Begin with Nothing.

The Genesis of a Creative Life: What Spiderman and the Buddha Teach Us About the Power of “Nothing”.

Last week, I reflected on how neglect impacts human development and the importance of assessing for neglect wounds in ourselves and our clients in my blog  Nothing Matters. This week I want to explore the concept that Ruth Cohn considers regarding how many people who suffer from the wounds of neglect share a similar tendency toward “hero worship.” Among her personal list of heroes was the author Thomas Wolfe and the political revolutionary Ernesto “Che” Guevara. Bessel van der Kolk states that this type of hero worship or idealization is a “defense against terror.” Cohn puts it less dramatically, pointing out that her fascination with Wolfe and Che came from her inability to connect with real people, so she invented the relationships she did not know how to have. 

That makes a lot of sense to me. When left in a void of neglect, the power to create relationships we do not have leaves us with a vast world of possibilities. We can be with anyone when we are left with no one. While her choices were Che and Wolfe, mine were Hemingway and Spider-Man.

At this moment, I am surrounded by books. Included in my library is every book Hemingway ever published, every book written about Hemingway, and every book collecting the letters Hemingway wrote to his lovers, artist friends, and the many villains in his life. In front of me is a large poster of Hemingway kicking a can down a gravel road by his home in the mountains of Ketchum, Idaho. Cohn reflected that in the gaping void of real connection was her search for a twin or a partner that she had to make up.

As a child, I was obsessed with biographies. The first book I read as a young child was a biography of Abraham Lincoln. As a teenager, I was given The Seven Storey Mountain, the autobiography of Thomas Merton. In both of these books, I found a partner, someone I could relate to, a story that I felt connected to, and something that made me feel less alone and more understood. As a young adult, my fascination turned toward the likes of Mary Oliver, St. Francis, Hemingway, and yes Spider-Man. One might say these characters are vastly different and that my fascination with them is clinically relevant. Perhaps so, but I would also say that this fascination is brilliantly adaptive, a defense against the terror that I am completely alone, and a comfort while facing the fear of nothing.

This week, I opened a book titled In The Beginning We Create, by Nathan Nicholson. This book explores how we can learn to imitate the creative process of the Creator God in our own art, writing, cooking, or whatever creative drive we have found in our living. Rev. Nicholson lays out the creative process found in the Book of Genesis as a path for our own creative expression. I opened the book and began reading.

The first words I read were: “Begin with Nothing.”

Nicholson notes that human creativity is an echo of the ultimate Creator, who formed everything out of nothing (ex nihilo). Facing a blank page, canvas, or empty project is not a void to fear, but an open space for Holy Creation. The book seems to be offered as a comfort to artists, showing that the work we release into seeming “voids” is not without meaning, but that the nothingness is an invitation to align our creative endeavors with a divine meaning and purpose. Nicholson encourages creators to find confidence when facing the challenge of beginning with nothing by assuring us that we are never truly creating alone, because we are all connected to one another and to God through our very impulse to create.

We are not alone.

In the void left by neglect, perhaps is the terror we defend ourselves against, the terror of being all alone. The comfort of finding a distant partner or a twin, as Ruth Cohn describes in her book Out Of My Mind, is a socially adaptive survival skill. However, the curiosity of how we choose who to turn to as our “twin” or “partner” is critical for our healing and for claiming the hope of fashioning authentic connections in real time with people in our day-to-day lives.

Do we seek connection with pro-social mythologies or anti-social mythological narratives and characters? Who are the heroes or heroines of our inner world, and what do they offer us as we seek a sense of belonging and purpose in the world? And, how do their narratives mirror our original wounds in a way that encourages us to make sense out of nothing?

As I considered these questions for myself, I took a deep dive into a few of my favorite idealized mythological and spiritual characters. What I discovered was that they all shared the characteristic of being privileged and neglected or abandoned as children. But then they took those experiences and transformed their learnings into superpowers or had visions that gave their lives meaning, purpose, and a sense of belonging which healed or saved them and offered a defiant example to the world around them.

Who doesn’t love a good superhero? And let’s be honest, who hasn’t had a little statue of the Buddha or St. Francis in their garden or “meditation room”? Since the Marvel franchise began with Iron Man in 2008, the Marvel Cinematic Universe has pulled in a gross of over $34.8 billion, averaging roughly $900 million to $1 billion per movie. And while there is no singular market tracking system for the sale of Buddha statues and trinkets, the global Buddhist supply and lifestyle market has averaged roughly $8 billion to $11 billion annually over the last 17 years. This would add up to an estimated $150 billion to $165 billion in total since 2008, and that market is expected to continue to increase in the years to come.

