It is not often that I would find a straight-line connection between an article in Sports Illustrated magazine and an essay on creativity and musical composition. But such happened recently when I first read a nice profile on arguably the NFL’s best tight end, Tony Gonzalez (August 3, 2009 issue). Gonzalez comments about his experience last football season as a member of the Kansas City Chiefs. The team lost a franchise record fourteen games against only two wins in 2008: “you do learn the most about yourself, you grow as a person, when you go through tough times.” Perhaps that sounds like fairly pedestrian wisdom, but most of us know the deep truth in it.
Shortly after putting my Sports Illustrated down, I read an interesting article by Patrick Kavanaugh entitled “Embracing our Creative Limitations.” Kavanaugh is a composer and conductor, an author of several books, as well as dean of the School of Music of Grace College, Winona Lake, Indiana. His essay appeared on the website of The Trinity Forum earlier this summer.
Kavanaugh expresses concern about a culturally-conditioned and often unexamined progressivist assumption that the more limits are removed from us and the more freedom we have to “do anything,” the better off we will be. Where did we get that idea? Kavanaugh wonders if we are at our creative best – and most human – when we accept our finitude and submit to working the best we can within the reality of limits? “For we are generally at our creative best whenever we come to a limitation and we are forced to creatively think of a way around it.” Or as St. Paul said, “For the sake of Christ, I am content with weaknesses… for when I am weak, then I am strong” (2 Corinthians 12:10).