The Spirit of Creativity
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While I believe it is true that no one can take your creativity away from you, there are those who sure try. Take this, for example. I was in my seventh grade art class, where we were working with clay. I don’t exactly remember what the assignment was, I just remember that I was having fun, creating, as I recall, a tiny gas station out of the red clay.
Suddenly the vice-principal, who was wandering through our classroom for some reason, sat down next to me. He looked at my little bits of clay and asked me what was I doing. I explained about my gas station.
“That’s the dumbest idea I’ve ever heard,” he said. “You clearly don’t have much talent, do you?”
I felt as if I’d been punched. I can still feel the anger and the shame that was in my seventh grade heart. I knew I wasn’t much good at art. I never could draw, but I liked working with clay. Somehow the three dimensional aspect made it easier for me. But after that day I never made anything. My creative spark was effectively doused.
Nevertheless, I believe art and religion are powerfully connected. One source that helped me to understand this was a book written many years ago by the writer Chaim Potok. In My Name is Asher Lev the title character is a Hasidic Jew, born in Brooklyn shortly after the Second World War and the Holocaust. His father is a traveler who moves around the world trying to save Jews from the fate of the six million. It is serious business.
When Asher Lev is born, it is assumed he will follow in his father’s footsteps. But instead, Asher discovers in himself the gift of art. Not just talent or skill; Asher Lev is blessed (or cursed) with an extraordinary gift to draw and paint—at a level not unlike the young Mozart’s gift for music. Asher Lev’s artistic ability made him suspect in the conservative religious community where he was born and raised.
Yet the boy could not deny the call to his art. He knew his father didn’t understand it. He felt his mother’s pain as she tried to encourage him without angering her husband. He bore the taunts of his classmates. He did so because he could not deny the powerful force that was his artistic creativity. When, for a short period, he gave up his art, it almost killed him. Only when he answered the call could he become whole, and grow into his humanness, even at the cost of great pain to himself, his family and his community.
At the end of the book, he finds he has to leave his religious community, at least for a while. Chaim Potok writes, in the voice of Asher Lev:
I looked at my right hand, the hand with which I painted. There was power in that hand. Power to create and destroy.… There was in that hand the demonic and the divine at the same time. The demonic and divine were two aspects of the same force. Creation was demonic and divine. Creativity was demonic and divine. Art was demonic and divine.… I was demonic and divine. Asher Lev paints good pictures and hurts people he loves.
He then hears the voice of God reply, “Then be a great painter, Asher Lev; that will be the only justification for all the pain you will cause… Journey with me, my Asher. Paint the anguish of all the world. Let people see the pain.”
Asher Lev does so, even though to answer the call of his art is excruciating. He discovers that through his call to creativity he becomes fully human, and also fully connected to the divine. Creativity, as Asher Lev discovered, is not always something that moves easily through us. Creativity requires a willingness to take risks.
It is tempting to hide our creativity in a box, and never take it out for others to see or experience. But I believe that taking the risk to share ourselves with others in creative ways is a profoundly spiritual process.
One Sunday in the church I served, I chose to sing a solo. When I had practiced earlier that week, it had gone perfectly. But there, in front of God and everybody, as it were, I failed to find my starting note. Not once, but twice. Finally, I had to ask the pianist for the note. He obliged, I sang, and after I finished I felt that familiar sense of shame. I had failed.
I waited in trepidation to hear comments after the service. To my surprise (and great relief!) several people came up to me to tell me how much my perceived failure had touched them. They appreciated me for taking the risk and for not giving up. They knew what I had forgotten—that taking a creative risk is always worth it, even if at first it feels like failure.
Our spirituality is, I believe, that part of our being which is continually evolving and growing in response to the world around us and the world within us. If we stifle our creativity, we run the risk of smothering our spirits. Spirit needs the lively interaction of creative hearts and hands and minds to keep it alive and growing. People can actually die when deprived of beauty. And I have seen the spiritual death that occurs when people lose (or have forced out of them) the ability to be creative.
So I challenge us all to take the risk of being creative, and let’s see what it does for our spirits. May we be blessed with an abundance of creativity, and use it to make this world just a little more beautiful, a little more exciting, a little more whole.
Barbara has a Master of Divinity degree (granted in 1985) and a Doctor of Ministry degree (granted in 2007) from Meadville/Lombard Theological School. She is a “homebred” UU whose father was also a UU minister.
Barbara has served in leadership positions on UUA and UUMA committees and was active within both the Pacific Northwest District and the Joseph Priestly District. She has led worship services at General Assembly, was the 25 year speaker at the annual gathering of UU ministers at General Assembly in 2010 and has spoken at many large gatherings of UUs across the country. She is considered an expert in UU worship and teaches worship and preaching skills to ministers, seminarians, and lay people.
Outside of the church, Barbara has volunteered in food banks and prisons, continues to participate actively in community theatre and musical groups and reads a lot of mystery novels. She is a loving sister and aunt and has many good friends. She and husband Jaco have been married since 1990 and have just retired to Bellingham, WA where they live in the Bellingham Co-Housing Community with their cat, Sophia Lion Paws.
- The Spirit of Creativity - April 1, 2017
- Both Whole and Healing - March 1, 2014
- What’s Broken is Brilliant - March 1, 2012
