Reflection
We are living in a time desperate for visionaries both in public life and in our church. Holding on to what is comfortable and traditional might cause us to reject the promise of the not yet. Creativity requires courage. It means taking what is ordinary and presenting it from a different perspective and in a new arrangement, transforming it into a new thing, reshaping the usual. It holds the possibility of progress for those unafraid of rejection. Our call is to be open and to be able to risk creative possibilities. Living in a time that can cause us to lose heart, we need to be creative. We need to let go of the comfortable and step out into the possible.
Prayer
May I have the courage to recognize and to accept God’s inspiration in whatever form it comes.
Action
Examine your attitudes. Do you find yourself mired in a sense of cynicism and lack of hope? Are you stuck in “the way it always is”? Do you regard creative ideas and new approaches with apprehension? How can you develop a healthy and common-sense openness to new ideas?
Suggested Reading
When Jesus had finished these parables, he moved on from there. Coming to his hometown, he began teaching the people in their synagogue, and they were amazed. “Where did this man get this wisdom and these miraculous powers?” they asked. “Isn’t this the carpenter’s son? Isn’t his mother’s name Mary, and aren’t his brothers James, Joseph, Simon and Judas? Aren’t all his sisters with us? Where then did this man get all these things?” And they took offense at him. But Jesus said to them, “Only in his hometown and in his own house is a prophet without honor.”
Matthew 13:52 -58
I am going to do something new. It is already happening. Don’t you recognize it? I will clear a way in the desert. I will make rivers on dry land.
Isaiah 43:19
In order to do good, we need memory, we need courage and we need creativity,
Pope Francis
We do not think ourselves into new ways of living, we live ourselves into new ways of thinking.
Richard Rohr
Creativity is seeing what everyone else has seen and thinking what no one else has thought.
Albert Einstein
Creativity involves breaking out of established patterns in order to look at things in a different way.
Edward de Bono
When all think alike, then no one is thinking.
Walter Lippman
Without the playing with fantasy no creative work has ever yet come to birth. The debt we owe to the play of imagination is incalculable.
Carl Jung
The uncreative mind can spot wrong answers, but it takes a very creative mind to spot wrong questions.
Anthony Jay
All human development, no matter what form it takes, must be outside the rules; otherwise we would never have anything new.
Charles Kettering
Almost always, the creative dedicated minority has made the world better.
Martin Luther King, Jr.