gifts, identify the gifts
of each person in the group doing these exercises with
you. If you are working alone, identify the gifts of
members of your family or close friends. What do you
feel would help each person to actualize his gift ? Ponder
that question. The answer might lie in considering what
will help or hinder you in the actualization of your
own gifts.

Do
 “For it will be as when a man going ona
journey called his servants and entrusted to
them his property; to one he gave five tal-
ents, to another two, to another one, to each
according to his ability. Then he went away.
He who had received the five talents went at
once and traded with them; and he made
five talents more. So too, he who had the two
talents made two talents more. But he who
had received the one talent went and dug in
the ground and hid his master’s money. Now
after a long time the master of those serv-
ants came and settled accounts with them.
And he who had received the five talents
came forward, bringing five talents more,
saying, ‘Master, you delivered to me five
talents; here I have made five talents more.’
His master said to him, ‘Well done, good and
faithful servant, you have been faithful over
a little, I will set you over much; enter into
the joy of your master.’ And he also who had
the two talents came forward, saying, ‘Mas-
ter, you delivered to me two talents; here I
have made two talents more.’ His master
said to him, ‘Well done, good and faithful
servant; you have been faithful over a little,
I will set you over much; enter into the joy
of your master.’ He also who had received
the one talent came forward, saying, ‘Master,
I knew you to be a hard man, reaping where
you did not sow, and gathering where you
did not winnow; so I was afraid, and I went

D6
and hid your talent in the ground. Here you
have what is yours.’ But his master answered
him, ‘You wicked and slothful servant! You
knew that I reap where I have not sowed,
and gather where I have not winnowed?
Then you ought to have invested my money
with the bankers, and at my coming I should
have received what was my own with inter-
est. So take the talent from him, and give it
to him who has the ten talents. For to every
one who has will more be given, and he will
have abundance; but from him who has not,
even what he has will be taken away. And
cast the worthless servant into the outer
darkness; there men will weep and gnash
their teeth.’ ”
—Matthew 25:14-30 (rsv).

oI ©

The unfulfilled potential, the unlived ex-

perience, haunts consciousness, for deep
down in every man lives the knowledge that
the sin of unfulfillment is a sin against the
Holy Ghost, the spirit of life whose breath is
the Awakener. In Christ’s parable unfulfill-
ment is the sin of the slothful servant who,
receiving the one talent from his master,
wraps it “in a clean white napkin” and
buries it until he is called upon for an ac-
counting. He plays safe and so forfeits that
which was originally given. Similarly in life
one may hoard a chosen virtue, running no

of
risk of losing it through living experience
that may require encountering evil within
oneself or risking its loss in the market
place of life. Too late, perhaps, we discover
that what we have saved through false
caution we have most truly lost. We may
plead unconsciousness, yet, if we look back
with honesty, we know that at a critical mo-
ment, an experience, or a dream, or a voice
came to arouse a consciousness of new life
which we refused. We must accept the un-
pleasant knowledge that in that moment we
chose to remain unconscious, and that “be-
fore the bar of nature and fate unconscious-
ness is never accepted as an excuse; on the
contrary, there are very severe penalties
for it.” (Jung, Answer to Job.)
—Frances G. Wickes, The Inner World of Choice, p. 53.

Ce
a et)

I can sit at my typewriter and imagine a

time when man will be able to engineer
planets in other solar systems into orbits
suitable for the support of human life and
“seed’”’ them to produce an environment sim-
ilar to our own. I can imagine art-works that
feed the spectators, or a buffalo riding on
the back of a giant sea turtle, or transmitting
the genetic code of man to planets in outer
space on electronic wave impulses. This fun-
damental freedom of the imagination places
it beyond the control of even the most fanat-

08
ical police state. Yet the tragedy is that we
constantly destroy man’s imagination by
labeling it “day-dreaming,” “unrealistic,”
“impractical.” In our society, at the age of
five, 90 percent of the population measures
“high creativity.” By the age of seven, the
figure has dropped to 10 percent. And the
percentage of adults with high creativity is
only two percent! Our creativity is destroyed
not through the use of outside force, but
through criticism, innuendo, subtle psycho-
logical means which the “well-trained” child
learns to use upon himself! Most of us are
our own “brain police.”
But if Freud was right that nothing is ever
lost to the unconscious, then the creativity
of early childhood must still be present in all
of us—latent, repressed, crippled—but pres-
ent! No less a man than William Blake, one
of the great creative geniuses of all times,
could say, “You have the same intuition as I,
only you do not trust or cultivate it. You can
see what I do, if you choose.” One of the fun-
damental freedoms of a democracy should
be the right of every individual to his own
creative expressions.
—Finley Eversole, ‘The Politics of Creativity.”’

GNI"

The following spring I was to leave the

preparatory school and enter a university. I
was still undecided, however, as to where

og
and what I was to study. I had grown a thin
mustache, I was a full-grown man, and yet I
was completely helpless and without a goal
in life. Only one thing was certain: the voice
within me, the dream image. I felt the duty
to follow this voice blindly wherever it might
lead me. But it was difficult and each day I
rebelled against it anew. Perhaps I was mad,
as I thought at moments; perhaps I was not
like other men? But I was able to do the
same things the others did; with a little ef-
fort and industry I could read Plato, was
able to solve problems in trigonometry or
follow a chemical analysis. There was only
one thing I could not do: wrest the dark se-
cret goal from myself and keep it before me
as others did who knew exactly what they
wanted to be—professors, lawyers, doctors,
artists, however long this would take them
and whatever difficulties and advantages
this decision would bear in its wake. This I
could not do. Perhaps I would become some-
thing similar, but how was I to know? Per-
haps I would have to continue my search for
years on end and would not become any-
thing, and would not reach a goal. Perhaps
I would reach this goal but it would turn out
to be an evil, dangerous, horrible one?
I wanted only to try to live in accord with
the promptings which came from my true
self. Why was that so very difficult?
—Hermann Hesse, Demian, p. 80.

60
 The Ancients said, ‘Know thyself,’ and the
moderns say, ‘Be yourself.’ It is not the same
thing, but the reeommendations do not con-
flict, and may even be necessary to each
other’s fulfillment. We are familiar with the
advice to go ahead and be ourselves at all
costs, and do what we genuinely want to do.
That sounds good. But then, as a modern
writer has pointed out, it is not always so
easy to know what we do like, or like to do.
That must depend on knowing what we
really are, which again means taking trou-
ble, and a period at any rate of uncertainty.
That is never a comfortable period! It seems
easier and safer to follow the crowd. So we
choose the things that other people appar-
ently find worth having, and try to persuade
ourselves that we have chosen them freely.
But then perhaps we discover that they are
not ‘our things’ at all, and they bring us little
satisfaction. Unless we first know ourselves,
it seems improbable that we can carry out
the rest of the programme. We may agree
that we are not likely to make a success of
trying to be something other than our true
self. But what is this ‘self,’ and how are we
to know it?
—E. Graham Howe and L. Le Mesurier, The Open Way, p. 111.

NL
Go ©

I am a question-asker and a truth-seeker.

I do not have much in the way of status in

61
my life, nor security. I have been on quest,
as it were, from the beginning. For a long
time I thought there was something wrong
with me: no ambition, no interest in tenure,
always on the march, changing every seven
years, from landscape to landscape. Certain
elements were constant: the poetry, the de-
sire for relationship, the sense of voyage.
But lately I have developed also a sense of
destination, or destiny. And a sense that if I
am to be on quest, I must expect to live like
a pilgrim; I must keep to the inner path. I
must be able to be whoever I am.
For example, it seemed strange to me, as
to others, that, having taken my Ph.D. in
English, I should then in the middle of my
life, instead of taking up a college professor-
ship, turn to the art of pottery. During one
period, when people asked me what I did, I
was uncertain what to answer; I guessed I
could say I taught English, wrote poetry, and
made pottery. What was my occupation? I
finally gave up and said “Person.”
—Mary Caroline Richards, Centering in Pottery, Poetry,
and the Person, pp. 13-14.

