The Unitarian Universalist Congregation of Salem, Oregon

Publications

Creativity: Where the Human and the Divine Meet

by Kate Lore

UUCS August 20, 2006

To set the tone for today’s sermon, imagine for a moment that vital, expressive energy is flowing everywhere. Its vibrancy is all around us. It pours in through this stained glass window; it emanates from the magnificent art that surrounds us. It shines forth from the plants that have been so lovingly tended by our landscape volunteers—and sparks brightly whenever we sing a hymn together.  The universe is sparkling with this generative power. It is the medium for the existence of life; we know it as creativity.

How can we tap into its source? Do we have to take art classes to unleash it?  Or can we simply sip from this wellspring on our own?  And if we are able to connect with creativity, what then can we do with this power?  Can we heal ourselves with it?  Can we heal the world with it?  These are some of the questions for the sermon today. 

When I was a child, I was considered creative. I loved to draw and paint and spent long hours at it. My family was certain I would grow up to be an artist someday.  Even though we didn’t have much money, my extended family always made sure I had plenty of art supplies.  It was how they demonstrated their love for me, as well as their belief that I had something to offer the world.

I’ll never forget my sense of delight when Mom came home one day with a special gift for me.  It was an 8-sided table painted red like a stop sign. It was about 6 feet in width but only a foot and a half off of the ground. I don’t know what it was originally designed for; it was somebody else’s cast-off. But my mom had realized how perfect it would be for her budding young artist.  She sat it down right in the middle of a not-so-large living room and there it stayed for years on end: the center for all my art projects.   I loved that table, and how I could spread my things out with abandon and without fear that something would be stepped on.  It was probably the best gift my mother ever gave me.

Now let’s fast-forward a few years, past those creative grade school years to being stuck in a very uninspiring 7^th grade art class.  The teacher is a severe and unhappy person who evokes fear in just about everyone.  She has no humor, nor any obvious love—nor even like—of children. “Art,” says she, “takes discipline: Lots and lots of discipline.”

All of us 7^th graders know the drill by now.  We are to remain absolutely silent during her class; offenders had their knuckles rapped with a ruler.  And we must learn how to create art by practicing shapes and replicating techniques, over and over again. 

Until this point, watercolor had been my favorite medium. I loved the surprises that come with it. It was as if the paint, water and I were all equal co-creators of the final painting. It was free, fun and flowing. The teacher, however, was not impressed. She told me that I needed to do a better job of controlling my process.  Instead of letting water create new shapes and colors, I needed to paint a small portion, then let it dry, then paint some more, and let it dry again.  It was no fun.

To make matters worse, she was also a great fan of peer evaluations.  Every time we did an art project, we had to critique and rate each other’s work: from best to worst.  Although my art usually got high marks, my soul rebelled against this competitive process.  It simply felt like sacrilege to me.   

Some may think I was too sensitive, and that the teacher was just doing her job with middle school students.  Some may believe that cultivating artistic skill does require repetition and competition.  Well, perhaps they are right, and we can discuss it during the congregational response. But this does not reflect my understanding, since that one class led to me to give up art for almost 30 years. 

I was lucky in that I had other areas in which I could be creative. I sang in the church choir, for instance, and played the piano and guitar. Yet I wonder what creative opportunities were lost to me because a clumsy teacher took it upon herself to take the fun and the spirit out of art.

What her teaching did to me (and others have perhaps done to you, I expect) was not only insensitive and wrong-headed. I think it arrested part of my spiritual development. Now, these are strong words, but I believe they’re true. In my mind, the creative spark that leads to art of all kinds is not simply talent or skill. That spark of creativity is both holy and one of the most important elements of our humanity.

The human spirit is blessed with extraordinary creativity, through which some of the best elements of human beings emerge. And when we take the risk to open ourselves to deeper and more challenging creativity, we become better and more spiritually centered people.

I am aided in this understanding by Matthew Fox, a former Dominican father who was forced out of the Catholic Church and became an Episcopal priest. In his book, Original Blessing, he wrote that we are co-creators with God, and that it is in the creative process that we can touch holiness and become one with the divine. He challenges us to throw out our pre-conceived notions of art –that the artist must be very talented or professional—and instead seek to discover the artistic creator that lives in each of us.

Matthew Fox laments the tendency in the West to make art the purview of professionals. He reminds us that in the not so distant past, people had little opportunity to simply ‘watch’ or ‘listen’ to music or paintings or dance or theatre. Before the advent of recording devices, most people made their own music, learned to draw and dance, and used their creativity in a variety of simple ways. Today much of our creative spirit has been dampened by the tendency to think we have to be talented or strive for perfection in our creative endeavors.

It’s a powerful message and one worth reiterating. The act of creation—whether a painting, a poem, a dance, a sermon, a lesson plan, or even a government report(!) –the act of creation is one of the most spiritual things we can do. Why? Because our spirituality is the part of our being, which is continually evolving and growing in response to the world both in and outside of us. If we stifle our creativity, we run the risk of smothering our spirits.

