Welcome to the habit podcast conversations with writers about writing. I'm Jonathan Rogers, your host. I'm going to try something new here at the Habit podcast. Instead of an interview, I'm going to read you a little essay I wrote. I presented a version of this essay as a talk for The Rabbit Room's 2024 House moot event. It's called love, happiness and Creative Work. The music you hear every week on this podcast is Diamonds by Taylor Leonard. It's a song I love, and I especially love this line from the chorus. You are not an afterthought. Love himself dreamed you up. That idea is the starting point for this essay about love and creativity. It's also going to be the ending point, and I'm going to hit it a few times in the middle too. You are not an afterthought. Love himself. Dreamed you up probably ten years ago. Maybe further back than that. I attended a talk by the mathematician and apologist John Lennox. He suggested that the fundamental difference between an atheist and a theist is that an atheist believes that matter gave rise to mind, and a theist believes that mind gave rise to matter. I'm quite sure he wasn't the first person to articulate that idea, but he was the first person I ever heard articulate it, and I've thought about it quite a bit ever since. So again, for an atheist or a materialist somehow matter organized in such a way that it gave rise to minds. And for a theist of any kind, whether a Christian or some other kind of theist, there was a God who had an idea, and that idea ultimately became the universe. Josef Pieper, paraphrasing Thomas Aquinas, wrote, the essence of things is that they are creatively thought. That's a remarkable thing to think about. The essence of a thing is not its atoms or its molecules or its cells. The essence of a thing is that it was creatively thought. Everything that exists in the universe exists because God thought it was a good idea. Love himself dreamed you up. He also dreamed up trees and porcupines and cities and music. God thought all those things were a good idea. And that's why they exist. And by the way, you are able to think about things. Your mind can engage with things because those things were thought first by God. Things are intelligible to your mind because things are mind shaped. Everything you've ever thought about God thought about first. And so, in a literal sense, we are always thinking God's thoughts after him. You've probably heard that phrase before thinking God's thoughts after him. I've seen it used in a few different contexts, starting with a sort of Christian world and life view movement. I want to think about the world the way God thinks about the world, or I want to judge matters of, say, morality, the way God judges matters of morality. That's one way to to think about the phrase thinking God's thoughts after him. I think the phrase thinking God's thoughts after him originated with Johannes Kepler, the 16th and 17th century astronomer who described science as thinking God's thoughts after him. God thought the universe into being. And so when we're doing scientific work, in Kepler's case, understanding the way planets and the stars move, we're thinking God's thoughts after him. I've already suggested that in one important sense, we can't help but think God's thoughts after him, because everything you've ever thought about was God's thought before it was a thing. But also, I want to consider the possibility that to love is to think God's thoughts after him. The word love is used in a lot of different ways, right? I love my wife. I love my children. I love my friends. I love sad old country songs. I love Shakespeare's King Lear, I love watermelon. All right, I'm not going to get pedantic about the difference between agape love and phileo love and Eros love. Nor am I going to scold anybody about using the word love too loosely. Rather, I want to pay attention to what all those uses of the word love have in common. As Josef Pieper says, in every conceivable case. Love signifies the same thing as approval. So no, I don't mean exactly the same thing when I say I love watermelon and my wife and King Lear, but I do at least mean that I approve of them. As Peter points out, approval derives from the Latin word Probus, which just means good. So then to approve of or to love a person or a thing is to say it is good that you exist. It's good wife that you exist. It's good friend that you exist. It's good watermelon that you exist. I don't think it's a stretch then to offer this working definition. To love is to say God thinks it's a good idea that this person, or even this thing exists. And so I think it is to love himself. Dreamed you up, love himself, thought you were a good idea. And he wasn't wrong about that. To love is to agree with the God who made the beloved. When you love a child, you affirm the child. You say it's good that the child exists, but also you affirm the child's maker and the whole plan that resulted in this child's existence. In doing so, you align your will with the will of the maker who thought that child was a good idea. I know you've heard this idea before, that love is not an emotion. It's an act of the will. Well, yes and amen. Pieper says the most extreme form of affirmation that can possibly be conceived of is creation, which is very much an act of the will. Remember in the creation story, at the end of every day, God says it is good. God made that statement after each phase of creation. But Thomas Aquinas would say that love, that approval, affirmation, preceded the creation. So it's not just that God made things and then judged them good, it's that he knew they would be good. And so he made them. So then, in creation, love and will are altogether inseparable. Everything exists because God wanted it to exist. Because he thought it was good. Love himself dreamed you up. And so human love is always an imitation and a repetition of the