Photo by James Steaky courtesy of Wikipedia

In reference to an angel he carved for Saint Domenic’s tomb (the total project was a massive undertaking of multiple artists spanning 500 years), Michaelangelo made his famous remark,

I saw the angel in the marble and carved until I set him free.

When we think of artists, we think of someone who is creative. The word “creative” implies making something from nothing, but that is part of art’s illusion. It’s a sleight of hand performed by the master artist. The hard work of making art is uncovering an ancient beauty buried beneath layers of sediment. It’s less magic and more archeology. This is also the hard work of business leaders, ministers and the talented sommelier at your favorite restaurant because, as Seth Godin has stated in his manifesto and book, we are all artists.

For those of us not carving marble this means penetrating the layers of mediocrity, compromise, bureaucracy and apathy that have covered over the masterpiece inside our work. But before we can do that, we must see the angel in the marble. This is the vision and inspiration that guides our hands and motivates our arms to continue hammering the chisel through the resistance.

There is something divine trapped in the banal. As Richard Rohr states,

Everything is profane if you live on the surface of it, and everything is sacred if you go into the depths of it…

So the world now is calling us all to a sacred (but hard) work of seeing the angels in the marble and carving, carving, carving until we set them free so we’re no longer the only ones who see them.