We don’t often talk about creativity in our spiritual lives. Or, if we do, I don’t think that we talk about it enough. Usually, when discussing our spiritual lives, we talk about either our tradition or our freedom in the Spirit.

On the one hand, we talk about the things handed down to us: the Sacraments, the liturgy, prayers like the Jesus Prayer or the Lord’s Prayer. We sing music that is around two or three hundred years old. Our church structures were born either during the Reformation or they look back to the way the early Church was formed. These are all good things.

On the other hand, we seek times of silence and contemplation. We practice self-awareness and mindfulness. We seek after the words of the Spirit that come fresh and free from the inner reaches of our hearts. We walk labyrinths (which are themselves ancient forms of contemplation, but which are also reworked in practices that look to develop the inner self). We go on retreats to sit and gaze out upon nature. We remember that intercessions and even thanksgivings are not the only forms of prayer; there is also silence, quiet, stillness, and a gentle watchfulness. These things are also good.

There is a different way to develop our spiritual beings, however, than waiting in patient silence. There’s also a different way to receive tradition than passive receptivity. Although it may sound strange to say, we can also be active in our silence and stillness, and we can be active as we receive our most holy traditions (let alone our general ones!). This is what some of our spiritual teachers mean when they talk or write about doing the work of our spiritual lives. There are times in our lives when we need to join God as active participants in the shaping of our souls. This is a creative act.

There are two ways to think of this. First, think about our work as Christians in the world. When we pray for, say, the poor, we don’t just pray that God helps the poor and sit back and wait for God to get on with it. Actually, it’s the other way around: when we pray for the poor, God comes as the Holy Spirit to lead us into the mission field and work for the poor. We also meet God in our work, already helping and raising up those who we are seeking to care for. In other words, we are active in our prayers.

Second, when we create as artists, we don’t just make our minds go blank and let our inner selves take over. A painter doesn’t just slop colors over a canvas, a musician doesn’t just sing random notes, and a writer doesn’t just heap a bunch of words in the semblance of a paragraph. There are deep, inner, and subconscious parts of ourselves at work, there are also conscious parts that recognize color balance or harmony or that search for just the right word to fit a particular feeling or mood. These are the active parts of our creative lives.

When we sit down to pray, after we’ve remembered people in our intercessions and thanked God for our blessings, we should also creatively work upon our spiritual selves. This work is always in conjunction with the Holy Spirit, and, really, the Spirit is the one to lead this work, direct its flow, and bring it to completion. All the same, we take part in this work by asking God questions about ourselves, finding where we are spiritually hurting or at a loss, and reminding ourselves of important truths. We tend our souls with careful yet firm hands, turning ourselves this way and that to see ourselves as we are but also as God sees us, which is always as beloved and often as hurting beings. Then we figure out, with God, what practices we need to take on or ways of living that we need to change or continue.

It is this inner work, however, that is the most creative and the most similar to the work of creative artists. And, personally, it’s the part of my own prayer life that I find most interesting and most fulfilling. It’s interesting to take my own spirit in my hands and, with God, look at it and ask God questions about it. How close are we, God? What is this feeling of tightness when I pray? How can I deepen my hope in you?

And then, then comes the creative work, and it’s hard to describe. It’s almost as if, when I pray for hope, for instance, I sense God building something inside my heart, but I’m also taking part in that building. I’m a writer, and it feels to me like when I’m coming up with an idea for a story: putting together disparate thoughts or images, weighing whether this detail will work better than that detail, seeing how characters grow and deciding whether I want them to grow that way in relation to other characters or the plot. And when I’m done, I have a story. In prayer, when I’m “done” (we’re not ever really “done” with our spiritual lives), I experience a sense of growth, of stability, of life flowing through me. It is a most magnificent feeling.

As Christians, we don’t do enough of this work – at least as I see it. We do this work sometimes when we’re listening to sermons, and I think when we’re praying in the liturgy (during the Prayers of the People), we are doing this work as we imagine the different people in our lives and the plight of those we don’t know but who are in need of our prayers. That said, as a priest, I often hear people wondering how to pray or how to bring what they experience in the liturgy or the Sacraments or their personal prayer time out into the rest of their lives. I think this kind of “creative” prayer is one important way to do it.