love of God. So Pepper, again, he says, the lover knows that his affirmation directed toward the beloved would be pointless were not some other force akin to creation involved, and moreover, a force not merely preceding his own love, but one that is still at work, and that he himself, the loving person, participates in and helps along by loving. Okay, I know that was a lot, but let's put it this way when you love, you are joining into a love that is already in motion, the love of God for the creature. That love precedes your love, but also the loving and creative act of God is still unfolding. Creation is not just something that happened in the past and is now finished. Rather, creation is always continuing and the human lover, by some mystery has a part to play in that creative act. If that sounds overly mystical, consider this there are people you love in whom you see things that they can't see in themselves as you call out those things in them, you help them become who they really are. It's the lovers job to see things in the beloved that the beloved can't see in herself or himself. So your love is an echo of the love of God. But it's not only an echo, it's also a continuation and even an expansion of the creative act that God is doing. God allows us to participate in his ongoing creation. So there's the argument that love is a kind of creative work. Your love for the people around you, your love for the world around you, is a kind of creative work, because our love affirms and agrees with the loving, creative work of God. And because God's love and creativity are not past tense, are not completed. We are in some way participants in the unfolding of the glories of the people we love. That's a pretty remarkable thing to think about, isn't it? So then, if love is a kind of creative work, can we also say that creative work is a kind of love? Well, I think the answer is yes. Thus far, I've mostly been talking about loving people. It's maybe easier to understand some of these concepts when we apply them to people, right? As we love the people we love, we participate in the unfolding and the expansion of their glories. And also the God who began a good work in you will complete that work through the people who love you, right? God began the work. He's going to complete it. And somehow human love is a part of that process. But what about the rest of the world? What about the not people aspects of creation, which, by the way, accounts for most of creation? Well, God loves that creation too. And according to Romans eight, the creation itself will be liberated from its bondage to decay and brought into the freedom and glory of the children of God. So just as people are moving toward a glorified state, the rest of creation is also moving toward a glorified state. And we have a role there too. A loving role, a creative role. So we can't create out of nothing like God can, but we can rearrange the materials that God has given us, and we can be a part of the process by which creation itself is liberated from bondage to decay, and brought into the freedom and glory of the children of God. We participate in the divine image when we cultivate the goodness of the world in which we find ourselves. When I teach writing, I often talk to writers about loving their reader. Well. The truth is, one of the challenges involved in loving your reader is that you don't necessarily know who your reader is. How do you love somebody when you don't know who they are? Well, I think the way you do that is simply to love what you love and invite your reader into the things that you love. As you affirm, as you agree with God that these things were good ideas. As you work to enhance the glories of the world, to show people the glories of things that you care about. Well, essentially, that's a way of tending to the little patch of ground that is yours to tend to. You're like the gardener who creates a beautiful public garden for the people who pass by. He loves those people by loving his garden. The theologian Elaine T cherry wrote a book called God of the Art of happiness. I ran across this book accidentally. I was looking for books about hospitality, but the happiness books come right before the hospitality books on the shelf at Vanderbilt Divinity Library. And I love something she says, she writes. Our limited participation in God by virtue of our God given creativity, intelligence, and goodness suffices to bring other things to their own flourishing by enhancing the well-being of creation's materials, both inert and living. We transmit God's creative goodness to the things on which we act for their gainful use. That use is in turn transmitted to those who will use and enjoy them. I know there's a lot there. We're going to try to work through it here. I love this idea of we have this limited participation in God by virtue of our God given creativity, intelligence, and goodness. It's limited, and yet that's part of our image bearing role. Um. As you tend to your little patch of ground, you benefit the people who pass through. Okay. The idea here that we transmit God's creative goodness, um, when we bring things to their gainful use, right. We we bring good things to the, the things we've worked on, but we also bring good things to the people who benefit from them. And I want to emphasize something that, um, maybe a slightly surprising she talks about enhancing the well-being of creation's materials, both inert and living. So that's worth thinking about a little bit. Right. The inert aspects of the created order? Well, they're part of the created order, too. And they have a well-being that we can serve. That may not seem self-evident, but think about this. If you're a gardener, you're bringing the raw material of creation, some of it inert. Right? Soil is inert. Um, but you're bringing it toward its perfection, and you're adding to the goodness and to the glory