Brian’s Reflection: Tuesday, April 2, 2008


If you ask me what I came into this life to do, I will tell you:
I came to live out loud.

- Emile Zola, author, born on this day, 1840, in Paris


Can’t you just hear the ancient gods and goddesses saying that? Isis? Horus? Jehovah? Jesus? The Buddha? Muhammad? All the divine or semi-divine beings conceived of by humans? And what a glorious tribute to the vocation of “artist”!

And yet we are all artists, made to be so, made to “live out loud”. It is said in the Christian Scriptures that we are all brothers and sisters of Jesus - and so we are all made to “live out loud” what it means to be human, to be made in the image of the Divinity. In incredible fact, to “be Divine”, as so many of the mystics of all faiths and religions have said.

Jesus said, “I came that you might have Life”. That’s living out loud, for sure! And I think that that’s what we are all about. Living out loud, manifesting the glory of what it means to be fully human. Most of us fail, most of the time. But I honour artists – their greatest value it to speak out loud about what it means to be human. They are the great prophets, speaking God’s truth to the human community.

But let’s bring it down to the bottom line: you and I are meant to Live Out Loud. That should be our goal. Find your voice and your way of being and hurl it out into the World. There it will become an energy refining and reshaping us and all that is into a blazing example of Beauty. Like Jesus, like so many others. Don’t think that you are not worthy; Jesus Himself said that we would do even greater things than He.

Artists create. You and I are called to create Glory and Wonder - a simple human community of loving beings.

We need to get busy. But it won’t be like Adam cast out to painful work. Oh no; it will be sheer giddiness!

Brian+