Recently we sat down with Rob Bell and talked with him about his new book, Drops Like Stars, and his West Coast tour. We had a great conversation talking about suffering and creativity, creating without pain, and the “church shopper.”

If you’d like to be entered into our contest to WIN tickets to see Rob Bell on his West Coast Drops Like Stars tour, please click here.

RETHINK MONTHLY: You recently wrote a book, Drops Like Stars, and in just a few short weeks, you’ll be on the West Coast giving a presentation of the same name. Can you tell us what led you to write a book about connecting the dots between creativity and suffering?

ROB BELL: Two things: First, I cut my teeth as a pastor. What happens when you’re a pastor and have an actual congregation full of people is you end up getting invited in to some of the most intimate moments of people’s suffering. I can think of an endless number of times when there’s some couple that I’ve only met twice, and then I end up in the I.C. unit with them in the last hours of their kids’ life. Or a family, who I’ve probably had five conversations with, whose sixteen year old son hangs himself, and I end up sitting in the hospital room all alone – just me and the family. Or I go to a funeral home to plan a service and it’s just me, the family, the body, and the casket, and I have to put together a service in the midst of all this grief and pain. Or the endless couples that I’ve met who are struggling with miscarriages. Then I see those same couples two years later and they’re still suffering. So part of it as a pastor is just watching people go through agonizing suffering and then seeing them a year later, two years later, three years later, and seeing the kinds of things that came out of their suffering. And secondly, I make things for a living. Whether it’s books, films, even sermons, there’s a certain sort of art to creating things – a certain agony to the art process. You have an idea about something and then you just work and work at it. It’s frustrating and you feel like you’re missing it. Then eventually it starts to exist. So I started to see all these parallels between the creative process and what I had seen with people who had gone through brutal suffering and all of the creativity and imagination that their suffering actually unleashed.

RM: In the book, you say, “And so we’re polite and we play by the rules and when asked how we are, we answer, ‘I’m fine, thank you,’ just like we’re supposed to. And then we suffer. There’s a disruption and our boxes get smashed.” Did you write this book out of your own experiences with suffering, or were they more out of observations of other people’s sufferings?

ROB: In the end, the book is kind of absent of my own experiences, but it’s deeply shaped, and a lot of people who’ve read the book have had the same sort of idea and say, “Hey wait, there is a bunch of you that’s missing in this book, but it’s got to be there somewhere.” My next book is essentially going to be all of the agonizing, brutal sorts of things that led to up to this book. But, yeah, my own experiences have deeply shaped the book, and my experiences will probably have its own book; just not as many pictures.

RM: Speaking of the visual element of the book, how did you connect with the designers to develop such an engaging, creative piece?

ROB: Mark Baas headed up the design, and he’s been a friend of mine for ten years, and we’ve been through all sorts of things together. Right away I knew that the content had to have a strong visual element, and when I finished the first draft I read it to him as my friend, but knowing that he might have some opinions about it. He immediately said, “Let me art direct, please?” There are several photographers and designers, all here in Grand Rapids, and Mark put together a whole team of people. When I had originally hand-written the first draft, I had a lot of notes in the margins – picture of this here, picture of that there – he took it and ran with it. We had the concept together, but he really oversaw the details of getting it all shot.

RM: There was a phrase in the book, “You can’t create without pain.” You also mention, with the cross, that God says, “I know what you’re feeling.” But what about God’s creation prior to pain, prior to the fall, and prior to the cross? Some of the best things we witness in this life were created in a world and at a time without pain. So, does that conflict with your message that creativity has to come out of pain?

ROB: When I first talked about creativity and suffering, several people said “You mean the tormented artist?” or “Only people who were abused can write great music.” There’s sort of an illusion in culture where the tortured artist is the only person who’s able to access their feelings. Central to the Christian story is a Trinitarian God who creates out of joy. The universe is the overflow of love and harmony. God doesn’t need pain to create. The cross, however, and the new creation does come about through pain. That’s the story of the cross. Out of all this mess, something beautiful emerges.