and to the wonders around you. And in so doing, you're loving the people around you. And also, we're going to return to this in a minute. You're making the world look a little bit more like the world you want to live in. I used. I've been using the example of a community garden that benefits the people in the community, but also it benefits the gardener because now the neighborhood has a garden. The neighborhood is more like the kind of neighborhood that gardener wants to live in. Well, Elaine Cherry uses the language of flourishing, right? She speaks of using your God given creativity, intelligence and goodness to bring things to their own flourishing. Well, Aquinas says essentially the same thing, but he uses the language of purpose. He says since all things are purposeful, the better we advance other things to their proper purpose, the more godly we are and the happier we become as the persons we are and are becoming. The idea is this God had an idea of what any given thing was and what it was for before he made it. Therefore, everything has a purpose, okay? Everything that was thought is purposeful, and then you move toward joy as you advance other things toward their proper purpose. As you extend out from your own self and see how you can make the things of the created order align a little more with their purpose. You're affirming and you're agreeing with God's purposes. So when we do creative work, and I'm defining creative work very broadly here, we're doing a few different things simultaneously. One thing we're doing is simply giving voice to or drawing the attention of our readers or listeners or audience members, the people who pass through our patch of ground. We're drawing their attention to the glories of creation. Right? We give an account of the hope that is within us. When Saint Peter talks about always being prepared to give an account of the hope that's within you. I always assumed that he was talking about making arguments. Now, I think maybe it's more about just affirming, giving an account of what it is that seems good about the created order. It seems like the world needs that kind of affirmation as much as it ever has, to give an account of the hope within us. Maybe as simple as saying, I have seen these wonders and I want you to see them too. It's a way of saying it's good that these things exist. God wasn't wrong when he thought they were a good idea. Well, maybe along the same lines, Wendell Berry wrote, the business of literature, then, is to renew not only itself, but also our sense of the perennial newness of what is perennially new. Yes and amen. So that's one role, an incredibly important role of a person who's doing creative work. And all good work is creative in some sense. Whatever work you do, I hope you're always giving a truer account of things than the world is giving. Every time you make a good meal and serve it to people you love. You're telling a different story than, say, McDonald's is telling. When you garden, you bring order to disorder. You're telling a story about how the world can be. So you're always telling a truer story in your creative work. You're always bearing witness to a created order that you didn't make that exists without reference to you. Okay. That's one thing you're doing. But also when you make, you are also adding to the stock of good things in the world, right? You're not just pointing to good things that you didn't make. And as you stay alert to the wonders of the world, those wonders inspire you to do. They inspire you to make. And yet, as Junius Johnson has said, the wonder you create is not the wonder you first saw. You take in as much as you can take in. You try to give a voice to it. But what you produce always turns out to be something different from what you took in. That can be frustrating. And yet, when you make anything at all, you've added to the stock of wonder in the world. So even when your work feels like a failure, I hope you'll consider the possibility that you've added to the stock of wonders in the world. And the wonders of the world are shared property, which is to say, as they increase, we all get richer. Here's what Thomas Aquinas had to say on the subject. And I have to acknowledge Elaine Terry again, because I first saw this Aquinas quote in her book, the good of one becomes common to many if it flows from the one to the others. God communicated his goodness to his creatures in such wise that one thing can communicate to another the good. It has received two ideas I want to make sure you get from this. First, the idea of the good of one becoming the good of the many. As you put good things into the world, those goods become common property. And secondly, God organized the universe in such a way that the good that he has given to you is communicable to others. And I don't just mean communicable, as in you can put it into a message that can then be told or sung or preached or whatever. Goodness is communicable the way the flu is communicable. And so the goodness of God has blessed you with the gifts that he has blessed you with are communicable to others. They can be passed along, and as they are communicated, they become shared property. To borrow from Lewis Hyde's book, The Gift, intangible goods like beauty and hope and love and joy operate in the gift economy, not the market economy. And when you give away intangible goods, they aren't subtracted from your stock. They are multiplied. When you give away love or joy or beauty, you have more, not less. If you give away knowledge, you don't have less knowledge. In fact, you have your knowledge more completely. So again, when you're doing creative work, when you are adding to the stock of wonders in the world, you aren't working in an economy of scarcity. It's not a zero sum game as you do good work, as you bring other things and other people to their own flourishing, the good you add becomes