Creative Recovery—Neo’s Transformation
Listen: “Wake Up” (The Matrix) by Rage Against the Machine
Most of my life I did not view myself as a creative artist. I thought creativity was the domain of musicians, painters, poets, playwrights, novelists, fashion designers, and film directors. Doctors, pastors, teachers, and business leaders belonged to a more mundane, but important ilk. I was wrong. Creativity is rooted in spirituality. Everybody is spiritual. Everybody is creative.
I read a couple of books a few years ago that began to reshape my thinking around creativity. In 2012, Austin Kleon published a book called Steal Like an Artist: Ten Things Nobody Told You About Being Creative. I can’t remember how I stumbled across this book, but it not only helped me realized that I was creative; it helped me realize that I had been incredibly creative my whole life. The other book was Creativity, Inc. by Ed Catmull. Catmull was the founder of Pixar, and he unpacked his creative journey and his approach to building creative teams. I was already working with what I called a “creative team” to help me mash up Bible, pop culture, movies, personal stories, and music with my messages. It’s still puzzling to me why it took so long for me to realize that what flowed out of me was intensely creative.
By 2012 when I read Kleon’s book, I had earned a Bachelor of Arts degree, a Master of Divinity degree, and a Doctor of Ministry degree. I had been an avid outdoor enthusiast, a rock climber, a competitive cyclist, a fly fisherman, a backpacker, and a mountain biker. I had started a non-traditional, casual, rock and roll church with five people meeting in an apartment which had grown to several thousand people meeting in facilities. I had delivered thousands of messages as a public speaker remixing the Bible, theology, and business acumen with movie film clips, personal stories, and modern music. I had created small group Bible study series which were being used by thousands of people. I had built a team of over two thousand staff and volunteers (mostly volunteers) who were serving tens of thousands of people each year.
All of that, and I didn’t see myself as a creative type until I read Kleon’s book. So crazy. It’s like the veil lifted. I realized my love for creativity, adventure, and spirituality were all tied together. Recently, another veil lifted. I have grown to love recovery, and I have learned that recovery is also intricately connected to these practices—recovery, creativity, spirituality and adventure—they go together.
The connection of these concepts crystalized for me through the help of another book, The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron. Cameron’s book helped me realize that I am in a “creative recovery.” As many of you know, much of my life came crashing down three years ago (2018-2019). The losses in my life were so enormous that I felt like a piece of ant excrement buried under an anthill—“the horror, the horror” as Colonel Kurtz uttered at the end of Apocalypse Now. My most private, personal failures and sins had been broadcast by news sources in Kansas City, America, and religious news feeds around the world. Over the next couple of years, I felt utterly abandoned. Thank God for my immediate family, my true friends, and my new friends I found in recovery.
In September of 2019, I decided I needed to get my shit together, so I attended a twelve-step recovery group. I was miserable and buried in shame and darkness. For new readers, my collapse revolved around a thirty-year insomnia problem, a puzzling marriage problem, a 2-3 year prescription Xanax combined with alcohol problem (2017-2018), and a ministry burnout problem (2016-2018). All of which conspired to influence me to make some poor decisions which led to my enormous losses.
Recovery, I am learning, is a spiritual and creative journey. Even if you are not in need of recovery from drugs or alcohol, there is a good chance you will need to recover from other forms of substance or behavioral distress or addiction in your life—things like unhealthy relationships, career failure, divorce, self-pity, parental crises, narcissism, OCD behaviors, eating disorders, broken dreams, and shattered faith. All recoveries can be seen as “creative recoveries.” I have grown to love the recovery community. I love the foundational, spiritual principles of rigorous honesty, humility, vulnerability, responsibility, and community. Recovery is a journey in what I call “Naked Spirituality” (https://spiritualityadventures.com/blog/naked-spirituality).It is also a journey in “Creative Recovery.”
Julia Cameron first published The Artist’s Way: A Spiritual Path to Higher Creativity in 1992. I am a little chagrined to have only recently stumbled upon Julia’s book (thanks to the recommendation of Dr. Kathleen Keenan). Come to find out, Cameron has been most influential in helping unblock creativity in the lives of millions for the better part of three decades. She has influenced people like Martin Scorsese, Anne Lamott, Alicia Keyes, Pete Townsend, and Russell Brand. Elizabeth Gilbert said, “Without The Artist’s Way, there would have been no Eat, Pray, Love.” The amazing thing to me about Cameron’s book is that she has taken spiritual principles from the twelve step recovery world and applied them to blocked, creative artists. Julia is passionate about the idea that everyone is creative, and that nurturing your inner, creative artist is a spiritual path of recovery to finding and expressing your true creative self.
In this new season of life, Cameron’s book has helped me realize that I can take all the pain, all the sorrow, all the shame, and all the humiliation and combine that with my previous history of education, outdoor adventure, community building, entrepreneurship, public speaking, and leadership and emerge in a new, fresh “creative recovery.” This gives me hope.
I am a huge fan of The Matrix Trilogy (and I haven’t even seen the new Matrix Resurrections). Over the course of my recovery, I have had a scene in my mind from the original movie in which Neo is transformed into his true self—The One—as Morpheus liked to say. The original 1999 The Matrix has many pause-worthy moments, but the best one in my mind is when Neo finally becomes “The One” towards the end of the movie. In the final act, Neo (played by Keanu Reeves) stops bullets midair, kicks Agent Smith down the hallway, and then explodes Agent Smith from the inside out. Prior to this moment, Neo is nearly dead after he is shot by the Agents. After Trinity kisses him, Neo revives from death, the computers on the Nebuchadnezzar go haywire, and Morpheus declares, “He is the one.” In his earlier battles with the Agents, Neo was beaten many times and barely escaped with his life. Now, in the moment of his worst defeat, Neo seems to absorb and transform all of his previous pain, doubt, and defeat and find his true self.
Through the last three humiliating and challenging years of my life, I am still committed:
To walking the high road by taking care of my side of the street, making amends, and forgiving myself and others;
To learning and growing spiritually and creatively;
To remixing and mashing up all that I have become;
To sharing, caring, serving, and pastoring others;
To absorbing all the pain and lessons through which I have gone.
Hopefully, I will emerge, like Neo, transformed as my true, creative self. The scene in The Matrix reminds me of the cross upon which Jesus died. The cross was not always seen as a symbol of hope by many. The cross was the cruelest form of torture and shame invented by the ancient Near Eastern world. No one would have cherished the cross or would have wanted jewelry and tattoos of it. Yet, Jesus’ sacrificial love transformed the cross into a symbol of hope. Pain, suffering, defeat, cruelty, injustice, sin, and shame are transformed into forgiveness, new creation, creativity, recovery, and spiritual hope.
There are still times when I feel like I want to give up, like I want to give in. This is my crime. This is my sin. But I still believe (a nod to The Call and Michael Been).
Shalom
©realfredherron, 2022
