Grace and Creativity

Grace and Creativity

M. Scott Peck’s masterwork The Road Less Travelled has been mentioned here many times. I recall in this entry the discussion in that book of entropy and grace. I shamelessly quote from myself below.

The big idea came from Peck’s book and concerns the twin forces of entropy and grace in our world. Simply put, entropy is a force that operates in the realm of the material world and causes everything to degenerate over time…except, that is, when it doesn’t. And the principal way we see this not happening is in the realm of biological life which does exactly the opposite: it flourishes and grows and develops over time. It becomes increasingly ordered as opposed to increasingly disordered. There are, therefore, these two difference forces at work in the universe, neither of which characterise it entirely.

This force of grace is not purely to do with biological life, however. There is much more to it than that. Again, I quote from myself:

His basic idea is that there is a benign force in the universe that is protecting us and helping us in various ways. He relates this to his practice as a psychiatrist, saying that there are so many patients that he sees that should be far more messed up than they are but that, somehow, they seem to be better than they should be and they are capable of recovering. This is apparently true for physical illnesses as well. Our bodies are filled with bacteria and cancer cells and fats and clots and acids and we should be far more unwell than we are.

It is hardly remarkable that we sicken and die; what is truly remarkable is that we don’t usually sicken very often and we don’t die very quickly…There is a force, the mechanism of which we do not fully understand, that seems to operate routinely in most people to protect and encourage their physical health even under the most adverse conditions.

M. Scott Peck, The Road Less Travelled, p.227-228

He then goes on to say that being health-prone is not the only phenomenon of this type but that we are also resistant to various types of disasters like accidents. Our lives are full of near misses, ‘patterns of repeated narrowly averted disasters…accidents that almost happened that (are) many times greater than the number of accidents that actually did happen’ (ibid., p.229).

…the next set of observations he makes…are about the unconscious. As I understand it, Peck’s thesis is that the unconscious (in contradiction to the negative view of it put forward by Freud) is actually some kind of loving force within us that knows things about us and about the world and that is trying to help us. If we learn to pay attention to it, we can learn things and receive guidance that we couldn’t otherwise. We might think of this force as God, of course, and this would be totally congruent with a Christian view of the immanence and transcendence of God to creation.

That last point is something that I am becoming increasingly convinced of: the mystery and wonder of our unconscious processes.

A strange thing has happened to me recently. I have heard the same intriguing anecdote three times in short order - an anecdote I’ve never heard anywhere before. This may be a coincidence within the context of a completely meaningless universe that has nothing whatsoever to say to me. Or it might not be.