common to many. The flourishing that you give to others becomes your own flourishing. So here's Elaine Cherry again, acting on things for their good advances, their purpose. And as this happens, we are also improving. Enhancing the flourishing of others enhances our own. This is enjoying ourselves and being happy in life. In addition to being godlike, living excellently is simply pleasurable. So as you affirm and agree with and participate in the loving creativity of the God who dreamed all this up, the world you live in starts to look more like the world you want to live in. Along the Camino de Santiago, the pilgrimage route in Spain, there's a monastery called Iraci that's quite famous among the pilgrims who pass through all along the Camino ends in hostels and villages, provide water fountains for the hot, thirsty, dusty travelers who are walking through. So, like many of the hospitable locals along the route, the monks at Iraci provide a water fountain, but also they provide a wine fountain. The monastery has its own vineyard, so the monks invite pilgrims passing through to fill up a cup of wine. At the wine fountain, there's a sign at the fountain that translates Pilgrim. If you want to reach Santiago with strength and vitality, drink from this great wine and toast to happiness. It's a kindness to provide water to those passing through. But wine? That's just prodigal, right? The monks have created this little outpost of the kingdom of heaven where wine flows like water. I love that image. I love it for the pilgrims, but I especially love it for the monks. The people who pass through. Well, they're just passing through. But the monks, they live in a place where wine flows like water. And don't you think they love that? Don't you think they love living in a world where that kind of prodigality is an everyday occurrence? Again, this is the economy you live in when you do creative work. Your little patch of ground is a blessing to the people who pass through, and that's gratifying. But just as importantly, you get to live there. You get to live in this place that looks a little bit more like the world you want to live in. It's good that you exist. Love himself dreamed you up. So I hope you'll go out and do some good work. Make some beautiful things. The Habit Podcast is brought to you by the Rabbit Room, where art nourishes community, and community nourishes art. You can support their work including this podcast, by becoming a member. Visit rabbit room.com/membership. Special thanks as well to Taylor Leonard for letting us use her song diamonds as the theme music for The Habit podcast. You can learn more about Taylor and follow her work at Taylor leonard.com. The Habit membership is a library of resources for writers by me, Jonathan Rogers. More importantly, the habit is a hub of community where like minded writers gather to discuss their work and give each other a little more courage. Find out more at the habit.co.

Welcome to the habit podcast conversations with writers about writing. I'm Jonathan Rogers, your host. I'm going to try something new here at the Habit podcast. Instead of an interview, I'm going to read you a little essay I wrote. I presented a version of this essay as a talk for The Rabbit Room's 2024 House moot event. It's called love, happiness and Creative Work. The music you hear every week on this podcast is Diamonds by Taylor Leonard. It's a song I love, and I especially love this line from the chorus. You are not an afterthought. Love himself dreamed you up. That idea is the starting point for this essay about love and creativity. It's also going to be the ending point, and I'm going to hit it a few times in the middle too. You are not an afterthought. Love himself. Dreamed you up probably ten years ago. Maybe further back than that. I attended a talk by the mathematician and apologist John Lennox. He suggested that the fundamental difference between an atheist and a theist is that an atheist believes that matter gave rise to mind, and a theist believes that mind gave rise to matter. I'm quite sure he wasn't the first person to articulate that idea, but he was the first person I ever heard articulate it, and I've thought about it quite a bit ever since. So again, for an atheist or a materialist somehow matter organized in such a way that it gave rise to minds. And for a theist of any kind, whether a Christian or some other kind of theist, there was a God who had an idea, and that idea ultimately became the universe. Josef Pieper, paraphrasing Thomas Aquinas, wrote, the essence of things is that they are creatively thought. That's a remarkable thing to think about. The essence of a thing is not its atoms or its molecules or its cells. The essence of a thing is that it was creatively thought. Everything that exists in the universe exists because God thought it was a good idea. Love himself dreamed you up. He also dreamed up trees and porcupines and cities and music. God thought all those things were a good idea. And that's why they exist. And by the way, you are able to think about things. Your mind can engage with things because those things were thought first by God. Things are intelligible to your mind because things are mind shaped. Everything you've ever thought about God thought about first. And so, in a literal sense, we are always thinking God's thoughts after him. You've probably heard that phrase before thinking God's thoughts after him. I've seen it used in a few different contexts, starting with a sort of Christian world and life view movement. I want to think about the world the way God thinks about the world, or I want to judge matters of, say, morality, the way God judges matters of morality. That's one way to to think about the phrase thinking God's thoughts after him. I think the phrase thinking God's thoughts after him originated with Johannes Kepler, the 16th and 17th century astronomer who