Why Making Matters
This blog post was originally given as a talk after lunch at our Creativity and the Life of Prayer Retreat in April.
We have faced the blank page. We have attended to silence. And we have accomplished an incredibly brave thing: we have gotten something on the page. It is not blank anymore—we are free to keep working toward a finished piece, whatever that might be, however many drafts it may take us to get there. We have committed to the creative act, and to whatever it may show us as we follow it through.
At this point it is worthwhile to step back and ask what the creative act means. We have explored what it is and how to enter it. But why is it important? Why does it matter to make things at all?
Let’s turn to Genesis again. I love to imagine God in the newly-created world, still in the throes of making, delighted with a deep delight. His love has just expressed itself in the making of the heavens, in the ordering of light and darkness, earth and sea. Perhaps God knelt close to the loose, reddish, sweet-smelling earth and took a slow, deep breath to inhale its scent. And then, as Genesis tells us, God reached His hands into that warm new earth and began to shape a new creature.
It is always important for us to remember that we are not God, and therefore we cannot create ex nihilo, from nothing. We cannot create creativity itself. This is why it is important for us to follow the pattern of God’s creativity when we make.
When God makes the first human, he does not speak him into existence. Genesis tells us, “the LORD God fashioned the human, humus from the soil, and blew into his nostrils the breath of life, and the human became a living creature.” The making of Eve is similar—when God takes a rib from the first human, he “buil[ds] the rib he had taken from the human into a woman.” Robert Alter, commenting on his translation of these verses, notes that “[build] may seem an odd term for the creation of woman” but it “complements the potter’s term, ‘fashion,’ used for the creation of the first human.”
In other words: When God separates the light from the darkness, and the waters from the land, He does so by speaking. But when He makes humans, He pulls in close to the newly-made earth and digs His hands into it.
The words that describe how God makes humans are words we might recognize as “art words.” When He makes the first man, God acts like a potter; when He makes the first woman, he acts like an architect. To shape a pot or build a house requires an intimacy between the maker and the thing being made suggestive of touch. These metaphors imply that God makes physical contact between His hands and the materials out of which humans are made. He touches and molds earth, breathes life directly into the first human’s nostrils. The creative act is a mode of nearness, of constructive intimacy between God and the materials of creation. It is nothing if not involved.
When we pattern our acts of making after God’s creativity, our acts of creation require us to draw near and “get involved,” too. They compel us to open ourselves to the materials we’re working with, to the subject we are representing, and to the people implicated in what we are making. In other words, the creative act requires us to draw close to reality, accept it as it is (not as we wish it to be), and develop a loving attention to it as we relate to it. This can be realized in art that celebrates what is good, observes beauty, asks hard questions, laments tragedy, investigates mystery, or works out Christ’s gift of redemption in broken things.
Abigail Favale, whose discussion of Genesis we explored this morning, also discusses the Fall in The Genesis of Gender. She observes that the Fall was quite literally a fall: when they ate the fruit, Adam and Eve broke the creative harmony of their relationship with God and each other. They plummeted from the state of exalted, creative union God raised them to when He breathed life into them, falling backward to humanity’s “natural state,” one marked by “disease, decay, and death.” Favale writes, “When the first humans broke faith with God . . . humankind ‘fell’ into mortality, becoming subject to death. The fall is not a plunge from our natural state into a more corrupt, unnatural state: it is a fall from what the [Catholic] Catechism calls ‘the grace of original holiness,’ a reversion to our mortal condition.”
When we practice creativity we are actively seeking to inhabit that “grace of original holiness,” of fruitful union with God and others. We struggle to engage this generative, healing act in a world fraught with sin, death, and decay, but this is precisely why creating is so important. The creative act is of “the New,” as Makoto Fujimura terms it. It is an expression of our yearning for the New Heaven and New Earth. It is a way to receive the gift of the new life resurrected in Christ on Easter. It is a way to participate in the Kingdom of God that has already come and is not yet fully realized on earth.
In Art + Faith, Fujimura writes, “When we make, we invite the abundance of God’s world into the reality of scarcity all about us.” Necessarily, we also invite others to share this abundance with us. The rightly ordered creative act is fundamentally hospitable: it is not a turning inward, but a turning out. It receives abundance in order to give abundance back to God and others. We do not create to better understand or create ourselves. We do it to practice and receive the “givenness” of our lives.
Because of Jesus’s victory over death, our stories cannot end in death. No silence, pain, destruction, or absence committed to Christ’s hands will ever end in nothingness again. He is, after all, our Creator God, our tender Maker who takes nothingness, darkness, and earth into his hands and fashions them into abundant life.
It matters to make things because creativity is one way we receive the gift of Christ’s resurrected and resurrecting life and then actively participate in it. We practice a new and renewing openness to reality. We make gifts of ourselves to God, creation, and each other. Through our creative acts we draw near to reality; steward the earth we were given to care for; and learn to know one another. We let our guard down. We get involved. Our knowledge of God also deepens, sinking from the level of mere cognitive understanding of his attributes to one of experience and embodied practice. As I rely on the Holy Spirit to endue me with creative life, I learn to know God as the One who breathes life into me, right into my nostrils, and I grow closer to Him in a wordless, quiet, attentive form of knowing that is awed by His power, gentleness, and immensity—by the expansiveness of the creative gift He makes known in and through me, and which He uses to invite others into His life.
So, to summarize: When we create we practice the grace of original holiness, which is restored to us in the life of Christ. We receive the gift of life given to us in Christ, and we practice giving it back to God and others. We practice a generative, open presence with reality that transforms us from takers and victims into givers and makers. And we look toward the New Creation with perseverant hope, recognizing that the creative act always has a horizon beyond itself, beyond ourselves, and beyond this place and time.
Next time we must face the blank page, may we not lose hope. May we instead quiet our souls, listen for the Spirit, and receive this simple but astonishing truth: we carry the creative Image of God within us, and we are restored to abundant life in Christ. We are given the gift of our creative vocation to take that life and offer it to all who will receive. We are creative beings. We are made to be makers.