Becoming Like Christ: Being Creative
Wednesday, March 17
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Becoming Like Christ:
Being Creative
Psalm 8
Rev. Shelley Woodruff
I am not a terribly creative person. At least I have never considered myself to be a creative person.
I do love to do creative things; however, I need to stick with creative outlets that have clear rules and patterns. I avoid artistic endeavors that require the artist to work with intuition and trust just as much as with paint or clay or pencil. I knit with a pattern. I cross-stitch with a diagram. I cook with a recipe. Give me a set of rules and a plan and then I feel much more at ease with the creative process.
At our church’s women’s retreat last year, our very own Ms. Kay gathered us ladies under an open-air pavilion in the north GA mountains to walk us through painting images of flowers. We had so much to fill our time during this retreat—we did yoga, engaged in Bible studies, participated in wellness talks, and had lots of time to chat—but the art lessons were the only portion of the weekend that instilled anxiety in my heart.
Being creative in front of others was overwhelming and intimidating. I walked into the weekend steadying myself for a healthy dose of public humility and readied my best self-deprecating jokes.
Imagine my surprise when Ms. Kay began her art class with rules. Patterns. She taught us which colors complemented each other and how certain color combinations achieved different moods. She explained where to position the image on the canvas to make the rest of the picture “work.” She patiently explained how to layer each component of the image so that each step slowly created the final, imagined picture.
Creativity can begin with rules
I am sure that there are painters out in the world who are intuitive and confident in their body’s ability to manifest what their brain sees. I am sure that the greatest artists do not need to reduce their craft to the most basic set of steps and patterns; however, I realized in that mountain art class that creativity can at least start with and embrace rules.
Why this was a revelation is still a mystery. After all, I used to play jazz. The best improvisation solo mesmerizes with its playfulness—with the way it bends notes and scales to make you hear and feel those notes anew.
But the best improviser stays within the “rules” and confines of a certain key. He or she has already tried out different riffs during hours and hours of practice and knows full well what combination of notes and rhythms will work together.
Jazz takes the same 8 notes and plays them in a new way. Painting takes the same colors and rules of perspective and light to illustrate some new beauty. Sculpting takes trusted and known substances and molds them within the laws of physics to shape something true. Even knitting takes the same few stitches to slowly build a new structure out of a single string.
How God creates
Recently, I heard someone say that only God creates—we just get to play around with what God has created and make something look different.
Lent never fails to remind me of two important truths.
I’m not God.
There are rules.
I am not God
God doesn’t need to work with a diagram or a set of steps. God speaks and matter comes into being. God imagines it and water and land separate. God wills it and lights appear in the sky. God desires it and human beings become bones and breath.
Yes, we are co-creators with the Creator itself but we are not on the same plane. “When I look at your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars that you have established; what are human beings that you are mindful of them, mortals that you care for them?” the psalmist wrote all those years ago.
The Lenten journey reminds me daily of our human frailty, or our nagging imperfections and bold rebellions, of our utter inability to measure up to the kind of love that is heaped upon us each and every day by a God who will not let us go.
Lent reminds me that, although we are creat-ive, we can never be Creat-or.
There are rules
And the second reminder is that there are rules. Scripture readings during Lent have pointed us back to Moses and the Ten Commandments carved on stone, to the prophets pleading with their people to turn toward God, to new versions of ancient Covenants that demand relationship, and to the teachings of Jesus himself, which call us to a life of faith led by disarming love.
A life of faith requires something of us. Being in a relationship with a holy, Creator God expects us to not be perfect, but certainly to be present and oriented towards the cross.
One way to see these rules—these requirements—is as restrictions.
Yet another way to see them is as the very substances by which we are enabled to live creative lives that illuminate beauty in new ways. This covenantal hold that God has on us provides us the scale by which we can improvise something that captures the heart. God’s ideals for our lives give us the color palette and perspective to resemble God’s beauty in this world.
We, being not-God, can never create out of a void. But we have before us all of the materials and mediums the eye can behold to paint a world that illuminates God’s Kingdom for all of humanity.
In that art class, I learned that patterns and rules are there to move me toward creativity. They liberate me to put brush to canvas and begin to fill up the white space with something new.
I learn during Lent that God’s ideals and expectations for those who God covenants with—the kind of relationship implicated in a life of discipleship—move us toward creativity. They liberate us to put life to the world and fill up the gray space with light.
About “Becoming Like Christ” (Weekly Lenten Reflections)
In 2019, we developed a 7-week long series packed full of devotions called “Exploring Humanity and Divinity.” It was about wrestling with our humanity as we seek to be transformed into the likeness of Christ.
After a tumultuous last year, and with tensions high on political, cultural, and social levels, it seems that “wrestling” is just as relevant today as it was two years ago.
In that spirit, we believed it would be healthy to resurrect a similar theme to this year’s Lenten devotional series: Becoming Like Christ.