described science as thinking God's thoughts after him. God thought the universe into being. And so when we're doing scientific work, in Kepler's case, understanding the way planets and the stars move, we're thinking God's thoughts after him. I've already suggested that in one important sense, we can't help but think God's thoughts after him, because everything you've ever thought about was God's thought before it was a thing. But also, I want to consider the possibility that to love is to think God's thoughts after him. The word love is used in a lot of different ways, right? I love my wife. I love my children. I love my friends. I love sad old country songs. I love Shakespeare's King Lear, I love watermelon. All right, I'm not going to get pedantic about the difference between agape love and phileo love and Eros love. Nor am I going to scold anybody about using the word love too loosely. Rather, I want to pay attention to what all those uses of the word love have in common. As Josef Pieper says, in every conceivable case. Love signifies the same thing as approval. So no, I don't mean exactly the same thing when I say I love watermelon and my wife and King Lear, but I do at least mean that I approve of them. As Peter points out, approval derives from the Latin word Probus, which just means good. So then to approve of or to love a person or a thing is to say it is good that you exist. It's good wife that you exist. It's good friend that you exist. It's good watermelon that you exist. I don't think it's a stretch then to offer this working definition. To love is to say God thinks it's a good idea that this person, or even this thing exists. And so I think it is to love himself. Dreamed you up, love himself, thought you were a good idea. And he wasn't wrong about that. To love is to agree with the God who made the beloved. When you love a child, you affirm the child. You say it's good that the child exists, but also you affirm the child's maker and the whole plan that resulted in this child's existence. In doing so, you align your will with the will of the maker who thought that child was a good idea. I know you've heard this idea before, that love is not an emotion. It's an act of the will. Well, yes and amen. Pieper says the most extreme form of affirmation that can possibly be conceived of is creation, which is very much an act of the will. Remember in the creation story, at the end of every day, God says it is good. God made that statement after each phase of creation. But Thomas Aquinas would say that love, that approval, affirmation, preceded the creation. So it's not just that God made things and then judged them good, it's that he knew they would be good. And so he made them. So then, in creation, love and will are altogether inseparable. Everything exists because God wanted it to exist. Because he thought it was good. Love himself dreamed you up. And so human love is always an imitation and a repetition of the love of God. So Pepper, again, he says, the lover knows that his affirmation directed toward the beloved would be pointless were not some other force akin to creation involved, and moreover, a force not merely preceding his own love, but one that is still at work, and that he himself, the loving person, participates in and helps along by loving. Okay, I know that was a lot, but let's put it this way when you love, you are joining into a love that is already in motion, the love of God for the creature. That love precedes your love, but also the loving and creative act of God is still unfolding. Creation is not just something that happened in the past and is now finished. Rather, creation is always continuing and the human lover, by some mystery has a part to play in that creative act. If that sounds overly mystical, consider this there are people you love in whom you see things that they can't see in themselves as you call out those things in them, you help them become who they really are. It's the lovers job to see things in the beloved that the beloved can't see in herself or himself. So your love is an echo of the love of God. But it's not only an echo, it's also a continuation and even an expansion of the creative act that God is doing. God allows us to participate in his ongoing creation. So there's the argument that love is a kind of creative work. Your love for the people around you, your love for the world around you, is a kind of creative work, because our love affirms and agrees with the loving, creative work of God. And because God's love and creativity are not past tense, are not completed. We are in some way participants in the unfolding of the glories of the people we love. That's a pretty remarkable thing to think about, isn't it? So then, if love is a kind of creative work, can we also say that creative work is a kind of love? Well, I think the answer is yes. Thus far, I've mostly been talking about loving people. It's maybe easier to understand some of these concepts when we apply them to people, right? As we love the people we love, we participate in the unfolding and the expansion of their glories. And also the God who began a good work in you will complete that work through the people who love you, right? God began the work. He's going to complete it. And somehow human love is a part of that process. But what about the rest of the world? What about the not people aspects of creation, which, by the way, accounts for most of creation? Well, God loves that creation too. And according to Romans eight, the creation itself will be liberated from its bondage to decay and brought into the freedom and glory of the children of God. So just as people are moving toward a glorified state, the rest of creation is also moving toward a glorified state. And we have a role there too. A loving role, a creative role. So we can't create out of nothing like God can, but we can rearrange the materials that God has given