Creativity and Prayer: You must create a space for both

I first encountered Robert Benson's amazing book, Living Prayer, on a public library shelf at a particularly dark time in my life - it was undoubtedly a divine appointment rather than mere chance or coincidence.

What Robert Benson said about workspace, prayer and writing rings as true for me today as it did then.  I hope it will encourage you to create a space in your home and in your heart for creative endeavor and for time with God.  It need not be a large space, or a magnificent one, but if you are to live creatively, you need a place and a time set aside for spiritual renewal.

Remember that Jacob encountered God only AFTER he sent sent his wives, children and all his men on ahead, and spent the night alone in the desert.  To receive a blessing, he had to step away from the people he loved, and be willing to risk his life in a dark and lonely place.

Maybe that's why, sometimes, we're so reluctant to work, to pray, or to make room for the transcendent Other in our lives.

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from Living Prayer by Robert Benson:

     Every writer I know writes in a different place and in a different way from every other writer I know.  But they all have a place to write.  A place that has been set apart for it.  They do it because they know that to live the life of an artist, you must produce art.  Otherwise, you are just cleverly avoiding the curse of the dreaded day job and maintaining an excuse to be shy and wear funny clothes.  Having a place helps produce art, if for no other reason than that you at least have a place to go and hope such a mysterious thing will take place.  To live a life of prayer, one must produce prayer.  Which is harder to do if you have no place in which to do so.  "We can talk to God anywhere," we say, and it is true.  But more often than not, because we do not have a somewhere to talk to God, we talk to God nowhere.  One can build an altar in one's heart, of course, but it can take some time, according to the saints.  Most of us could use the reminder that might come to us if we would put an altar in our house while we pray for the day in which we ourselves become the living sacrifice such an altar deserves.
     Any place can be more or less sacred, depending on what we ourselves bring to it.  Our own attitudes and expectations and actions can contribute or not to the sacredness of the place.  A temple can become a den of thieves, or so I have heard.  A picnic rug can become a sanctuary, or so I have found.

Robert Benson. Living Prayer, pp. 158-159.  New York: Putnam, 1998.