I am taking a slanted approach to Ayn Rand. I’ve been reading Dorothy Sayers, Letters to a Diminished Church, and she has some amazing insights. I've rewritten these in (partly) my own words.
1. Work is the natural function of man.
2. Work is not what we do to live, but the thing one lives to do.
3. Rest prepares us for work. Work should not be seen as something to rush through for rest or leisure. It is not rest and leisure that we live for. We live for our work.
4. Work should never harm the body, mind, or soul.
5. All good work is godly work.
6. Our first duty is to serve our work.
7. To aim directly at serving a person or a community is to falsify the work.
Why does serving a person or community falsify our work? Because we begin to bend the work into something that pleases man. Remember the quote attributed to Norman Vincent Peale? "Shoot for the moon. Even if you miss, you'll land among the stars."
We aim to please God by focusing on the work and the insights and abilities we have to accomplish the work. By doing so, we will serve our fellow man, but we cannot focus on our fellow man without diluting our work.
Another reason, I believe, is that when we focus on pleasing man, it usually causes us to expect compensation, even if it is compensation in the form of praise. We do not work for man but do the work God calls us to do. Our work can then be freely given to others.
Note that this does not mean we should not be compensated for our work, but the compensation is not our goal. Does this sound a lot like Ayn Rand? I hope to write further posts about Rand’s underlying premise that she never fully articulates, at least, to my knowledge.
But, first, Sayers has more to say about art. She goes into more detail in The Mind of the Maker, but we’ll save that for another time. She says that:
8. A work of art is something new and more real than what it depicts.
9. The Father is known only to Himself by beholding His image in His Son.
10. An artist “images” forth something. That "something" is unimaginable until it is known through the created image.
11. The Son is the express image of the Father, not a copy, or imitation, or representation.
12. Thus the unimaginable (the Father) and the image (the Son) are one and the same.
13. The written word is the expression of the writer's experience, as yet unknown to the writer until it is written.
14. The true writer (probably a poet is the truest writer) is a person who feels the impact of external events and also experiences them fully.
15. By putting experiences into words, we bring something into being--that is, the recognition of something more.
These are my thoughts on the three paths to learning that I believe dovetail with some of Sayers’ thoughts.
1. The gathering of data is intelligence. The data is beyond us--out there somewhere--and we gather it in our minds.
2. The data that we act upon is our experience. Our experiences are felt with our bodies--through our senses.
3. Our innocence is taking the data and our experiences and integrating them into a whole. We can call this consciousness if we think of consciousness as something within us. This is recognizing something within our souls.
Here's an example from a woman's POV. A woman meets a man. He is single, good-looking, and intelligent. This is "intelligence" she gathers about the man. Then, she goes on a date with him. Dating the man gives her experiences with him. After a few dates, she recognizes from the data and experiences she has had with the man that she has fallen in love. This is the consciousness of love she feels in her soul.
An interesting thing about learning through consciousness is that when we recognize something within our soul, it's as if we have always known it. However, it is only when we give voice to what we know (the intelligence) and what we have felt (the experiences) that recognition dawns within our souls.
This is why some people do not recognize love until they lose the person--"I didn't know I loved her until she moved away." The reason is that the person never voiced what he knew and felt in a meaningful way.
To work in a creative Way is to work with mind, body, and soul. Or, we can say, to live in a creative Way is to live with mind, body, and soul.
When we view a work of art, created with mind, body, and soul, we recognize something more--we feel something in our souls. Some have never been in touch with their souls, or have been told to ignore their souls, or have been laughed at because they have felt with their souls.
Learning only through the mind is called being "rational" and this has been man’s emphasis for the past couple of centuries, beginning with the Age of Enlightenment in the 1700s and our modern era with its emphasis on science.
While reason is important, being solely rational is not enough for the Christian or for any man. To live fully, without despair, we must be in touch with all three parts--the mind, body, and soul.
We see mind, body, and soul in the Trinity of God.
The Father gathered the intelligence--the data, the plans. The creation was as yet unknowable and unseen--unimaginable. This is the Mind of God.
The Comforter brought forth the creation, moving upon the face of the deep--the experiencing of the intelligence from the Mind. The creation could now be seen. This is the Body of God (note that the Bible tells us God is Spirit, not a body as we think of body, but the Way God executes His plans.).
The Son integrated the intelligence and the experience into consciousness. The creation could now be known. It was now "imaged." This is the Soul of God.
Let's think of the creation of a book to see how this works. The author plans the book, gathers information for the book, thinks about the book. This is from the mind of the author. At this point, the book is unimaginable, even to the author. The unimaginable is imagined to a certain extent and planned or else it never becomes reality.
Then the author types the book. Let's pretend the author can type the book without reading it. This is the body of the author bringing something into being. So, the book is now physical. It can be seen but, at this point, just "something" that is not known. This is the imagined becoming real, becoming substance.
Then the author reads the book. Now, the book is "imaged." It is now known by the soul of the author. This is analogous to Jesus speaking the world into existence. This is the book becoming the image of the author’s imaginings.
The creation was planned by the Father, “birthed” by the Comforter, and spoken into being by the Son. Just as the author does all three, some overlapping the other (we see how difficult it is to distance the typing of the book from the reading of the book), so God in Trinity overlaps the imagining with the unimaginable and conforming it to the image. The planning, executing, and reflecting happen together to form something new. This is Trinity in Unity; Unity in Trinity.
This is the Mind, Body, and Soul of God, the image we are made in.
Amen.