Ce >)

You ask whether your verses are good.

You ask me. You have asked others before.
You send them to magazines. You compare
them with other poems, and you are dis-
turbed when certain editors reject your ef-

62
forts. Now (since you have allowed me to
advise you) I beg you to give up all that. You
are looking outward, and that above all you
should not do now. Nobody can counsel and
help you, nobody. There is only one single
way. Go into yourself. Search for the reason
that bids you write; find out whether it is
spreading out its roots in the deepest places
of your heart, acknowledge to yourself
whether you would have to die if it were de-
nied you to write. This above all—ask your-
self in the stillest hour of your night: must I
write? Delve into yourself for a deep answer.
And if this should be affirmative, if you may
meet this earnest question with a strong and
simple “J must,” then build your life accord-
ing to this necessity; your life even into its
most indifferent and slightest hour must be
a sign of this urge and a testimony to it.
Then draw near to Nature. Then try, like
some first human being, to say what you see
and experience and love and lose. Do not
write love-poems; avoid at first those forms
that are too facile and commonplace: they
are the most difficult, for it takes a great,
fully matured power to give something of
your own where good and even excellent
traditions come to mind in quantity. There-
fore save yourself from these general themes
and seek those which your own everyday
life offers you; describe your sorrows and
desires, passing thoughts and the belief in

63
some sort of beauty—describe all these with
loving, quiet, humble sincerity, and use, to
express yourself, the things of your environ-
ment, the images from your dreams, and the
objects of your memory. If your daily life
seems poor, do not blame it; blame yourself,
tell yourself that you are not poet enough to
call forth its riches; for to the creator there
is no poverty and no poor indifferent place.
And even if you were in some prison the
walls of which let none of the sounds of the
world come to your senses—would you not
then still have your childhood, that precious,
kingly possession, that treasure-house of
memories? Turn your attention thither. Try
to raise the submerged sensations of that
ample past; your personality will grow more
firm, your solitude will widen and will be-
come a dusky dwelling past which the noise
of others goes by far away.—And if out of
this turning inward, out of this absorption
into your own world verses come, then it will
not occur to you to ask anyone whether they
are good verses. Nor will you try to interest
magazines in your poems: for you will see in
them your fond natural possession, a frag-
ment and a voice of your life. A work of art
is good if it has sprung from necessity. In
this nature of its origin lies the judgment of
it: there is no other. Therefore, my dear sir,
I know no advice for you save this: to go into
yourself and test the deeps in which your

64
life takes rise; at its source you will find the
answer to the question whether you must
create. Accept it, just as it sounds, without
inquiring into it. Perhaps it will turn out
that you are called to be an artist. Then take
that destiny upon yourself and bear it, its
burden and its greatness, without ever ask-
ing what recompense might come from out-
side. For the creator must be a world for
himself and find everything in himself and
in Nature to whom he has attached himself.
But perhaps after this descent into your-
self and into your inner solitude you will
have to give up becoming a poet; (it is
enough, as I have said, to feel that one could
live without writing: then one must not at-
tempt it at all). But even then this inward
searching which I ask of you will not have
been in vain. Your life will in any case find
its own ways thence, and that they may be
good, rich and wide I wish you more than I
can say.
What more shall I say to you? Everything
seems to me to have its just emphasis; and
after all Ido only want to advise you to keep
growing quietly and seriously throughout
your whole development; you cannot disturb
it more rudely than by looking outward and
expecting from outside replies to questions
that only your inmost feeling in your most
hushed hour can perhaps answer.
—Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet, pp. 18-21.

65
 We ask “how?” and we ask to be shown
the means only because we are unwilling to
give ourselves totally to the search for what
is required. What does the Lord require of
you” The prophet Micah has given a very
famous answer to this question. But I should
like to suggest another answer, namely, that
what the Lord requires of you, what life
requires of you, is that you should knock
yourself out your whole life long to find out
what is required of you. And until you do
that, you are not really being honest to God,
or to life. You’re trying to get by with some-
thing less than what is really required, to
come by reality at bargain basement prices.
But reality is never on sale, its price is never
marked down. We are required to sell all
that we have in order to be able to pay for it.
St. Francis de Sales was once approached
by a disciple who said to him, “Sir, you speak
so much about the love of God, but you
never tell us how to achieve it. Won’t you
tell me how one comes to love God?” And
St. Francis replied, “There is only one way
and that is to love Him.” “But you don’t
quite understand my question. What I asked
was, ‘How do you engender this love of
God?’” And St. Francis said, “By loving
Him.” Once again the pupil came back with
the same question, “But what steps do you
take? Just what do you do in order to come
into the possession of this love?” And all St.

66
Francis said was, ‘““You begin by loving and
you go on loving and loving teaches you how
to love. And the more you love, the more you
learn to love.’”’ And in our own day, Martin
Buber has spoken in the same vein, replying
to the question:

‘“‘What are we to do?” “What is to be done?” If

you mean by this question, ‘“What is one to do?”
there is no answer. One is not to do anything. One
cannot help himself. With one, there is nothing to
begin. With one, it is all over. He who contents him-
self with explaining or asking what he is to do, talks
and lives in a vacuum.
But he who poses the question with the earnest-
ness of his soul on his lips and means, “‘What have
I to do?” he is taken by the hand by comrades he
does not know but whom he will soon become famil-
iar with, and they answer, “You shall not withhold
yourself.”

Thus again, the Way will teach you the

Way, and the Way is learning not to with-
hold yourself. The Way is learning to be
with life, in life, one with life, more and
more. And there is nothing else to be
learned. And for this there are no tech-
niques. We must not, therefore, look to a
conference on religion and psychology to re-
lieve us of the task of living our own lives.
There are many who look to psychology or
psychotherapy or to spiritual writing for an-
swers, and this is all right up to a point, but
pushed too far it becomes an escape from

67
oneself, from one’s own reality. If you keep
asking, “How shall I do it?” you are not
meeting your own life situation. Only your
own life can teach you how it is to be lived.
If we turn to psychology or to religion be-
cause we are afraid to face our own life, to
sweat and to toil and to shed tears and to
learn to love in the context of our own exis-
tential situation, then psychology and reli-
gion become obstacles to reality. Since this
is what happens to most people, it can per-
haps be said paradoxically that the greatest
obstacle to religion is religion, and the great-
est obstacle to self-understanding is psychol-
ogy. One must never approach these as forms
of knowledge which will exempt one from
the necessity of actually living and learning
from life itself.
—Bernard Phillips, The Search Will Make You Free, pp. 30-31.

GN JIU" 9

This inner core, even though it is biologi-

cally based and “instinctoid,” is weak in
certain senses rather than strong. It is easily
overcome, suppressed or repressed. It may
even be killed off permanently. Humans no
longer have instincts in the animal sense,
powerful, unmistakable inner voices which
tell them unequivocally what to do, when,
where, how and with whom. All that we have
left are instinct-remnants. And furthermore,
these are weak, subtle and delicate, very eas-

68
ily drowned out by learning, by cultural ex-
pectations, by fear, by disapproval, etc. They
are hard to know, rather than easy. Authen-
tic self-hood can be defined in part as being
able to hear these impulse-voices within one-
self, i.e., to know what one really wants or
doesn’t want, what one is fit for and what
one is not fit for, etc. It appears that there
are wide individual differences in the
strength of these impulse-voices.
—Abraham H. Maslow, Toward a Psychology of Being, p. 191.

oN I"9

You compel many to change their opinion

about you; they hold that very much against
you. You approached them and yet went on
past them: that they will never forgive you.
You go above and beyond them: but the
higher you climb, the smaller you appear to
the eye of envy. And he who flies is hated
most of all.
—Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, p. 89.