RM: Concerning the response of the book, do you feel it has connected with people who are still asking questions about life, still searching for faith?

ROB: There was a man and his wife whose 22-year old son was killed in March, and the wife got the book and read it out loud to her husband, five months after their son was killed. They talked about that being the beginning of the healing process for them. In one city, a man’s mother died of cancer twenty-nine years ago, and he said he felt that at the Drops Like Stars live event, for the first time he was able to go places he hadn’t gone. He was able to heal in a way he hadn’t in the previous twenty-nine years. One woman from Tampa, Florida bought tickets for her and her husband, and from the time she had bought the tickets until the night of the event, her husband died. So there have been some very visceral, powerful encounters I’ve had personally.

Our culture is a culture of denial. We don’t have good culture modes for grief and mourning, let alone just asking questions. And I think a lot of people with faith backgrounds feel guilty for being angry or venting or putting God on trial. Being honest about how they’re really feeling is not something they’ve been encouraged to do. My experience has been that when people are given a medium, whether it’s a book or a live experience where they don’t have to have everything resolved – they don’t have to end everything with a nice Bible verse about how it’s all going to work out – there’s a certain freedom in that to be healing. Some people think that half the Psalms are laments. And some of the psalms don’t end with “it’s all going to be alright.” They end just hanging there. And I think in our culture what people need are spaces where you can grieve and be angry and vent and rant and you can be fully human without having to, in the end, put on a polished smile. That’s actually, I think, where we begin to heal. So, the feedback has been that this has given people that certain space, and that’s a beautiful thing to be a part of.

RM: What do you think has happened in modern evangelical Christianity where for so long it hasn’t been alright to lament or be in mourning? Where did we take a left turn to get to this place where everything has to be neat and in order?

ROB: The consumer mentality – the altar of consumerism – is almost like water that we are swimming in. It’s almost like you have to drag the fish up onto the beach and just beat it senseless. Think about the ways people evaluate your average sermon. The number one way a lot of people evaluate a sermon comes in the form of a question: “Did you like it or not?” Imagine after Jesus tells the parable of the wheat and the sower or he curses the fig tree. Imagine people saying, “Did you like it?” You know, those aren’t categories you generally find people throughout history using. Or secondly, people evaluate and say “Did she do a good job? Did he do a good job?” These are all the ways in which spiritual practice has been co-opted by consumer culture.

So, the questions aren’t: “What’s going on inside of you? What is the Spirit doing to you? In what ways are you stretching, evolving, growing, or being transformed?” Instead it’s “Did they do a good job?” which is essentially a subject, object, relationship, in which we stand at a distance and observe and then evaluate and decide whether or not go to that church. A guy the other day said to me, “I’m church shopping.” Can you imagine saying that to the mystics or the apostles? People use phrases that are absolutely insane with a straight face.

RM: Well, we just hope he finds a good deal somewhere.

ROB: Exactly. In a way, a spiritual path has become a commodity like everything else. You have to begin to see that this is the water that the fish are swimming in. It’s so pervasive that it takes profound awakening for people to go: “Oh my word, this is absolutely screwed up.” For a lot of people, the way they were taught about God is that this is an answer to your problems. But the truth is if you decide to follow Jesus, this may be the beginning of some of your problems. There is massive suffering on a global scale and Jesus invites us to see the world as God sees it. Then we begin to steal and see things that we didn’t see before. On many levels, the spiritual path has always, for thousands of years, involved suffering. That’s been a stated, obvious consequence of directing your life in purposeful ways. These are traditions and paths that have been lost to many people, especially when they are given a bright, shiny, happy god, who will fix all their problems. Part of it is introducing people to their own history. When you do, all sorts of beautiful things happen then.

This interview was featured in the Jan/Feb 2010 issue of Rethink Monthly magazine. To see the article in the online version of the magazine, please click here.