It’s when we create art — and create a better world — that we’re most like our Creator

By David McElroy · July 10, 2011

I took this picture just after sunset Saturday night near where I live in a suburb of Birmingham, Ala. The sky around me was so perfect — and the trees providing the frame so perfect — that I didn’t feel I was responsible for the art I was making. I felt more as though it was being handed to me on a silver platter. All I had to do was click the virtual shutter on my iPhone. When that happens, it feels like magic.

Most people who spend their lives concentrating on politics and power and governing philosophy don’t seem to spend much time thinking about the meaning of life. It’s all about rights and control and fighting someone else for supremacy. When I was much younger, I could understand that coolly rational way of looking at political discussions, but I’m way past that. For me to think it matters anymore, I have to have a reason why it matters insofar as living life. Experiencing such stunning beauty as I photographed last night — and playing a humble role in making it into art — helps make it all make sense to me. Please indulge me while I try to explain what I mean.

I have no desire for power over other people, so politics for that reason alone doesn’t interest me. I have trouble getting excited about tremendous wealth just to live a life of decadent luxury, so the thought of that bores me. I’m ultimately interested in power and money only if they can serve something I see as a higher purpose. My love of life and my love of beauty give me that purpose, because they give me an instinctive understanding of why I was placed here by “the all-wise Author of nature,” to use Adam Smith’s poetic title for God.

I love this life and all its aspects. Even with its hurts and low points and frustrations, life really is good. While we’re on this Earth, we experience most of that through our senses — sight, hearing, smell, touch and taste. It’s in these ways that we experience what the world has to offer us. For an atheist, that’s all there’s ever going to be, in his view, so it stops there. For those of us who are Christians (or those who are expecting an afterlife through whatever they believe in), that next life looms as terribly important. But if we don’t see this life — and this world — as important, we’re questioning why our Creator put us here.

For me, I feel closest to God when I’m creating something of beauty and meaning — in the world and in the lives of other people. God has many roles in the Bible, but the first and foremost was of Creator — creating the world around us and all the life that live in it, including me. I believe human beings are most like God when we create in our own small ways, but not just art in the grandiose sense of the word. We’re emulating God’s creative power when we invent things or build cities or lead people to a better life. In short, we are most like God when we take the raw material He has given us and create a better world. When we create a better world for ourselves and others to live in, we are creating a kind of art and beauty that’s impossible to put a value on.

As I thought tonight about the meaning of life and of creation, I thought about the most intense experiences I’ve had with my senses. I’m not going to take the time to detail all of mine — partly because they wouldn’t all be interesting to you and partly because they’re too intensely personal — but I found that it was quite clear with each one of them which experience in my life most represented that sense to me. I realized quickly that they were very intensely emotional experiences.

For sight, I identify the incredible natural beauty around me — such as in the picture I took Saturday night — as my most intense experiences. Sometimes it’s been sky or trees or flowers. Other times, it’s animals or even people. Yet other times, objects made by humans were a part of those artistic combinations. In those cases, even those seemed natural and perfect and heroic in ways that I can’t explain. For sound, I was torn between certain music and the sound of a particular woman’s voice. Somehow, they meshed together for me. For smell and touch, the same woman played the most emotional role. For taste, I surprised myself by realizing that the most intense memories were from decades ago, not from the foods that I treasure and enjoy today.

There are dozens of things I could have mentioned in each category. Your list would be different from mine. There aren’t any “right” answers. But there are certain conditions which need to be met for us to experience those things. Creating those conditions in the world is the only reason I’m interested in political ideas or governance at all.

I’m a creator. I’m an artist. Sometimes, I’m not sure what my medium is. Sometimes I’m not sure I’m any good at the art I try to make. But it’s only through trying to create — making things and failing and then trying again and experiencing the triumph and the humility of success — that I live out the life God has given me in a way that seems worthy of Him.

We inherited a very fallen world. In Christian terms, it’s a sinful world. In more generic terms that almost everyone can agree with at one time or another, it’s a world where evil plays a tremendous role. It’s a world where darkness is constantly pushing against the light to roll back the gains that humans have made as we’ve inched our way out of savagery. It’s by trying to make a better world — for ourselves and others — that we are part of the light and that we push the darkness back.

It’s always going to be an individual choice how people want to live their lives, and that’s as it should be. Some people will choose to live in ugliness — whether it’s literal, physical ugliness or inner ugliness that reflects the values of darkness — and others will choose something closer to the beauty and light that the world are sometimes capable of being. What I believe is that people have a tougher time making a positive choice when they live in an ugly world and where they don’t believe beautiful and good choices even exist.

I can’t change the whole world. I can’t make the entire world beautiful and clean and free. But maybe I can help show that it’s possible to build pockets where that’s true. And if enough people see that it’s possible, maybe they’ll choose to build their own beautiful parts of the world. Until they believe it’s possible, though, they’re going to keep living in the ugly and coercive world that they’re a part of.

For me, creating free cities and free enclaves is a step on the way toward creating a more beautiful world that brings us just a little closer to what God intended. God certainly doesn’t need us to do it for Him. But as we use the raw material and beauty and freedom He naturally gave us to create something better, we’re making ourselves better people and we’re learning some of the things He put us here to learn.