us, and we can be a part of the process by which creation itself is liberated from bondage to decay, and brought into the freedom and glory of the children of God. We participate in the divine image when we cultivate the goodness of the world in which we find ourselves. When I teach writing, I often talk to writers about loving their reader. Well. The truth is, one of the challenges involved in loving your reader is that you don't necessarily know who your reader is. How do you love somebody when you don't know who they are? Well, I think the way you do that is simply to love what you love and invite your reader into the things that you love. As you affirm, as you agree with God that these things were good ideas. As you work to enhance the glories of the world, to show people the glories of things that you care about. Well, essentially, that's a way of tending to the little patch of ground that is yours to tend to. You're like the gardener who creates a beautiful public garden for the people who pass by. He loves those people by loving his garden. The theologian Elaine T cherry wrote a book called God of the Art of happiness. I ran across this book accidentally. I was looking for books about hospitality, but the happiness books come right before the hospitality books on the shelf at Vanderbilt Divinity Library. And I love something she says, she writes. Our limited participation in God by virtue of our God given creativity, intelligence, and goodness suffices to bring other things to their own flourishing by enhancing the well-being of creation's materials, both inert and living. We transmit God's creative goodness to the things on which we act for their gainful use. That use is in turn transmitted to those who will use and enjoy them. I know there's a lot there. We're going to try to work through it here. I love this idea of we have this limited participation in God by virtue of our God given creativity, intelligence, and goodness. It's limited, and yet that's part of our image bearing role. Um. As you tend to your little patch of ground, you benefit the people who pass through. Okay. The idea here that we transmit God's creative goodness, um, when we bring things to their gainful use, right. We we bring good things to the, the things we've worked on, but we also bring good things to the people who benefit from them. And I want to emphasize something that, um, maybe a slightly surprising she talks about enhancing the well-being of creation's materials, both inert and living. So that's worth thinking about a little bit. Right. The inert aspects of the created order? Well, they're part of the created order, too. And they have a well-being that we can serve. That may not seem self-evident, but think about this. If you're a gardener, you're bringing the raw material of creation, some of it inert. Right? Soil is inert. Um, but you're bringing it toward its perfection, and you're adding to the goodness and to the glory and to the wonders around you. And in so doing, you're loving the people around you. And also, we're going to return to this in a minute. You're making the world look a little bit more like the world you want to live in. I used. I've been using the example of a community garden that benefits the people in the community, but also it benefits the gardener because now the neighborhood has a garden. The neighborhood is more like the kind of neighborhood that gardener wants to live in. Well, Elaine Cherry uses the language of flourishing, right? She speaks of using your God given creativity, intelligence and goodness to bring things to their own flourishing. Well, Aquinas says essentially the same thing, but he uses the language of purpose. He says since all things are purposeful, the better we advance other things to their proper purpose, the more godly we are and the happier we become as the persons we are and are becoming. The idea is this God had an idea of what any given thing was and what it was for before he made it. Therefore, everything has a purpose, okay? Everything that was thought is purposeful, and then you move toward joy as you advance other things toward their proper purpose. As you extend out from your own self and see how you can make the things of the created order align a little more with their purpose. You're affirming and you're agreeing with God's purposes. So when we do creative work, and I'm defining creative work very broadly here, we're doing a few different things simultaneously. One thing we're doing is simply giving voice to or drawing the attention of our readers or listeners or audience members, the people who pass through our patch of ground. We're drawing their attention to the glories of creation. Right? We give an account of the hope that is within us. When Saint Peter talks about always being prepared to give an account of the hope that's within you. I always assumed that he was talking about making arguments. Now, I think maybe it's more about just affirming, giving an account of what it is that seems good about the created order. It seems like the world needs that kind of affirmation as much as it ever has, to give an account of the hope within us. Maybe as simple as saying, I have seen these wonders and I want you to see them too. It's a way of saying it's good that these things exist. God wasn't wrong when he thought they were a good idea. Well, maybe along the same lines, Wendell Berry wrote, the business of literature, then, is to renew not only itself, but also our sense of the perennial newness of what is perennially new. Yes and amen. So that's one role, an incredibly important role of a person who's doing creative work. And all good work is creative in some sense. Whatever work you do, I hope you're always giving a truer account of things than the world is giving. Every time you make a good meal and serve it to people you love. You're telling a different story than, say, McDonald's