How Creative Can You Be?

Creativity is not coming up with something new from scratch. Creativity is scratching something new out of the old.

Only God creates ex nihilo (out of nothing). The rest of us create ex complexio (out of complex somethings). Oh, to be Adam and Eve, knowing that everything you said was being said for the first time and you weren't quoting anybody! Only our prime parents were blessed with original utterances. Everything said since then is a quote.

Leonard Bernstein had a favorite story about Beethoven's creativity. The ending of the first movement of his Fifth Symphony was giving him trouble. He had a long ending, but he decided it was too long. He had a much shorter ending, but he decided it was too short. The mark of his creative genius was that he did not compromise between the long and the short endings; he opted for something even shorter. Creativity is in the unlikely, the unexpected, the startling choice.

Much of Jesus' teaching was not original. Want to talk about the originality of the Lord's Prayer? You can find almost exact parallels to each of its six petitions in some Jewish source. The originality of the Lord's Prayer is not in Jesus' choice of words but in the order, brevity and the synthesis of its design. The originality of Jesus was in the way the teachings of his ancestors lived and evolved in him. Jesus lived these teachings and reworked them for the first-century world.

A sign before a long bridge in Florida reads: "It is against the law to run out of gas on the bridge." To run out of creativity and spiritual energy should be outlawed.

from "Learn to Dance the Soul Salsa" by Leonard Sweet,PhD