IO
Go

Where there is a striving for power and

domination, one can with certainty find the
trait of envy in addition. The gulf between an
individual and his supernaturally high goal
expresses itself in the form of an inferiority
complex. It oppresses him, and acquires such
an influence upon his general behavior and
his attitude toward life that one has the im-

69
pression that he is a long way from his goal.
His own low evaluation of himself, and his
constant dissatisfaction with life are unfail-
ing indicators thereof. He begins to spend his
time in measuring the success of others, in
occupying himself with what others think of
him, or of what others have accomplished.
He is always the victim of a sense of neglect,
and he feels that discrimination has been
exercised against him. Such an individual
may actually have more than others. The
various manifestations of this feeling of be-
ing neglected are indices of an unsatisfied
vanity, of a desire to have more than one’s
neighbor, or indeed, to have everything. En-
vious people of this type do not say that they
wish to have everything because the actual
existence of a social feeling prevents them
from thinking these thoughts. But they act
as if they wanted to have everything.
The feeling of envy which grows up in the
process of this constant measuring of others’
success does not lead to greater possibilities
of achieving happiness. The universality of
the social feeling causes the universal dislike
of envy; yet there are but few who are not
capable of some envy. None of us is entirely
free of it. In the even tenor of life it may
often not be evident, yet when a man suffers,
or feels himself oppressed, or lacks for
money, food, dress, or warmth, when his
hope for the future is darkened, and he sees

70
no way out of his unfortunate situation, then
envy appears.
We human beings stand today in the be-
ginning of our civilization. Although our
ethics and our religion forbid feelings of
envy, we have not yet psychologically ma-
tured enough to do without them. One can
well understand the envy of the impecunious.
Such envy would be incomprehensible only
if someone could prove that, placed in the
same position, he would not be envious. All
that we wish to say concerning this is that
we must reckon with this factor in the con-
temporary situation in the human soul. The
fact is that envy arises in the individual, or
in the group, as soon as one limits their
activity too much. But when envy appears
in those most disagreeable forms which we
cannot ever approve, we do not actually
know any means of obviating such envy and
the frequently associated hate. One thing is
clear to everyone who lives in our society,
and that is that one should not put such
tendencies to the test, nor provoke them; and
that one should have sufficient tact not to
accentuate any envious expressions which
might be expected. Nothing is bettered by
this course, it is true. Yet the very least we
can demand of an individual is this: that he
should not parade any temporary superiority
over his fellows. He may too easily injure
someone thereby.

TL
 The inseparable connection between the
individual and society is indicated in the
origin of this character trait. No one can lift
himself above society, demonstrate his power
over his fellows, without simultaneously
arousing the opposition of others who want
to prevent his success. Envy forces us to in-
stitute all those measures and rules whose Ps t: a
purpose is the establishment of equality in
all human beings. Finally we come rationally a
to a thesis which we have felt intuitively: Pr gf
the law of the equality of all human beings. Thi
wea 24,
law may not be broken without a Wn?
producing opposition and discord.'It is one
of the fundamental laws of Leveniits society.
The manifestations of envy are easily rec-
ognized, sometimes, indeed, in the very look
of an individual. Envious traits which people
have long used in their figures of speech
have a_ physiological concomitant. One
speaks of “green” or “pale” envy, pointing to
the fact that envy influences the circulation
of the blood. The organic expression of envy
is found in the peripheral contraction of the
capillary arteries.
So far as the pedagogic significance of
envy is concerned, we have but one course.
Since we cannot entirely destroy it, we must
make it useful. This can be done by giving it
a channel in which it can be made fruitful,
without causing too great a shock to the
psychic life. This holds good for the indi-

72
vidual, as well as for the crowd. In the case
of the individual we can prescribe an occu-
pation which will elevate his self-esteem; in
the life of nations, we can do nothing else
than to show new ways to the development
of innate, undeveloped powers to those na-
tions which feel themselves neglected.
Anyone who has been envious all his life
is useless for communal life. He will be inter-
ested solely in taking something away from
another, in depriving him in some fashion,
and in disturbing him. Simultaneously he
will have the tendency to fix alibis for the
goals which he has not attained, and blame
others for his failures. He will be a fighter, a
marplot, one who has no great love for good
relationships, who has no part in the busi-
ness of making himself useful to others.
Since he hardly gives himself the trouble to
sympathize with the situation of others, he
has little understanding for human nature.
He will not be moved by the fact that some-
one else suffers because of his actions. Envy
may go so far as to lead a man to feel pleas-
ure in the pain of his neighbor. The Churecnr.
—Alfred Adler, Understanding Human Nature, pp. 178-80.

oJ

Then Herod summoned the wise men se-

cretly and ascertained from them what time
the star appeared; and he sent them to Beth-
lehem, saying, “Go and search diligently for

73
the child, and when you have found him
bring me word, that I too may come and wor-
ship him.’”’ When they had heard the king
they went their way; and lo, the star which
they had seen in the East went before them,
till it came to rest over the place where the
child was. When they saw the star, they re-
joiced exceedingly with great joy; and going
into the house they saw the child with Mary
his mother, and they fell down and wor-
shiped him. Then, opening their treasures,
they offered him gifts, gold and frankincense
and myrrh. And being warned in a dream
not to return to Herod, they departed to
their own country by another way.
—Matthew 2:7-12 (rsv).

GNI"

Thought today of envy—the envy of Herod.

It is a dread thought that another should
take my place—another be considered great-
er than I. Kill off quickly the possibility of
replacement. Secure my own position. Kill
off Russia and China and keep America first.
Kill the slumbering giant in every nation—
better still, kill the slumbering giant in every
person.
As for the exercising of gifts, let everyone
be cautious. The exercising of gifts evokes
envy—makes enemies of those who, if you
stay commonplace, would be your friends.
Above all, do not exercise the gift of being

74
yourself—this is the greatest threat of all.
Kill off the man who would be himself.
Watch out, if you plan to be yourself. Such
disturbance of the peace will not be allowed
in many hearts.
Envy, the killer, strikes not only the head
beneath the star, but the one who follows
the star. Envy does not know that everyone
has a star above his head. Small wonder that
I dread my own envy, but then I also dread
yours. I will protect us both-and keep secret
the fact that Iam the possessor of gifts. And
if you will be so kind, please do the same for
me. Or is there another way—the way of the
star? If in my envy, I will remember to look
up, and search, and ask, will I find the star
that leads to “the place of indescribable joy”
(Matt. 2:10, Phillips), the place where one
kneels down and worships? They say that
from that place one rises up both a shepherd
and a king—a servant and a leader. This is
what the exercising of gifts is all about. It
has to do with going to Bethlehem. But how
many men are wise?
—Elizabeth O’Connor, ‘“‘A Meditation on the Christmas Story.”’

GNI"

Each one of us has some kind of vocation.

