Almost everything we see as admirable and as excellent at one point didn’t exist. For something as simple as a ballpoint pen, László Bíró after many attempts at trying to fix the inky inconveniences of the fountain pen, had the faith to persist - to keep going in his quest for a better alternative. Then one day, he was inspired by a child playing with marbles in a puddle. He was struck by the watery trace the marble left behind, made the mental connection to previous versions he had made, and the ingenuity of modern ballpoint pen was born.
Creativity requires faith. It requires the ability to see the fuller potential of raw material; pen and paper, clay and spinning wheel, isolated notes and melody. The very act of envisioning a creative idea involves pulling of scraps of memory and desire, ache and frustration. It does this by contorting and stretching it into a resolution or aim that doesn’t yet exist.
My favourite quote on faith is one from the bible. The writer says:
“Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.”
But perhaps more fundamentally, faith requires creativity. A visual demonstration of this is the stretching of an elastic band and holding it taut. Faith is a stretching of our imagination and holding it in that position of tension over a period of time. Its integrity is tested, which essentially requires creative thinking to be able to remember previous successes, adapt, give the benefit of the doubt in difficult relationships and take advantage of the benefits of hindsight which are currently unfolding in real time. Faith is inherently imaginative. It takes scraps of memory, mental images from previous encounters and reworks them into a new image. In essence, faith is a stretching of our imaginative resources.
There’s an interrelated relationship between faith and creativity
The same chapter from where this verse is from lists multiple examples of where this creative stretching took place. The writer concludes:
‘These all died in faith, not having received the things promised, but having seen them and greeted them from afar, and having acknowledged that they were strangers and exiles on the earth’.
What does greeting something from afar look like in practice, other than a kind envisioning which is stretched? I imagine these individuals squinting in the distance, tensing their chest and eye muscles in hope of something better to come.
But what blocks faith? Often, people talk about fear - and rightly so. But fear only blocks faith via the route of imagination. Fear is just as imaginative as faith, but it conjures up phantoms and fantasies of annihilation, rather than resolution.
Within this stretching, there is inevitable tension. There’s a pulling and a discomfort within the process. Faith is creativity with tensile strength. It encompasses resilience, malleability and is tested and strengthened over time.
This has become a core value to my creative practice because so many other good qualities are contingent on it. For example, without faith I cannot have the emotional resources to combat setbacks and disillusionment. I need faith to be able to push forward when I feel uncertain about a new partnership, and trust that if things don’t work out, it wasn’t pointless. But my faith isn’t arbitrary. I don’t have faith in faith. Ultimately for me, it’s grounded in a personal God who has proved himself faithful over time.