Why Create?
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I’ve been working on a poem for months. I know it needs work, and I’m not always sure I’m up to the task. But I keep working at it, even if for a few minutes a day. Creative projects like this raise a good question: Why create?
Our creativity helps us explore the meaning found in knowing we are made by a creative God. Through creativity, we imagine and make as a way of participating in the joy of meaning-making.
Makoto Fujimura is one artist who works to help us see the relationship between our Christian faith and creativity. In Art and Faith: A Theology of Making, he connects art to “making” in general to encompass all our creative acts as a form of art and making. In this way, we “make” by attending to the needs of the world—for some that means caring and cooking and others its writing and painting as well as anything in between. Our creativity and creative imagination are part of how we draw closer to God. He says, “Imagination is a gift given to us by the Creator to steward, a gift that no other creature under heaven and earth (as far as I know) has been given.”
In this way creatives often minister through their art. In Thy Olive Tree’s Fiat Self-Publishing Academy, we had a live interview in February with Charbel Raish, Founder of Parousia Media, who discussed this topic of ministry-building. He focused on discernment and recognizing our God-given desires and gifts. We all have gifts, but if we resist trying something new or challenging ourselves to bring an idea to fruition, we are withholding a gift that could be meant to transform another.
Beauty is often the medium for reaching others because God is beauty. We are poetic beings, and beauty offers us a language to encounter, revel in, and wonder about mystery and the abundance of the world God created. St. Augustine laments in Book X of the Confessions of Saint Augustine, “Late have I loved thee, O beauty ever ancient, ever new.” Beauty, in this sense, also has the capacity to transcend time and place through its imaginative power and the meaning it conveys.
Creative work is also work for the soul. In putting words to a blank page or mixing matter to develop colors, creativity is an exercise in bringing wholeness to things that are broken and scattered. This might be why we hear words like “shaping” and “molding” when it comes to child-raising, which is a creative act that takes constant imagination, and, of course, love.
William Blake wrote something that I had to read quite a few times to wrap my head around: “A Poet, a Painter, a Musician, an Architect; the man or woman who is not one of these is not a Christian.” Fujimura explains a paradox that underlies what Blake is saying: “Unless we become makers in the image of the Maker, we labor in vain.” This is where discernment comes in because we need to learn how to give up our creative desires to co-create as little-‘a’ artists called to share in this work with God, which means making “with, and through, the fruit of the Spirit.”
To Ponder:
1. How do you see yourself as a “maker”?
2. How does your making draw you closer to God?
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