We are all called by God to share in His life
and in His Kingdom. Each one of us is called
to a special place in the Kingdom. If we find
that place we will be happy. If we do not find

15
it, we can never be completely happy. For
each one of us, there is only one thing neces-
sary: to fulfill our own destiny, according to
God’s will, to be what God wants us to be.
We must not imagine that we only discover
this destiny by a game of hide-and-seek with
Divine Providence. Our vocation is not a
sphinx’s riddle, which we must solve in one
guess or else perish. Some people find, in the
end, that they have made many wrong
guesses, and that their paradoxical vocation
is to go through life guessing wrong. It takes
them a long time to find out that they are
happier that way.
In any case, our destiny is the work of two
wills, not one. It is not an immutable fate,
forced upon us without any choice of our
own, by a divinity without heart.
Our vocation is not a supernatural lottery
but the interaction of two freedoms, and,
therefore, of two loves. It is hopeless to try
to settle the problem of vocation outside the
context of friendship and of love. We speak
of Providence: that is a philosophical term.
The Bible speaks of our Father in Heaven.
Providence is, consequently, more than an
institution, it is a person. More than a benev-
olent stranger, He is our Father. And even
the term Father is too loose a metaphor to
contain all the depths of the mystery: for He
loves us more than we love ourselves, as if
we were Himself. He loves us moreover with

76
our own wills, with our own decisions. How
can we understand the mystery of our union
with God Who is closer to us than we are to
ourselves? It is His very closeness that
makes it difficult for us to think of Him. He
Who is infinitely above us, infinitely differ-
ent from ourselves, infinitely “other” from
us, nevertheless dwells in our souls, watches
over every movement of our life with as
much love as if we were His own self. His
love is at work bringing good out of all our
mistakes and defeating even our sins.
In planning the course of our lives, we
must remember the importance and the dig-
nity of our own freedom. A man who fears to
settle his future by a good act of his own free
choice does not understand the love of God.
For our freedom is a gift God has given us in
order that He may be able to love us more
perfectly, and be loved by us more perfectly
in return.
—Thomas Merton, No Man Is an Island, pp. 107-8.
GJ ©

The parent who is interested in his child

plays with him, works with him, spends time
with him, leads him into various kinds of
self-activity. In the words of Bietz, this par-
ent paints talking pictures for his child—
verbal pictures, orienting pictures, imagina-
tive pictures, suggestive pictures, experi-
mental pictures, molding and_ shaping
pictures, both of the present and the future.

a
He talks of what the child is, what he can be,
and what he might become: “I can see that
you're going to be able to get along with all
kinds of people.’”’ He mentions possible goals
and directions: “Can you imagine how it
would be to fly an airplane? How would you
like to be able to cure people who are sick?
To make speeches in front of big audiences?”
He is always ready to participate when the
child wants to do a bit of day-dreaming be-
cause he respects the child for whatever he
happens to be and whatever he may become.
He has a sense of the endless possibilities
open to the child, and tries to help him sur-
vey some of these possibilities. That is, he
tries to help the child find himself, choose
himself, create himself.
Unquestionably, psychic existence—a
strong, clear feeling of personal identity—is
the finest gift a parent can make to his child.
It is the definitive parental gift, the gift
which entitles one to call himself a parent.
Helping his child toward personal identifica-
tion is the area of real parental indispensa-
bility: others can wash diapers, teach arith-
metic, and the like. Bringing children into
physical existence is only the beginning of
the basic parental responsibility. The real
job is to bring them into psychic existence
and to help them as far as possible along its
distant reaches.
—Raymond Rogers, Coming into Existence: The Struggle
to Become an Individual, pp. 9-10.

78
 A man, in order to make his place in the
modern world, will push forward every ele-
ment in his character that will help him rise
to his desired goal. In order to do this, he has
to neglect certain other aspects or values in
his life. Let us say there is a bit of an artist,
a poet, or a musician in him. In order to
make his way in business, he pushes this
inclination aside, thinking it just does not
belong with his profession. Yet this gift was
placed there by One other than himself, and
he will not let it be neglected. Either the
man comes back and picks up his interest in
this field, or he dies spiritually and emotion-
ally. The heart must have its nurture as well
as the mind; the soul must be clothed as well
as the body. It is no accident that Winston
Churchill and President Eisenhower painted,
or that President Truman played the piano,
and Albert Schweitzer continued playing the
organ.
—Charles B. Hanna, The Face of the Deep, p. 98.

GJIC"

A gift of any kind is a considerable respon-

sibility. It is a mystery in itself, something
gratuitous and wholly undeserved, some-
thing whose real uses will probably always
be hidden from us. Usually the artist has to
suffer certain deprivations in order to use his
gift with integrity. Art is a virtue of the prac-
tical intellect, and the practice of any virtue

79
demands a certain asceticism and a very
definite leaving-behind of the niggardly part
of the ego. The writer has to judge himself
with a stranger’s eye and a stranger’s sever-
ity. The prophet in him has to see the freak.
No art is sunk in the self, but rather, in art
the self becomes self-forgetful in order to
meet the demands of the thing seen and the
thing being made.

If a writer is any good, what he makes will

have its source in a realm much larger than
that which his conscious mind can encom-
pass and will always be a greater surprise to
him than it can ever be to his reader.
—Flannery O’Connor, Mystery and Manners, pp. 81-82, 83.

GNI"

I heard them talking to one another in

murmurs and whispers. They talked about
illness, money, shabby domestic cares. Their
talk painted the walls of the dismal prison in
which these men had locked themselves up.
And suddenly I had a vision of the face of
destiny.
Old bureaucrat, my comrade, it is not you
who are to blame. No one ever helped you
to escape. You, like a termite, built your
peace by blocking up with cement every
chink and cranny through which the light
might pierce. You rolled yourself up into a
ball in your genteel security, in routine, in

80
the stifling conventions of provincial life,
raising a modest rampart against the winds
and the tides and the stars. You have chosen
not to be perturbed by great problems, hav-
ing trouble enough to forget your own fate
as man. You are not the dweller upon an
errant planet and do not ask yourself ques-
tions to which there are no answers. You are
a petty bourgeois of Toulouse. Nobody
grasped you by the shoulder while there was
still time. Now the clay of which you were
shaped has dried and hardened, and naught
in you will ever awaken the sleeping musi-
cian, the poet, the astronomer that possibly
inhabited you in the beginning.
—Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Wind, Sand and Stars, p. 23.

GNI

The new gullibility of our particular time

is not that of the man who believes too
much, but that of the man who believes too
little—the man who has lost his sense of the
miracle—the man capable of believing that
Creation is in some way an automatic or
commonplace thing, or even that man him-
self, physically and psychically, can be dis-
sected into neat packages susceptible to
complete explanation.
When awe and wonder depart from our
awareness, depression sets in, and after its
blanket has lain smotheringly upon us for a
while, despair may ensue, or the quest for

81
kicks begin. The loss of wonder, of awe, of
the sense of the sublime, is a condition lead-
ing to the death of the soul. There is no more
withering state than that which takes all
things for granted, whether with respect to
human beings or the rest of the natural or-
der. The blasé attitude means spiritual, emo-
tional, intellectual, and creative death.
—Edmund Fuller, Man in Modern Fiction, pp. 163-64.

oJ ©

But each of us has been given his gift, his

due portion of Christ’s bounty. Therefore
Scripture says:
‘He ascended into the heights
with captives in his train;
he gave gifts to men.’
—Ephesians 4:7-8 (NEB).

82
Exercise I]

In the last exercise your at-

tention was focused primarily on the identifica-
tion of your gifts. Now you are to think of a work that
will exercise those gifts. Perhaps it will be something
that you have put off because you thought you lacked
the talent, or because you could not do it as well as
someone else, or because you feared criticism, or
simply because you are a procrastinator. It may be
enrolling in an art class, or having a dinner party,
writing a poem, speaking out at a public meeting,
volunteering your time for a cause in which you
believe.

Choose a piece of work to do

by listening to yourself—the still small voice
within that speaks to you in images, wishes, dreams
and fantasies, your own conversations and the

84
conversations of others. If you make a mistake and
choose the wrong task, you will still learn something
about yourself and can take courage and choose again.
This is a good place to learn to move forward in the
face of fear. If you have no feelings of uncertainty, it is
not likely that you are doing too much adventuring into
the new for the unknown always stirs in us some
anxiety—waves of self-doubt. If we think we are alone
in that response, we can know that we are caught by
another illusion. When the Lord told Moses that he was
to deliver his people out of the hand of the Egyptians,
Moses replied, “Who am I that Ishould go?” He
raised question after question as to whether he was the
one to accomplish the mission. Finally he said, “Oh, my
Lord, Iam not eloquent, either heretofore or since thou
hast spoken to thy servant; but Iam slow of speech and
of tongue” (Exod. 4:10, Rsv). Jeremiah had as difficult
a time with his commissioning, “Ah, Lord God! Behold,
I do not know how to speak, for Iam only a youth”
(Jer. 1:6, RSV).
Move into the silence within
and listen to what God is saying to you. If you
feel that he has overestimated your gifts, follow in the
tradition of Moses and Jeremiah and tell him your
fears. Then listen in quiet for his answer. As you
practice this assignment you may want to picture Jesus
standing there before you. Write in your journal the
conversation that you have with him either as it is
taking place or later as you reflect on it.