The modern evangelical church has seen art in a utilitarian way for too long. It’s time that Christians accepted their natural role as creators of art for its own sake — for the sake of emulating God. Part of that creative impulse needs to be to create beautiful and free places in which people can live better lives. Even though Franky Schaeffer didn’t have the notion of building free cities in mind when he wrote his book, I think what he says about art is also true of creating a better world. For Christians, I highly recommend Schaeffer’s 1981 book, “Addicted to Mediocrity: Contemporary Christians and the Arts.” It’s an indictment of how the church has abandoned the historic role it once had in creating and fostering creativity across a range of endeavors.

For me, there’s an obvious and intuitive leap that goes from the beauty I see in the picture I took Saturday night and what I want to create in the world around me. Explaining that — and the theological implications for me as a Christian — are much more complicated. If you’re not a Christian, you certainly won’t share my particular reasons for wanting to create a better world (or better pieces of the world), but that doesn’t mean that love of beauty and love of life can’t be inspirations for you, too.

Whether you share my inspiration or not, most people can agree that creating great art is something we should strive for. Creating a free and beautiful world — or even pockets of it to prove it can be done — is worth giving a lifetime to achieving.

You might find creativity or artistic impulses in yourself on a shelf of underused things in the metaphorical closet of your brain. You really need to pull it off of the shelf and see what it feels like to use it again — or even for the first time. It can change your life and bring you closer to the truth about God, however you understand Him.

If I ever forget why I want to create a better world, I look at a picture such as last night’s — or think about the touch or smell or sound of someone important — and it all makes sense to me. That sort of perfect beauty inspires me to want to create more beauty. It’s not easy, but it’s worth struggling to achieve.

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After I wrote last night about being happy, I thought of an old song that mirrored what I was feeling. After listening to the entire album, I found it remarkable how well the emotions of that music match my own heart at this point in my life. Bob Bennett’s “Matters of the Heart” came out while I was in college. Even after all these years, it holds up really well, and you can listen to the entire album on YouTube. The specific song which matched my feelings last night was “Madness Dancing,” but I still find every song on the album to be strong with the exception of the eighth and ninth. (The song about his parents, called “1951,” is especially poignant.) In fact, the opening and closing songs paint a picture of my heart at its best now in these lines: “A light shining in this heart of darkness, A new beginning and a miracle, Day by day the integration of the concrete and the spiritual.” It’s old music that you’ve probably never heard, but it means a lot to me.

Narcissists tend to turn their children into narcissists — and since a narcissist doesn’t realize he or she is a narcissist, there’s no bad intent. How does this happen? I watched a YouTube video over the weekend from an Australian psychologist who does a nice job of summarizing how it works. None of this is new to me, but I thought it was useful for those who haven’t spent years digging through books and articles about it. The same psychologist has an excellent summary of something which confuses a lot of people about narcissism. You’ve all seen examples of the loud, boisterous and overbearing narcissist, but what about the ones who are more introverted and vulnerable? This type is called a covert narcissist (or a vulnerable narcissist), and this is what my father was. In the first video, I strongly see myself in the ways my father treated me and in the second video, I see what my father was almost successful in making me become.

It’s National Dog Day in the U.S. and Lucy is here to remind you to go express love and appreciation to your favorite canine. Not only does your doggie friend give you love and affection, but he or she also protects your home from intruders — such as birds, squirrels, mail carriers and other undesirables who deserve to be barked at vigorously. Where would we be without that? And if you think this service is actually unnecessary, ask yourself how long it’s been since your home was the victim of a vicious squirrel attack. See? The doggie defense works. Keep barking at ’em, Lucy.

I’ve spent a tremendous amount of time over the last couple of years thinking and writing about love and connection. I’ve come to understand that this lack of love and connection is at the root of a lot of human tragedy and unhappiness, including addictions and depression. As I talked with others and researched the psychology behind the issues, I ran into the surprising fact that researchers are increasingly using psychedelic drugs to allow volunteers to have experiences which are giving them a sense of connection which they’ve lost — something that allows them to feel connected to love and God in a way they didn’t understand before — which is having dramatic effects in combating things such as depression and addictions. In this 15-minute TED talk — without an audience in the age of COVID-19 — Johns Hopkins researcher Mary Cosimano shares her experiences with guided psilocybin sessions being used to treat addiction, depression and end-of-life issues. One of her key observations is the importance of love and connection. She said that it seems love is literally part of the answer. In her role as director of guide/facilitator services for the program, Cosimano is responsible for training and supervising session facilitators.

It’s something I wrote four and a half years ago — in the desperation of loneliness — and it’s become my most popular article. It’s not my best writing. It’s raw and unpolished. But it seems as though a lot of people can identify with it. It’s called Missing someone creates intense physical sensations in my heart. Just to give you an idea how many people still read it, I had 11,586 people visit the page last month — from 2,907 cities and towns around the world. London sent the most readers for it, followed by New York, Westminster, Los Angeles, Chicago, Kuala Lumpur, Melbourne, Sydney, Toronto and almost 3,000 more. I’ve noticed something interesting. It always gets the most hits from an area of the world in the late hours, right after midnight, and that breaks my heart — because I understand why. All these people are so lonely and are missing someone so much that they turn to a search engine looking for answers, so they stumble upon this piece. I wrote this late at night on the day after Christmas because my heart was breaking. I needed to express how much I missed someone, and a lot of people seem to identify with it. If you’re one of those people, I have no way of knowing who you are, but I empathize with you. I know why you hurt. I wish I could do more to help. I hurt with you, because after all this time, I still feel the same way.

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