“Imitating Creativity”

Thursday September 30, 2010

Psalm 19

Over the past weeks, we have been contemplating different dimensions of the strange but repeated biblical invitation to shape our lives and our spirituality in imitation of God’s nature and attributes – the passage from Ephesians which invites us to ‘be imitators of God’; the passage from the Gospel of Matthew in which Jesus invites his followers to seek to be perfect as God is perfect; the passage from John’s Gospel in which Jesus himself invites his followers to love one another as he loved them.

The invitation that I would offer for our reflections today is a slightly different type of imitation – that is, the call to imitate God’s creativity.

Our reading from Genesis is drawn from the very opening verses of the biblical canon.  It recounts the first of two creation narratives that are recorded in the opening chapters of Genesis, with its description of the formation of the world – and the universe – as an act in seven parts, culminating in a time of rest.  The portrait that is presented of creation, in this account, is an interesting one – that is, that creation was the result of God’s power being exercised over the primal disorder and chaos of the world; that creation was good; that creation was ordered and that the rhythm of work and rest was intended to be an essential movement in the creative process.

These verses from Genesis, as we all know, have been the source and subject of a great deal of controversy over the past years.  Disputes about how literally these passages should be taken have resulted in the perception that there is a divisive and unnecessary conflict with the insights of science. 

Rather than wading into that particular debate today, I would invite us to shift our perspective on this text, if only slightly.  That is, I would invite us to ponder what these texts are inviting us to learn and to believe about God, and what implications those insights might have for our lives and for our spirituality.

And what is interesting for us to realize, as we do so, is that these passages suggest that before all else, God is creative.  Before any mention is made, in the Bible, about God’s judgement, God’s love, God’s goodness, God’s rules, what is suggested is that God’s nature is fundamentally creative.

And that creativity results in beauty, shape, order and goodness being brought into the disordered chaos of the world.

As we ponder this divine creativity, it is interesting for us to notice that this text does not suggest that nothing existed before this account of creation – to the contrary, the texts suggest that there a physical world before creation, but that it was a formless void and that darkness covered the face of the deep.

According to this account of creation, therefore, God’s creativity was not revealed in bringing existence ex nihilo or out of nothing, but rather bringing order and light to a disordered physical world.  Like an artist who takes existing globs of paint and moves them around the canvas until they have formed a stunning painting; or like a musician who takes sounds and silence, chords and notes and fashions them into a symphony; or like a sculptor who takes a piece of stone and chips away all that is not the statue that the stone contains, the divine creativity was revealed in this act of taking formless chaos and fashioning, from it, a world of light and beauty.

But there are other clues about this movement from chaos to creation that are woven into the text itself – and we come to realize this fact in an even greater way when we consider the culture and world-view of those who wrote these texts. We must remember, for example, that the ancient Israelites were never a sea-going people – and in many places throughout the biblical texts, the image of the sea is an image that represents danger, threat and chaos – as it does in these opening verses of Genesis. 

This same use of the metaphor of water as a sign of chaos is woven through many other part of the biblical canon.  In parting the waters of the Red Sea on the journey out of Egypt, the writers were attempting to point us toward the claim that God’s guidance – even as it led them into the wilderness – had power over the threats and dangers that otherwise would have drowned them and washed them away.  The stories about Jesus walking on the water, giving the disciples the power to walk on the water, and stilling the winds and waves were all stories that were trying to remind the readers that faith in Christ could offer them the ability to triumph over the raging chaos of the world – to weather the storms of life without sinking.   This use of the sea as a metaphor for chaos and danger continues even into the final verses of the Bible, when the author of the Book of Revelation writes, “then I saw a new heaven and a new earth; for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and the sea was no more.” It is only when we realize that the sea had been a metaphor for danger and chaos, from the opening verses of the Bible, that we begin to realize that the author of Revelation was using this strange reference to the sea being no more as a sign that in the new creation, all chaos, disorder, threat and danger was going to be wiped away.

It is also both important and interesting for us to realize, in today’s reading from Genesis, that the Hebrew words in verse 2 that are translated into English as “a wind from God” are the words ruach elohim.  These same words – which can legitimately be translated as the wind, or breath, or spirit of God – are used a bit later when the act of creating the humans is being described.  The humans, it is suggested, did not come to life until the “ruach elohim” was breathed into them.  The breath of life, combined with the dust of the earth, were the essential gifts for the formation of life.

The passage that we read today, therefore, intends us to realize that when the spirit of God, the ruach elohim, blows across the chaos of the world, creation – in all its wonder, its diversity, its beauty and its goodness – comes into being. 

When we realize this important theological claim about God, we begin to catch sight of a very important dimension of Christian spirituality – and it is a dimension of our spirituality that is sometimes overlooked and forgotten. 

That is, Christian spirituality invites us to ponder the fact that the expression and cultivation of creativity is at the very core of what it means to be human, to be a being created in the image of God.  The Genesis accounts suggest that the definition of a human is a creature that is formed from the dust of the earth and the breath of God – the ruach elohim -  the creative spirit.  Christian spirituality invites us to ponder the fact that a part of God’s invitation to us, in this world, is to find ways to take what is formless, void, chaotic, threatening, and meaningless, and make things that are beautiful, ordered, and lovely. 

So when was the last time that we did something truly creative?  When was the last time that we picked up an instrument and fashioned notes into a piece of music that has never, in the history of the world, ever been heard before?  When was the last time that we took a pencil and arranged words into some poem or sentence or story that has never been read before?  When was the last time that we picked up a paintbrush and arranged the paint into a vision that has never been seen before?

And when was the last time that we pondered the fact that places of disorder, of chaos, of uncertainty and of threat might very well be transformed not by violence, not by force, not by law – but by creativity and by beauty? 

One of the greatest threats to creativity, of course, is the voice of self-criticism and judgement that we render on our own work and on the work of others.  We hide our creativity; we feel sheepish about sharing something that we have done with another; and, worst of all, we hold back from doing creative things because we do not feel that we are good enough to make something beautiful.

But, again, this passage from Genesis invites us to imitate God’s own reflections on creation.  Repeated, frequently, throughout this narrative is a short but powerful statement – God saw that it was good.  God saw that it was good.  And finally in verse 31, we read, “God saw everything that he had made, and indeed it was very good.”

The theological implication of this is quite intriguing – when creativity reigns over chaos, when order is brought out of disorder, when beauty is revealed in places which had previously been formless voids, it is good.  This not only the story of creation, it is the story of the Gospel itself – the triumph of life over death, the triumph of love over hatred, the triumph of the first-born of the new creation over the negative and destructive powers of this world, the triumph of Christ over the cross.

So, today, I leave us all with a challenge.  In the coming days, or weeks, find some way to be creative as a spiritual act.  And whether you share that act of creativity with others, or whether you keep it for your own enjoyment, do so in a way that is not dominated or diminished by voices of criticism and negativity – whether those voices are from others or from ourselves – but rather allow a different voice to be heard.

When you are finished your act of creation, look at it, smile, give thanks for the presence of God’s creative spirit at work within you, and say to yourself, “indeed, it is very good.”