If out of your meditation

comes an idea, a thought, a piece of work that

85
you are to do, then carry it around with you, reflect on
it, brood over it, ask what it wants, what it requires of
you. Perhaps you will have the experience of all the
world talking to you about your idea. An item ina
newspaper, a meeting with a friend, a chance remark—
each has the possibility of nourishing the mysterious
spark of life that is growing in you. For everyone the
experience is different, but it is not uncommon for an
idea to expand in unforeseen ways. At first we must
make a strenuous effort to stay with a work which is
new and unformed, but as we give it any attention it
takes shape and grows strong; then it will not let us go
until it has its own place in the world. Here again our
uncertainty enters the picture because we are never
quite sure that we can bring into being the image that
is secreted away in us. If we begin to wonder how men
will respond to our offering, whether what we have to
share will be pleasing to them, we run away from
ourselves and are in immediate trouble. As Brother
Lawrence picked up a piece of straw for the love of God,
so we must take up our work for love of the Holy Spirit
working in our lives.

Remember, also, that the

guides of the saints are punctuated with the
words toil, labor, work, strive. If we are to move toward
any immediate or distant goal, these words will also
describe our days. The writer of Corinthians in listing
the gifts said, “Leaders, exert yourselves to lead.”
He might have said: “Prophets, exert yourselves to
prophesy; teachers, exert yourself to teach...” Asin

86
contemplative prayer, so in the work of co-creation, we
toil and toil and then one day the cloud begins to part,
pieces fit together, ideas and thoughts pour in from
another realm and we know that the work of creation
has been going on at two levels in us. Finally we have
a piece of sculpture, a story, a building that has
something more in it than all the conscious labor of our
days. Of a work like this we say that it is inspired. But,
of course, there are not many inspired pieces in the
world for not many of us are contemplatives.

Always before beginning a

piece of work, as before prayer, ask for the gift of
the Holy Spirit, and then practice the exercise of
recollection so that your attention is gathered in as you
have learned to do. Meditate for a long time on the
work at hand, holding it quietly before you and letting
your spirit merge with it. And then, before beginning
your work, center your attention once again deep in
yourself so that what emerges flows from the core of
your being, and not from some peripheral point on the
circumference of your life where all kinds of distractions
and the opinions of others flow in and take you further
from yourself. When you are centered deep in yourself,
using your trained powers of concentration, give
yourself to the work at hand, exercising the gifts that
will give that work breath.

Though I wrote this having

in mind a creative act of the imagination—mak-
ing something out of nothing—the same meditative,

87
contemplative attitude can be brought to ordinary
tasks, the conferences we attend, the people that
we meet.

If you do not immediately

discover a special project to work on, while you
wait for it to be given to you, practice each day doing
one task with a contemplative attitude.
 After I had written this book I told several
friends. Their response was polite and mild.
Later I was able to tell them the book was
going to be published. Almost to a man they
used the words “I am proud of you.” Proud of
the results but not of the action.
Everyone but me looks back on my behav-
ior in judgement. They can only see my acts
coupled with their results. But Iact now. And
I cannot know the results. I give my actions
their only possible meaning for me, and this
meaning always issues from: “I am respond-
ing to this part of me and not to that part.”
I don’t live in a laboratory: I have no way
of knowing what results my actions will
have. To live my life for results would be to
sentence myself to continuous frustration
and to hang over my head the threat that
death may at any moment make my having
lived a waste. My only sure reward is in my
actions and not from them. The quality of
my reward is in the depth of my response,
the centralness of the part of me I act from.
Because the results are unpredictable, no
effort of mine is doomed to failure. And even
a failure will not take the form I imagine.
The most realistic attitude for me to have
toward future consequences is “it will be
interesting to see what happens.” Excite-
ment, dejection and boredom assume a
knowledge of results that I cannot have.
—Hugh Prather, Notes to Myself.

90
 A woman traveling in India chanced upon
a maker of brass bowls. She picked up one
of intricate design and asked its price. “Two
annas.” She thought of a friend who ran a
“sifte shoppe” in America and of the profit
she could make. “Ask him,” she said to the
interpreter, “how much they will be if I take
fifty like this.” The maker pondered. “Four
annas.” “But,” said the bewildered woman,
“tell him if I take so many they must be less,
not more.” The craftsman answered, “Tell
the lady that if I repeat myself so many
times I must have much money, for I shall
need to go away into solitude so that my
spirit can re-create itself.”
I once found in a junk shop a Ming temple
painting. The spirit of beauty shone through
its battered surface. I took it home and sent
for an Oriental man who restored such treas-
ures. He stood before it a long time. “Yes, I
will fix it. I will take it now.” “What will it
cost?” “I do not know.” “When can you do
it?” “I do not know.” After several months
he brought it back. He had re-created it. I
stood reverently before it, then said, “No
wonder it took so long.” “Not the work,” he
answered. “That was swift; but the vision. I
go into the country. I sit all day under a tree.
It does not appear inside me. I am too far
away. I may go again and again. One day I
see it. Then I work quickly.”
“And the price?” “Fifteen dollars.” “For

91
this!” “A man came yesterday bringing a
terrible untrue object—such dreadful shape,
such angry color—I charged him four hun-
dred dollars, so now I charge you fifteen. It
likes this room.”
—Frances G, Wickes, The Inner World of Choice, pp. 64-65.

oN

And, if I may say it in a very condensed

way, it is precisely the god-like in ourselves
that we are ambivalent about, fascinated by
and fearful of, motivated to and defensive
against. This is one aspect of the basic hu-
man predicament, that we are simultaneous-
ly worms and gods... Every one of our great
creators, our god-like people, has testified to
the element of courage that is needed in the
lonely moment of creation, affirming some-
thing new (contradictory to the old). This is
a kind of daring, a going out in front all
alone, a defiance, a challenge. The moment
of fright is quite understandable but must
nevertheless be overcome if creation is to be
possible. Thus to discover in oneself a great
talent can certainly bring exhilaration but it
also brings a fear of the dangers and respon-
sibilities and duties of being a leader and of
being all alone. Responsibility can be seen as
a heavy burden and evaded as long as possi-
ble. Think of the mixture of feelings, of awe,
humility, even of fright that have been re-

92
ported to us, let us say, by people who have
been elected President.

To make growth and self-actualization

possible, it is necessary to understand that
capacities, organs and organ systems press
to function and express themselves and to be
used and exercised, and that such use is sat-
isfying, and disuse irritating. The muscular
person likes to use his muscles, indeed, has
to use them in order to “feel good” and to
achieve the subjective feeling of harmonious,
successful, uninhibited functioning (sponta-
neity) whichis so important an aspect of good
growth and psychological health. So also for
intelligence, for the uterus, the eyes, the
capacity to love. Capacities clamor to be
used, and cease their clamor only when they
are well used. That is, capacities are also
needs. Not only is it fun to use our capaci-
ties, but it is also necessary for growth. The
unused skill or capacity or organ can become
a disease center or else atrophy or disappear,
thus diminishing the person.