Spirit needs the lively interaction of creative hearts, hands, and minds to keep it alive and growing.  As someone once said:

When our hearts open [to art], magic happens.  Intuitive wisdom comes calling, creativity flows, our presence becomes a force for healing, and the very air in the room becomes charged with possibility.

As a parent, I’ve been adamant that my sons feel free to create.   We did art with abandon every day when they were preschoolers.  And when they went off to grade school, I went with them as a volunteer art teacher in their school.  My favorite grade to work with was kindergarten.  At this young age the artistic minds of children are still wide open.  The girls hadn’t yet learned that they were supposed to draw unicorns and flowers and houses.  The boys had not yet honed their skills at drawing the predictable jet plane and army tank.  No, these little 5- and 6-years olds are still free of all of that and consequently create the most remarkable art.  Teaching, the act of unleashing these kids, was probably the most rewarding volunteer work I’ve ever done.  Not only did I help kids connect to their own inner artists, I reconnected with my own inner artist as well.   

The Unitarian Universalist Association believes its ministerial candidates must be open to art to be effective. Anyone being welcomed into our ministry is asked to demonstrate competency in the arts.  If the candidate is deemed incompetent in this area, classes in creativity are required before the MFC will even consider admission again. The arts are simply that important.  This requirement has proven to be very challenging to many seminarians: Engaging in creative arts requires a ‘letting go’ – not always an easy thing for us UUs to do.  But when we do ‘let go’ to release the barriers of self that keep us separate and seemingly in control, we allow an entirely new and vital energy of passion to surge through us, with a feeling of connection to the Mystery.  

When we allow creativity its appropriate place in our lives and culture, our education and family relationships, we allow healing to happen at the most profound level. The intimacy of creativity corresponds to mystical experience. Mysticism, after all, bespeaks union, and there is an ongoing union of us and the Divine precisely during the process of giving birth to any art form whatsoever. We move into timeless time and placeless space during the creative state. Afterwards we know we have tasted something worth remembering, something that will last.

Now the curious truth about this day and age is that our creativity —both its divine and its destructive capacities—is so powerful right now, so unprecedented that it has eclipsed evolution in terms of determining our liklihood of survival. Scientists now tell us that our culture is moving and changing at so rapid a pace that it has far outrun and outstripped the natural processes of change and adaptation. This means we are already ‘playing God’ whether we want to or not—whether we admit it or not.  Our creativity has taken over the process of evolution on this planet. 

So, how are we doing?  As I mentioned in my sermon on Hopeful Trends a couple of weeks ago, I take great hope in the expressions of creativity emerging in our society today.  But I think we could still do a better job focusing our energies on peace, justice and sustainability – for these tasks are still within our reach.  That’s what I love about creativity: the possibilities are limitless!

African-American author bell hooks agrees.  In a recent magazine article, she tells us that these times are calling out for an “aesthetic revolution.” She proposes we now have an opportunity to create new and unheard-of connections between classes and differing races and cultures by way of the arts. Hooks argues that on the terrain of creativity and culture, one can participate in critical dialogue with anyone. She writes:

It’s exciting to think, write, talk about and create art that reflects passionate engagement with popular culture, because this may very well be THE central future location of resistance struggle, a meeting place where new and radical happenings can occur.

Hooks, in other words, is advocating creativity and imagination for social transformation. 

I concur. I do not see any way out of humankind’s multiple dilemmas except that one route that got us here in the first place: our capacity to imagine and create. How to apply our creativity at the service of justice and compassion is the lesson taught by all spiritual traditions, and it is the lesson of survival for our times.

I find it interesting that psychologist Otto Rank saw creativity as so basic to the essence of our humanity that he, in effect, substituted the human creative impulse—the drive for production—for Freud’s emphasis on sexuality and reproduction. For Rank, at the heart of our dignity lies our power of creativity, where the human being “actually moves from creature to creator, in the ideal case, creator of himself, his own personality.” Our ultimate act of creativity, then, is giving birth to who we are.

Because creativity is central to our hearts and souls, Rank puts it at the same level as love itself as a sign of our health and well-being. Creativity and relationship, art and love, express our deepest beings, and what they share in common is that they take us both into the void and beyond it in a kind of ceaseless rhythm of birth and rebirth. This is where creativity engages the Divine. For the very essence of our humanity, our souls, which the artist puts into his or her work and is represented by it, is found again in the work by the ‘enjoyer’ (the one who experiences it).   So art evokes soul-to-soul connection; it is a spiritual experience.

So, dear ones, let us all take the risk of being creative to see what it does to our spirits. If we can recognize that each of us will express creativity in our own unique ways, if we can take failure with good humor, learn from our mistakes, and keep trying new things, maybe we can imagine ourselves into a new level of peace and love.

It is my hope that our church can be a community where our imperfect but creative spirits can find a home. May this church be a place where everyone can bring their whole selves, where we can touch the deep spirit of creativity and make it come alive. What we create in our individual lives matters—what we create here matters, too. May we be blessed with an abundance of creativity, using it to make this world just a little more beautiful, a little more exciting, a little more whole.

May it be so.  Amen