What is so compelling about these characters that their mere images produce this kind of market force in our economy? To be clear, I don’t know, but I would suggest that like God in the creation story found in Genesis, these characters began with nothing and then created a universe where they had purpose, meaning, and belonging. I would suggest that this is what we seek to imitate, and why we are fascinated with their lives and idealize the legends.

The Buddha was given the name Siddhartha Gautama at birth. He was born a prince and raised in a luxurious palace, explicitly sheltered by his father from seeing any form of human suffering, including his own. Finding no peace within the palace walls, Siddhartha left his life of privilege to witness the life of the common man and to face his own pain. We know the rest of that story. Siddhartha is under the Bodhi tree and finds himself drenched in the unavoidable suffering of being human and from this he experienced Enlightenment and began teaching others to find Enlightenment too. Even if the story is not so well known, the image of the Buddha certainly is one of the most recognizable spiritual images in the secular world. 

What may be less well known is that this narrative of the privileged but neglected child is common among spiritual visionaries. This includes St. Francis of Assisi, who was the son of a wealthy silk merchant and indulged in a youth of fine clothes, partying, and high status, yet lacked real connection with his parental figures and was often alone. St. Clare of Assisi was born into a wealthy, powerful aristocratic family, raised in an Italian palace, and also was left often alone. St. Ignatius of Loyola was born into Spanish nobility, spending his youth as a page and a courtier seeking power through military might; when that failed to meet his genuine need and desire for belonging and meaning, he left it all behind. Muhammad belonged to the Banu Hashim, a highly respected and noble clan of the ruling Quraysh tribe in Mecca, but he was orphaned by all three of his primary attachment figures by the time he was eight-years-old. Before these ordinary humans became spiritual visionaries, their childhoods fostered a growing sensitivity to the hollow nature of their surroundings and to the nothing that echoed within their souls. 

Whether it was the Buddha sensing an underlying lack of peace despite the palace walls, Clare being disturbed by the class disparity around her, or St. Francis escaping the neglect within his home and the violence of war by finding refuge in the natural world, each character in these stories shares a unique crucible of material abundance within an isolating social utopia, interrupted by an intimate experience of human suffering. The friction and conflict led them to the profound existential questions they would wrestle with, receive visions about, and ultimately respond to with courage and compassion.

Likewise, modern superhero mythological characters share a similar narrative. These well-known superhero characters are all orphans who experienced the abrupt, traumatic loss of their biological parents at a young age. Superman (Kal-El) loses his entire birth family (and his entire species) when Krypton explodes, forcing him into an adoptive home from infancy. Batman (Bruce Wayne) suffers acute childhood trauma by witnessing the brutal, senseless murder of his parents in Park Row later known as “Crime Alley”. And finally, Spider-Man (Peter Parker) is left  orphaned as a toddler when his parents die in a plane crash, thrusting him into a kinship foster care system. As we know, Peter Parker’s uncle is also tragically killed and then Peter abandons a real life love to save his Aunt May in one version of the story. Also compelling is the fact that each of these characters has such a trauma-induced, fragmented sense of self that they have two names or two distinct identities as they move through the world. These defining moments for each superhero served as a catalyst for the evolution of their heroism and was the major plot of their life story. Their childhoods did not just give them a backstory; the nothingness they experienced in their unique stories of abandonment provided the blank canvas on which was created the story of good triumphing over evil, and how they transformed pain into power.

Maybe the reason hero movies and Buddha merchandise collectively makes hundreds of billions of dollars a year is because as consumers, in our heart of hearts, we really want more than figures of enlightenment or fantasy entertainment, we need a twin or a partner that we can connect with and mirror in our gallant efforts to discover our own meaning, purpose, and belonging. Maybe through imagined relationships with these mythologized characters, we actually see the real possibility of creating our lives like a work of art, beginning with nothing. Maybe our fascination with their stories is not a pathological defense against terror; perhaps their stories are like stars in a night sky that guide us toward a tangible hope that we too can purposefully create a life of meaning on the blank canvas of our future with confidence that we don’t have to create alone.