Growth has not only rewards and pleas-

ures but also many intrinsic pains and al-
ways will have. Each step forward is a step
into the unfamiliar and is possibly danger-
ous. It also means giving up something fa-
miliar and good and satisfying. It frequently
means a parting and a separation, even a

93
kind of death prior to rebirth, with conse-
quent nostalgia, fear, loneliness and mourn-
ing. It also often means giving up a simpler
and easier and less effortful life, in exchange
for a more demanding, more responsible,
more difficult life. Growth forward is in spite
of these losses and therefore requires cour-
age, will, choice, and strength in the indi-
vidual, as well as protection, permission and
encouragement from the environment, es-
pecially for the child.
—Abraham H. Maslow, Toward a Psychology of Being,
pp. 61-62, 201, 204.

oN OO

My own exploration of a psychology of

hope will focus principally on the firm and
constant relationship between hope and
wishing. I assume that wishing and wanting
reality in any or all its forms is basic to hope,
and that it is hard to think of anything more
in need of emphasis and analysis among us.
For many are inclined toward apathy, which
is to have no wishes; or toward not knowing
what their real wishes are, which is to be
separated from oneself; or toward throwing
the interior gift of wishing and hoping out
into the atmosphere, which is to let others
do the wishing for us. How many can answer
the questions: what do I wish? what do I
want now? fant onda
These are the three evils we can come up

94
against so far as a life of wishing and hoping
is concerned: either we do not wish at all, or
we have wishes and do not even know what
they are, or we let others do the wishing and
hoping for us. Any or all of these conditions
can move us toward hopelessness, since any
or all of them strike at the heart of our hu-
manity and identity.
—William F, Lynch, Images of Hope, p. 110.

oI ©

The very qualities which make us what

we are constitute our special approach to
God and our potential use for Him. Each
man is created for the fulfillment of a unique
purpose. His foremost task, therefore ‘is the
actualization of his unique, unprecedented
and never-recurring potentialities, and not
the repetition of something that another,
and be it even the greatest, has already
achieved.’ We can revere the service of
others and learn from it, but we cannot imi-
tate it. Neither ought we envy another’s
particularity and place nor attempt to im-
pose our own particular way on him. The
way by which a man can reach God is re-
vealed to him only through the knowledge
of his essential quality and inclination. Man
discovers this essential quality through per-
ceiving his ‘central wish,’ the strongest feel-
ing which stirs his inmost being. In many
cases he knows this central wish only in the

95
 form of the particular passion which seeks
to lead him astray. To preserve and direct
this passion he must divert it from the casual
to the essential, from the relative to the ab-
solute. He must prevent it from rushing at
the objects which lie across his path, yet he
must not turn away from these objects but
establish genuine relationship with them.
‘Man’s task, therefore, is not to extirpate the
evil urge, but to reunite it with the good.’
If man lends his will to the direction of his
passions, he begins the movement of holi-
ness which God completes. In the hallowing
which results, ‘the total man is accepted,
confirmed, and fulfilled. This is the true in-
tegration of man.’
—Maurice S. Friedman, Martin Buber, The Life of Dialogue,
pp. 134-35.

oN LAO

WALLS |
Without consideration, without pity, without shame Bs
they have built big and high walls around me.

And now [sit here despairing.

I think of nothing else: this fate gnaws at my mind;

for I had many things to do outside.

Ah why didn’t I observe them when they were building the
walls?

But I never heard the noise or the sound of the builders.

Imperceptibly they shut me out of the world.
—Constantine P. Cavafy, The Complete Poems of Cavafy.

96
 When you feel very strongly about some-
thing, do you consider it difficult to put it
into action? When you are keen to play
cricket, you play it with your whole being,
don’t you? And do you call it difficult? It is
only when you don’t vitally feel the truth
of something that you say it is difficult to
put it into action. You don’t love it. That
which you love you do with ardour, there
is joy in it, and then what society or what
your parents may say does not matter. But
if you are not deeply convinced, if you do
not feel free and happy in doing what you
think is right, surely your interest in it is
false, unreal; therefore it becomes moun-
tainous and you say it is difficult to put it
into action.
In doing what you love to do there will of
course be difficulties, but that won’t matter
to you, it is part of life. You see, we have
made a philosophy of difficulty, we consider
it a virtue to make effort, to struggle, to
oppose.
I am not talking of proficiency through
effort and struggle, but of the love of doing
something. But don’t battle against society,
don’t tackle dead tradition, unless you have
this love in you, for your struggle will be
meaningless and you will merely create
more mischief. Whereas, if you deeply feel
what is right and can therefore stand alone,
then your action born of love will have ex-

97
traordinary significance, it will have vital-
ity, beauty.

Creativeness is not merely a matter of

painting pictures or writing poems, which
is good to do, but which is very little in it-
self. What is important is to be wholly dis-
contented, for such total discont is the
beginning
of the initiative which becomes
es

crea it matures; and that is the only

as tive
way to find out what is truth, what is God,
because the creative state is God.
So one must have this total discontent—
but with joy. Do you understand? One must
be wholly discontented, not complainingly,
but with joy, with gaiety, with love. Most
people who are discontented are terrible
bores; they are always complaining that
something or other is not right, or wishing
they were in a better position, or wanting
circumstances to be different, because their
discontent is very superficial. And those
who are not discontented at all are already
dead.
If you can be in revolt while you are
young, and as you grow older keep your
discontent alive with the vitality of joy and
great affection, then that flame of discon-
tent will have an extraordinary significance
because it will build, it will create, it will
bring new things into being. For this you
must have the right kind of education,

98
which is not the kind that merely prepares
you to get a job or to climb the ladder of
success, but the education that helps you to
think and gives you space—space, not in the
form of a larger bedroom or a higher roof,
but space for your mind to grow so that it
is not bound by any belief, by any fear.

To be inwardly rich is much more ardu-

ous than to be outwardly rich and famous;
it needs much more care, much closer atten-
tion. If you have a little talent and know
how to exploit it, you become famous; but
inward richness does not come about in that
way. To be inwardly rich the mind has to
understand and put away the things that
are not important, like wanting to be fa-
mous. Inward richness implies standing
alone; but the man who wants to be famous
is afraid to stand alone because he depends
on people’s flattery and good opinion.

Can you and I, who are simple, ordinary

people, live creatively in this world without
the drive of ambition which shows itself in
various ways as the desire for power, posi-
tion? You will find the right answer when
you love what you are doing. If you are an
engineer merely because you must earn a
livelihood, or because your father or society
expects it of you, that is another form of
compulsion; and compulsion in any form

99
creates a contradiction, conflict. Whereas,
if you really love to be an engineer, or a
scientist, or if you can plant a tree, or paint
a picture, or write a poem, not to gain recog-
nition but just because you love to do it,
then you will find that you never compete
with another. I think this is the real key: to
love what you do.
But when you are young it is often very
difficult to know what you love to do, be-
cause you want to do so many things. You
want to be an engineer, a locomotive driver,
an airplane pilot zooming along in the blue
skies; or perhaps you want to be a famous
orator or politician. You may want to be an
artist, a chemist, a poet or a carpenter. You
may want to work with your head, or do
something with your hands. Is any of these
things what you really love to do, or is your
interest in them merely a reaction to social
pressures? How can you find out? And is
not the true purpose of education to help
you to find out, so that as you grow up you
can begin to give your whole mind, heart
and body to that which you really love to
do?
To find out what you love to do demands
a great deal of intelligence; because, if you
are afraid of not being able to earn a liveli-
hood, or of not fitting into this rotten so-
ciety, then you will never find out. But, if
you are not frightened, if you refuse to be

100
pushed into the groove of tradition by your
parents, by your teachers, by the superficial
demands of society, then there is a possi-
bility of discovering what it is you really
love to do. So, to discover, there must be no
fear of not surviving.
But most of us are afraid of not surviving,
we say, “What will happen to me if I don’t
do as my parents say, if I don’t fit into this
society ?” Being frightened, we do as we are
told, and in that there is no love, there is
only contradiction; and this inner contradic-
tion is one of the factors that bring about
destructive ambition.
—J. Krishnamurti, Think on These Things,
pp. 155, 40, 47, 52-53.

GNI"

No matter how much we love a person,

accept him, give him support, have warmth
and affection for him, no matter how much
we help him in so many ways, unless we
can actually call him forth so that he is him-
self exercising the uniqueness God gave
him, then the love is incomplete; he is not
free, he is less than fully human.
We have said that the most effective
thing we can do to call forth the gift of an-
other is to employ our own gift in freedom.
This may seem selfish at first. Aren’t we sup-
posed to help the other person? What does
our own gift have to do with it? We start
there.

