The Creative Act
This blog post was originally given as a talk after morning prayer at our Creativity and the Life of Prayer Retreat in April.
In the next three blog posts, we will consider what I call “the creative act.” Before we dive in, let’s ask a question that may seem obvious: What is the creative act?
Our cultural context abounds with many attempts to define creativity. Artists are often revered as somehow “other” than the rest of us. They are regarded as conduits of genius that people who are “not artists” can never hope to attain. But this assumes an ability to be creative is a form of self-originating genius that only a few people have. It regards the artist as the source of her own creative power, and suggests she can use it to construct and define herself on her own terms. This understanding of creativity is incompatible with a Christian worldview, in which we understand all that is—all life, all goodness, all ability—to be gifted to us by God.
What, then, is the Christian response to these ideas? What does it mean to be creative as God understands creativity?
Here is my claim: In the Christian framework, the “creative act” is any act that seeks to participate in the fruitful tension between sameness and difference—of cultivating relationship across separation, life out of emptiness, order out of chaos, nearness to what is other. It can be discerned in actions ranging from a child’s attempt to make a finger painting of his dog to an accountant’s ability to craft a spreadsheet that effectively organizes her financial data. To engage in the creative act is to seek to name reality well, to converse with it, to facilitate a healing relationship with it, and ultimately to invite others to share in the fruitful tension of our human ability to commune with ourselves, others, and God.
To deepen our understanding of this, let’s turn to Genesis.
Genesis 2:5 states that there were not yet plants growing out of the earth when God moved to make the first human, “for the LORD God had not caused rain to fall on the earth and there was no human to till the soil.” Only once he has made the first human does God cause the garden to grow, place the human there, and make the animals: “And the LORD God planted a garden in Eden, to the east . . . And the LORD God took the human and set him down in the garden of Eden to till it and watch it.”
Here, we see that humanity’s vocation has involved creativity since the moment we took our first breath. Adam’s first tasks were to tend to the Garden and name the animals. When Eve is created, she is called to share this work with Adam, and the two of them are also called to a particular form of fruitfulness together—to engage the immensely creative act of bringing forth children and parenting the human race.
In The Genesis of Gender, Abigail Favale discusses what she calls the “fruitful tension” that exists between the first two humans due to their maleness and femaleness. Adam and Eve are alike and different, and it is the balance between their sameness and difference that makes it possible for them to exist in creative community. This “fruitful tension” has a unique form in the male/female marital relationship but, as Favale acknowledges, it also exists in other human relationships: “There are all kinds of differences among human beings: differences in size, temperament, gifts, complexion. These differences can help create fruitful and vibrant relationships and communities.” Her observation intimates a significant truth—namely, that creativity begins with some kind of difference or perceived tension, and often sustains it in a manner that is, in some way, artful. Creativity can certainly be a means by which we work out redemption in harmful or harmed tensions, but difference and tension are not necessarily negative. In fact, they can be generative.
Think of Adam’s exclamation when he meets Eve. This is perhaps the first poem ever uttered by a human and is, at its core, a celebration of an encounter with difference. Adam is celebrating the creative possibilities opened by the fact that he and Eve share their humanity, equal dignity, and are called to be co-laborers, but in ways unique to the differences between their genders. The generative, creative joy of their relationship will in large part be sustained by a curious, hopeful outworking of how they are alike and different.
Creativity is written into what we are as human beings. It is essential to our relationships, and to our vocation on this earth. We were fashioned specifically to steward life, help it grow, cultivate its beauty, and facilitate a relationship with it by giving it a name. As Makoto Fujimura claims in Art + Faith, “to be human is to be creative.” It is to live in a state of “fruitful tension” with God, each other, and the created world.
How do we participate in this fruitful tension? Where do we start?
Art is one way. And as any artist will tell you, the first step in every creative act involves the seemingly impossible: facing the blank page and putting something on it.
The moment in which we face the void of that blank page is an inescapable, necessary part of making anything. This is true mostly for practical reasons: before I pen any words, the page is blank. I have to stare at it before I start writing. But this can feel, simply put, awful—like trying to light a fire in the rain with damp kindling.
This blank page moment echoes the initial creative act in an interesting way. Think of the first verses in the Bible, which Robert Alter translates this way: “When God began to create heaven and earth, and the earth was then welter and waste and darkness over the deep and God’s breath hovering over the waters, God said, ‘Let there be light.’” Or the NKJV—“The earth was without form, and void; and darkness was on the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God was hovering over the face of the waters.”
We live in a world that, due to sin, oppression, physical infirmity, emotional distress—you name it—often feels like that unformed “void,” that “welter and waste and darkness.” When we face these things, we must remember that we are not God, and therefore cannot create ex nihilo, from nothing. We cannot solve them on our own. Similarly, we cannot fill the void of the blank page on our own power. But as we have discussed, we were created to be creative, and the emptiness of that “welter and waste and darkness” still cries out for a creative act to answer it.
As in the life of prayer, when we find ourselves facing and bewildered by darkness, emptiness, the unformed void, we must begin by casting ourselves upon the creative strength of the Holy Spirit, who hovered over those waters in the beginning. Which is to say: the best thing we can do to engage the first step in the creative act is to stop talking, stop worrying about our lack of strength, and stop trying to find power within ourselves. We must accept the silence of that unformed void for what it is, accept our weakness before it, and listen for the presence of the Spirit within it.
We must practice a quietness akin to what the Orthodox tradition calls hesychia. Father Stephen Freeman, an Orthodox priest, defines hesychia in this way:
“. . . a quiet, not just of the mind but of the body as well, the silencing of the noise within us. . . . Hesychia is by no means a passive approach to the world. . . . it prefers the sound of God and the work of God to that of the self or humanity in general. It listens. . . . It says ‘yes’ to God and ‘yes’ to life.”
In other words, we must shut up and show up. We must set aside distractions, solutions, and any tools we might use to numb our fear of our own powerlessness. We must also relinquish our felt need to resolve the tension by doing something about it—fixing the problem, getting the thing created, getting past this scary emptiness. Instead, we must deepen our presence in and attention to the silence we don’t understand and can’t solve on our own.
This silence is our entrance into the “fruitful tension” of our relationship with reality. It is a gift, an opportunity to make space for God to meet us as we are and give us His creativity.
In the process of art-making, or of making anything, the moment of silence we share with the blank page might be long, short, or somewhere in between. But it is a crucial moment, and we avoid it at our peril. It is here that we submit our work to the movement of the Spirit, to the life Christ is making real in us, and to the nature of the creativity that is part of His Image in us.
Select sources:
All quotations from Genesis are taken from Robert Alter’s translation of the Hebrew Scriptures, unless otherwise specified.
The Genesis of Gender, Abigail Favale
Art and Faith, Makoto Fujimura