Free Between the Dark and the Daylight: Encountering and Embracing the Contradictions of Life by Osb Joan Chittister, Joan Sister Chittister Page A

picture of the intruder. “And on the strength of that picture,” the French police reported later, “we arrested a mother superior, a government minister, a washing machine, and the Eiffel Tower.”
    It is possible that never has a clearer word been spoken about the tense and tender relationship between confusion and creativity. Chaos is its own kind of order. Creativity is what a person makes out of the confusion. This emerging new order, forged out of disarray and shaped into vision, defies the future. In the end, creativity develops another glimpse of life previously unknown, perhaps, even to the person who manages to create it.
    At the same time, confusion is something our highly technological world wars against. Technology exists toassert the assumption that everything must have a visible function. That the function must be precisely defined. That the precision must be productive. And that the productivity must contribute even more to the order of the world around it. It is an orbit in a circle that maintains a cosmology that can be comprehended—tolerated, in fact—only by the creation of more order.
    Except that confusion is part of the process of creation and so cannot, dare not, be lost in some kind of mad service to order. No less a scientist than Albert Einstein himself has confirmed the process: “I used to go away for weeks,” he said, “in a state of confusion.”
    How can what appear to be two completely irreconcilable approaches to life possibly be the answer to each other? Because confusion is a beautiful thing without which no greater beauty can possibly be imagined. Confusion simply upends the expectations that form the steel frames of our lives. “Creativity,” Versace says, “comes from a conflict of ideas.”
    Confusion happens when the frames of our lives, the certainties on which we have come to depend, begin to break down. Nature does not act the way we think it should. What used to be clear to us—the rationales that had kept our lives in place for years—become gray and murky. Worse, our notions about morality, artistic taste, social systems, scientific theories, one or all of the givens in life, lose their previously unchallenged place in our private, internal universe. The ways we have been taught to view the world, to make things happen, to put life together, to accept as the norms of human existence become, for whatever reasons, fallible to the point of mere mist on our old selves. Then, it is necessaryto rethink everything. As Erich Fromm says, “Creativity requires the courage to let go of certainties.” Then we begin, in confusion, to seek a new order of the heart and the mind and the soul.
    Then we are ready to make our small world new again. Purple and yellow are no longer a forbidden color scheme, however out of style it might be right now; interracial marriage is no longer unthinkable; cars with wings are debuted at automobile shows.
    Confusion stirs the habitual order of things. It throws the deck of lifestyle cards into the air and puts them back together again. Newly.
    The chaos of thought rankles the soul in the middle of the night, forcing us to face the upheaval around us. It forces us finally to ask ourselves, How can we possibly survive this latest assault on the past? with a heart pried open by virtue of the fact, if nothing else, that we can no longer escape it.
    When the structures of the past no longer satisfy, no long serve to make life lively, we must now begin to ask new questions and to create new answers to old questions. We have been given cosmic permission to think differently. In fact, we are required to rethink everything once we have begun to rethink anything. It is a no-holds-barred moment in life out of which have come some of the greatest additions to the social order the world had ever imagined: Picasso, for instance; airplanes and floating hotels; heart transplants and women priests; manned air flights to Mars.
    Certainty dies in the mist of these