101
 The charismatic person is one who, by his
very being, will be God’s instrument in call-
ing forth gifts. The person who is having the
time of his life doing what he is doing has a
way of calling forth the deeps of another.
Such a person is himself Good News. He is
the embodiment of the freedom of the new
humanity. Verbal proclamation of the Good
News becomes believable. The person who
exercises his own gift in freedom can allow
the Holy Spirit to do in others what He
wants to do.
—Gordon Cosby, “The Calling Forth of the Charisma,”
(a sermon).

GNI ©

What is it about us, the public, and what

is it about conformity itself that causes us
all to require it of our neighbors and of our
artists and then, with consummate fickle-
ness, to forget those who fall into line and
eternally celebrate those who do not?
Might not one surmise that there is some
degree of nonconformity in us-all, perhaps
conquered or suppressed in the interest of
our general well-being, but able to be
touched or rekindled or inspired by just the
quality of unorthodoxy which is so deeply
embedded in art?
I doubt that good psychological or socio-
logical opinion would allow such a view. On
the contrary, I think that the most advanced
opinion in these fields holds that we are by

102
our natures doomed to conformity. We
seem to be hemmed in by peer groups,
hedged by tradition, struck dumb by arche-
types; to be other-directed, inner-directed,
outer-directed, over-directed. We are the or-
ganization man. It is not allowed that we
may think for ourselves or be different or
create something better than that which
was before.
Since I do not myself aspire to being a
sociologist, I do not feel particularly com-
mitted to correct sociological behavior. I
don’t care a rap about my peer group. And
as for my tradition, brave though it may be
and nostalgic, still I feel that I am on the
whole well out of it. I cannot believe in
Statistical Man or Reisman Man (Reis-
Man?) and I can even dream of a day when
perhaps both shall be ranged alongside
Piltdown Man in some wonderful museum
of scientific follies.
Nonconformity is not only a desirable
thing, it is a factual thing. One need only
remark that all art is based upon noncon-
formity—a point that I shall undertake to
establish—and that every great historical
change has been based upon nonconformity,
has been bought either with the blood or
with the reputation of nonconformists.
Without nonconformity we would have no
Bill of Rights or Magna Charta, no public ed-
ucation system, no nation upon this conti-

103
nent, no continent, no science at all, no
philosophy, and considerably fewer reli-
gions. All that is pretty obvious.
But it seems to be less obvious somehow
that to create anything at all in any field,
and especially anything of outstanding
worth, requires nonconformity, or a want of
satisfaction with things as they are. The
creative person—the nonconformist—may
be in profound disagreement with the pres-
ent way of things, or he may simply wish to
add his views, to render a personal account
of matters.

Nonconformity is the basic pre-condition

of art, as it is the pre-condition of good
thinking and therefore of growth and great-
ness in a people. The degree of nonconform-
ity present—and tolerated—in a_ society
might be looked upon as a symptom of its
state of health.

The Education of an Artist

My capsule recommendation for a course

of education is as follows:
Attend a university if you possibly can.
There is no content of knowledge that is not
pertinent to the work you will want to do.
But before you attend a university work at
something for a while. Do anything. Get a

104
job in a potato field; or work as a grease-
monkey in an auto repair shop. But if you
do work in a field do not fail to observe the
look and the feel of earth and of all things that
you handle—yes, even potatoes! Or, in the
auto shop, the smell of oil and grease and
burning rubber. Paint of course, but if you
have to lay aside painting for a time, con-
tinue to draw. Listen well to all conversa-
tions and be instructed by them and take all
seriousness seriously. Never look down upon
anything or anyone as not worthy of notice.
In college or out of college, read. And form
opinions! Read Sophocles and Euripides and
Dante and Proust. Read everything that you
can find about art except the reviews. Read
the Bible; read Hume; read Pogo. Read all
kinds of poetry and know many poets and
many artists. Go to an art school, or two, or
three, or take art courses at night if neces-
sary. And paint and paint and draw and
draw. Know all that you can, both curricular
and noncurricular—mathematics and phys-
ics and economics, logic, and particularly
history. Know at least two languages besides
your own, but anyway, know French. Look
at pictures and more pictures. Look at every
kind of visual symbol, every kind of em-
blem; do not spurn sign-boards or furniture
drawings or this style of art or that style of
art. Do not be afraid to like paintings hon-
estly or to dislike them honestly, but if you

105
do dislike them retain an open mind. Do not
dismiss any school of art, not the Pre-
Raphaelites nor the Hudson River School
nor the German Genre painters. Talk and
talk and sit at cafés, and listen to everything,
to Brahms, to Brubeck, to the Italian hour
on the radio. Listen to preachers in small
town churches and in big city churches.
Listen to politicians in New England town
meetings and to rabble-rousers in Alabama.
Even draw them. And remember that you
are trying to learn to think what you want
to think, that you are trying to co-ordinate
mind and hand and eye. Go to all sorts of
museums and galleries and to the studios of
artists. Go to Paris and Madrid and Rome
and Ravenna and Padua. Stand alone in
Sainte Chapelle, in the Sistine Chapel, in the
Church of the Carmine in Florence. Draw
and draw and paint and learn to work in
many media; try lithography and aquatint
and silk-screen. Know all that you can about
art, and by all means have opinions. Never
be afraid to become embroiled in art or life
or politics; never be afraid to learn to draw
or paint better than you already do; and
never be afraid to undertake any kind of art
at all, however exalted to however common,
but do it with distinction.
Anyone may observe that such an art ed-
ucation has no beginning and no end and
that almost any other comparable set of ex-

106
periences might be substituted for those
mentioned, without loss. Such an education
has, however, a certain structure which is
dictated by the special needs of art.
—Ben Shahn, The Shape of Content, pp. 75-77, 87.

GUO

When Two Sing

When a man is singing and cannot lift his
voice, and another comes and sings with
him, another who can lift his voice, the first
will be able to lift his voice too. That is the
secret of the bond between spirits.

Pregnancy
When a man grows aware of a new way
in which to serve God, he should carry it
around with him secretly, and without ut-
tering it, for nine months, as though he were
pregnant with it, and let others know of it
only at the end of that time, as though it
were a birth.
—Martin Buber, Ten Rungs: Hasidic Sayings, pp. 84, 74.

GNI"

Creativeness sometimes needs the protec-

tion of darkness, of being ignored. That is
very obvious in the natural tendency many
artists and writers have not to show their
paintings or writings before they are fin-
ished. Until then they cannot stand even

107
positive reactions. The passionate reactions
of people to a painting, the exclamation,
“Oh, this is wonderful!”’, may, even if meant
in a positive way, entirely destroy the chiaro-
scuro, the mystical hidden weaving of fan-
tasy which the artist needs. Only when: he
has finished his product can he expose it to
the light of consciousness, and to the emo-
tional reactions of others. Thus if you notice
an unconscious fantasy coming up within
you, you would be wise not to interpret it at
once. Do not say that you know what it is
and force it into consciousness. Just let it
live with you, leaving it in the half-dark,
carry it with you and watch where it is going
or what it is driving at. Much later you will
look back and wonder what you were doing
all that time, that you were nursing a
strange fantasy which then led to some un-
expected goal. For instance, if you do some
painting and have the idea that you could
add this and that, then don’t think, “I know
what that means!” If you do, then push the
thought away and just give yourself to it
more and more so that the whole web of
symbols expands in all its ramifications be-
fore you jump at its essential meaning.
—Marie-Louise von Franz, Interpretation of Fairytales,
ch. 6, p. 12.
GNU"

I learned this, at least, by my experiment:

that if one advances confidently in the direc-

108
tion of his dreams, and endeavors to live the
life which he has imagined, he will meet with
a success unexpected in common hours. He
will put some things behind, will pass an in-
visible boundary; new, universal, and more
liberal laws will begin to establish them-
selves around and within him; or the old
laws be expanded, and interpreted in his
favor in a more liberal sense, and he will live
with the license of a higher order of beings.
In proportion as he simplifies his life, the
laws of the universe will appear less com-
plex, and solitude will not be solitude, nor
poverty poverty, nor weakness weakness. If
you have built castles in the air, your work
need not be lost; that is where they should
be. Now put the foundations under them.
—Henry David Thoreau, Walden, p. 215.