is telling. When you garden, you bring order to disorder. You're telling a story about how the world can be. So you're always telling a truer story in your creative work. You're always bearing witness to a created order that you didn't make that exists without reference to you. Okay. That's one thing you're doing. But also when you make, you are also adding to the stock of good things in the world, right? You're not just pointing to good things that you didn't make. And as you stay alert to the wonders of the world, those wonders inspire you to do. They inspire you to make. And yet, as Junius Johnson has said, the wonder you create is not the wonder you first saw. You take in as much as you can take in. You try to give a voice to it. But what you produce always turns out to be something different from what you took in. That can be frustrating. And yet, when you make anything at all, you've added to the stock of wonder in the world. So even when your work feels like a failure, I hope you'll consider the possibility that you've added to the stock of wonders in the world. And the wonders of the world are shared property, which is to say, as they increase, we all get richer. Here's what Thomas Aquinas had to say on the subject. And I have to acknowledge Elaine Terry again, because I first saw this Aquinas quote in her book, the good of one becomes common to many if it flows from the one to the others. God communicated his goodness to his creatures in such wise that one thing can communicate to another the good. It has received two ideas I want to make sure you get from this. First, the idea of the good of one becoming the good of the many. As you put good things into the world, those goods become common property. And secondly, God organized the universe in such a way that the good that he has given to you is communicable to others. And I don't just mean communicable, as in you can put it into a message that can then be told or sung or preached or whatever. Goodness is communicable the way the flu is communicable. And so the goodness of God has blessed you with the gifts that he has blessed you with are communicable to others. They can be passed along, and as they are communicated, they become shared property. To borrow from Lewis Hyde's book, The Gift, intangible goods like beauty and hope and love and joy operate in the gift economy, not the market economy. And when you give away intangible goods, they aren't subtracted from your stock. They are multiplied. When you give away love or joy or beauty, you have more, not less. If you give away knowledge, you don't have less knowledge. In fact, you have your knowledge more completely. So again, when you're doing creative work, when you are adding to the stock of wonders in the world, you aren't working in an economy of scarcity. It's not a zero sum game as you do good work, as you bring other things and other people to their own flourishing, the good you add becomes common to many. The flourishing that you give to others becomes your own flourishing. So here's Elaine Cherry again, acting on things for their good advances, their purpose. And as this happens, we are also improving. Enhancing the flourishing of others enhances our own. This is enjoying ourselves and being happy in life. In addition to being godlike, living excellently is simply pleasurable. So as you affirm and agree with and participate in the loving creativity of the God who dreamed all this up, the world you live in starts to look more like the world you want to live in. Along the Camino de Santiago, the pilgrimage route in Spain, there's a monastery called Iraci that's quite famous among the pilgrims who pass through all along the Camino ends in hostels and villages, provide water fountains for the hot, thirsty, dusty travelers who are walking through. So, like many of the hospitable locals along the route, the monks at Iraci provide a water fountain, but also they provide a wine fountain. The monastery has its own vineyard, so the monks invite pilgrims passing through to fill up a cup of wine. At the wine fountain, there's a sign at the fountain that translates Pilgrim. If you want to reach Santiago with strength and vitality, drink from this great wine and toast to happiness. It's a kindness to provide water to those passing through. But wine? That's just prodigal, right? The monks have created this little outpost of the kingdom of heaven where wine flows like water. I love that image. I love it for the pilgrims, but I especially love it for the monks. The people who pass through. Well, they're just passing through. But the monks, they live in a place where wine flows like water. And don't you think they love that? Don't you think they love living in a world where that kind of prodigality is an everyday occurrence? Again, this is the economy you live in when you do creative work. Your little patch of ground is a blessing to the people who pass through, and that's gratifying. But just as importantly, you get to live there. You get to live in this place that looks a little bit more like the world you want to live in. It's good that you exist. Love himself dreamed you up. So I hope you'll go out and do some good work. Make some beautiful things. The Habit Podcast is brought to you by the Rabbit Room, where art nourishes community, and community nourishes art. You can support their work including this podcast, by becoming a member. Visit rabbit room.com/membership. Special thanks as well to Taylor Leonard for letting us use her song diamonds as the theme music for The Habit podcast. You can learn more about Taylor and follow her work at Taylor leonard.com. The Habit membership is a library of resources for writers by me, Jonathan Rogers. More importantly, the habit is a hub of community where like minded writers gather to discuss their work and give each other a little more courage. Find out more at the habit.co.