GNU"

Good and evil, then, cannot be a pair of

opposites like right and left or above and be-
neath. “Good” is the movement in the direc-
tion of home, “evil” is the aimless whirl of
human potentialities without which nothing
can be achieved and by which, if they take
no direction but remain trapped in them-
selves, everything goes awry.
—Martin Buber, Between Man and Man, p. 78.

GN "©

Each one who knows himself, for example,

as called to a work which he has not done,

109
each one who has not fulfilled a task which
he knows to be his own, each who did not
remain faithful to his vocation which he had
become certain of—each such person knows
what it means to say that “his conscience
smites him.”
—Martin Buber, Eclipse of God, p. 87.

GNI"

Like clouds and wind that bring no rain is

the man who boasts of gifts he never gives.
—Proverbs 25:14 (Nes).

GNA O

But if you have nothing at all to create,

then perhaps you create yourself.
—C. G. Jung, Collected Works, 11:557.

oJ)

We must learn neither to seek nor to take

our own advantage in any matter, but al-
ways to find and procure the advantage of
God. For God does not give gifts, nor did he
ever give one, so that man might keep it and
take satisfaction in it; but all were given—
all he ever gave on earth or in heaven—that
he might give this one more: himself. With
all his giving, he is trying only to prepare us
for the gift that he himself is; and all his
works—all that he ever did on earth or in
heaven—he did for the sake of this one

110
more: to perfect our happiness. Therefore I
say that we must learn to look through
every gift and every event to God and never
be content with the thing itself. There is no
stopping place in this life—no, nor was there
ever one for any man, no matter how far
along his way he’d gone. This above all,
then, be ready at all times for the gifts of
God and always for new ones.
—Meister Eckhart, Meister Eckhart, A Modern Translation,
p. 32.

111
 NOTES
PREFACE

1. Elizabeth O’Connor, Our Many Selves (New York: Harper &

Row, 1971).
Z. , Search for Silence (Waco, Texas: Word Books,
1972).

GIFTS AND CREATIVITY

1. Calvin Tomkins, Eric Hoffer, An American Odyssey (New

York: E. P. Dutton & Co., 1968), pp. 9-10.
2. The formation of mission groups is explained in detail in
Elizabeth O’Connor, Journey Inward, Journey Outward (New
York: Harper & Row, 1968).
3. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Life Together (New York: Harper &
Row, 1954), p. 94.
4, Minister, The Church of The Saviour, Washington, D.C.
o. Leslie H. Farber, The Ways of the Will (New York: Harper
& Row, 1966), p. 130.
6. William F. Lynch, Images of Hope (New York: New Ameri-
can Library, Mentor Books, 1965), p. 189.
7. From Psychology Today, March 1968.
8. Mary Caroline Richards, Centering in Pottery, Poetry, and
the Person (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press,
1964), p. 23.
9. Nicolas Berdyaev, The Divine and the Human (London:
Bles, 1949), ch. 13.

EXERCISE I

1. In the literature of prayer this is called ‘‘recollection’”’ or

being present to one’s deeper self. A full explanation and exercises
in recollection and meditation are given in a companion volume
to this book, Elizabeth O’Connor, Search for Silence (Waco,
Texas: Word Books, 1972).

112
 BIBLIOGRAPHY

Booxs

Adler, Alfred. Understanding Human Nature. Translated by W.

Biran Wolfe. Greenwich, Conn.: Fawcett World, 1968. (Hard-
bound ed., New York: Humanities Press, 1928.)
Berdyaev, Nicolas. The Divine and the Human. London: Bles,
1949.
Bonhoeffer, Dietrich. Life Together. Translated by J. W. Dober-
stein. New York: Harper & Row, 1954.
Buber, Martin. Between Man and Man. Boston: Beacon Press,
1955. New York: Macmillan, 1965.
. Eclipse of God. New York: Harper & Bros., 1952.
———. Ten Rungs: Hasidic Sayings. New York: Schocken Books,
1947.
Cavafy, Constantine P. Complete Poems of Cavafy. New York:
Harcourt, Brace & World, 1961.
Eckhart, Meister. Meister Eckhart, a Modern Translation. Trans-
lated by Raymond B. Blakney. New York: Harper & Row, 1941.
Farber, Leslie H. The Ways of the Will. New York: Harper &
Row, 1966.
Friedman, Maurice S. Martin Buber, The Life of Dialogue. Chi-
cago: University of Chicago Press, 1955.
Fuller, Edmund. Man in Modern Fiction. New York: Random
House, 1949.
Hanna, Charles B. The Face of the Deep. Philadelphia: Westmin-
ster Press, 1967.
Hesse, Hermann. Demian. New York: Harper & Row, 1965.
Howe, E. Graham, and Le Mesurier, L. The Open Way. London:
Vincent Stuart & John M. Watkins, Ltd., 1939.
Jung, Carl G. Collected Works. Edited by G. Adler et al. Trans-
lated by R. F. Hull. 20 vols. 2d ed. Princeton, New Jersey:
Princeton University Press, 1968.
Krishnamurti, Jiddu. Think on These Things. New York: Harper

113
 & Row, 1964.
Lynch, William F. ]mages of Hope. New York: New American
Library, Mentor, 1966.
Maslow, Abraham H. Toward a Psychology of Being. New York:
Van Nostrand-Reinhold, 1962.
Merton, Thomas. No Man Is an Island. New York: Doubleday,
1967.
Nietzsche, Friedrich. Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Translated by
R. J. Hollingdale. Baltimore, Md.: Penguin Books, 1961.
O’Connor, Elizabeth. Journey Inward, Journey Outward. New
York: Harper & Row, 1968.
. Our Many Selves. New York: Harper & Row, 1971.
. Search for Silence. Waco. Tex.: Word Books, 1972.
O’Connor, Flannery. Mystery and Manners. New York: Farrar,
Straus & Giroux, 1957.
Prather, Hugh. Notes to Myself. Lafayette, Cal.: Real People
Press, 1970.
Richards, Mary Caroline. Centering in Pottery, Poetry, and the
Person. Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1964.
Rilke, Rainer Maria. Letters to a Young Poet. Translated by
M. D. Herter Norton. New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1934.
Rogers, Raymond. Coming into Existence: The Struggle to Be-
come an Individual. Cleveland, Ohio: World Publishing Co.,
1967.
Saint-Exupéry, Antoine de. Wind, Sand and Stars. Translated
by Lewis Galantuie. New York: Reynal & Hitchcock, 1939.
Shahn, Ben. The Shape of Content. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard
University Press, 1957. (also in Vintage Books, paperback
edition)
Thoreau, Henry David. Walden and the Famous Essay on Civil
Disobedience. New York: New American Library.
Tomkins, Calvin. Eric Hoffer, An American Odyssey. New York:
E. P. Dutton & Co., 1968.
Von Franz, Marie-Louise. Interpretation of Fairytales. New York:
Spring Publications, 1970.
Wickes, Frances G. The Inner World of Choice. New York: Har-
per & Row, 1963.

114
 BOOKLETS AND PERIODICALS

Eversole, Finley. “The Politics of Creativity.” Journal of the

Creative Society, June 1969.
Hall, Mary Harrington. ‘““A Conversation with Peter F. Drucker.”’
Psychology Today, March 1968.
Phillips, Bernard. The Search Will Make You Free. Friends Con-
ference on Religion and Psychology.

115