by Rev. Kate Lore

To set the tone for today’s sermon, imagine for a moment that vital, expressive energy is flowing everywhere. It emanates from this pulpit and the wooden arch that frames it.  It shines forth when the bell ringers share their syncopated magic and when we sing a hymn together.  The universe is sparkling with this generative power. It is, in fact, the medium for the existence of life. 

In our responsive reading this morning, we touched upon it.  In that Hindu scripture, it had the name of Brahman – which is the infinite, immanent, and transcendent reality that is the Divine Ground of everything in and beyond this Universe.  In today’s sermon, I will refer to it as creativity: a more familiar term—yet no less holy—as I will soon explain.

Let me start with a personal story.  Like many of us, I was considered creative when I was a child. I loved to draw and paint and spent long hours at it—much to the delight of my family.   One could not have asked for a more supportive environment for a budding young artist.  Everything I created was met with praise and my works were put on display around our house for years on end.    It was a pretty ideal home for nurturing creativity.

Now let us flash forward a few years.  While I believe it is true that no one can take your creativity away from you, there are those who sure try.   For me, it was my 7th grade art teacher. The teacher was a severe and unhappy person who evoked fear in just about everyone.  She had no humor, nor any obvious love of children--clearly not an appropriate candidate for working with pre-adolescents.

“Art,” said she, “requires supreme discipline: If you want to become artistic, you must learn the drills.”  Thus, we were forced to remain absolutely silent during class time.  I think there is a time and place for silence if there is some purpose for it.  In this case, however, it seemed to be used to control us—and, perhaps, to take the fun out of art. 

We spent week after week silently practicing shapes and replicating techniques.  Heaven help the maverick who surrendered to an impulse to break out of the featured form or to share words with a neighbor.  The teacher’s punishments were swift and severe.

Up until this point, watercolor had been my favorite medium. It was fun and flowing and I loved the surprises that came with it.  With watercolor, my art did not feel entirely of my own making. Rather, it felt as if the paint, water and I were all co-creators of the final product and I did my best work and took great pleasure with this technique.   My art teacher, however, was not impressed. No big surprise there.  She felt it was her job to help me gain control of the process and to implement a more disciplined technique.  Thus, instead of letting the water and paint flow—thereby opening up my imagination, I learned to start with a drawing and then paint in layers: paint a little, let it dry, then painting some more and again pausing to let the colors dry—just like the professionals or so we were told.

It was in this same art class that I was introduced to peer evaluations. Every time we did an art project, we had to critique and rate each other’s work: from best to worst –again, just like the professionals.  Although my art usually got high marks, my soul rebelled against this competitive process.  It simply felt like sacrilege to me.   I could see budding young artists shrinking away in embarrassment when their project came in last and it made me both sad and mad.

In retrospect, I think this particular art class ended up being a sorting class, separating the students with true “artistic potential” from everyone else.  Thus, this class didn’t really open the door to the arts.  It did just the opposite: it closed the doors to the arts for anyone who had no “recognizable” talent.

Now some might think I am being overly sensitive here, and that the teacher was just doing her job.  There is a benefit in practicing skills, after all.  Just ask our pianist Signe or our organist Joe if they could play at their level without having first practiced the Hannon scales over and over again.  Similarly, we cannot ignore the fact the professional artists face competition so they have to get used to it.   But this was a 7^th grade art class and the drill, the discipline, the competition left no room for creative expression to flourish.

Still, I was luckier than most.  I had other areas in my life where I could express creativity.  I sang in the church choir, for instance, and played the piano and guitar.   And I had a mother who would let me get out of doing dishes if I would play guitar and sing songs with her while SHE did the dishes!  Still, the reason why I’m even telling you this story is because I believe that many of us have had experiences like the one I had in art class.  And that these experiences actually arrested part of our spiritual development.  

You see, in my mind the creative spark that leads to art is not simply talent or skill.  That spark of creativity is sacred and one of the most important elements of our humanity.  Its source is beyond our understanding and our connection to it needs to be lovingly nurtured in us all. 

Lest we forget, in the not so distant past, people had little opportunity to simply "watch" or "listen" to music or paintings or dance or theatre. Before the advent of recording devices and the like, most people made their own music, learned to draw, dance, and make clothing and used their creativity in a variety of simple ways.   And it had a direct impact of the spirituality of a people.

The act of creation–whether a painting, a poem, a dance, a lesson plan, or even a government report! –This act of creating is one of the most spiritual things we can do. Why is this? Because our spirituality is that part of our being which is continually growing and evolving in response to the world around us and the world within us. If we stifle our creativity, we stifle this growth.

When our hearts open to creativity, magic happens.  Intuitive wisdom comes calling, creativity flows, our presence becomes a force for healing, and the very air in the room becomes charged with possibility.

Psychologist Otto Rank agreed.  He saw creativity as so basic to the essence of our humanity that he, in effect, substituted the human creative impulse—the drive for production—for Freud’s emphasis on sexuality and reproduction. For Rank, at the heart of our dignity lies our power of creativity, where the human being “actually moves from creature to creator, in the ideal case, creator of himself, his own personality.” Our ultimate act of creativity, then, is giving birth to who we are.

Because creativity is so central to our hearts and souls, Rank puts it at the same level as love itself as a sign of our health and well-being. Creativity and relationship, art and love, express our deepest beings, and what they share in common is that they take us both into the void and beyond it in a kind of ceaseless rhythm of birth and rebirth. This is where creativity engages the Divine. For the very essence of our humanity, our souls, which the artist puts into his or her work and is represented by it, is found again in the work by the ‘enjoyer’ (the one who experiences it).   So art evokes soul-to-soul connections.

These very soul-to-soul connections that come with creativity are sorely needed.  We are facing enormous problems right now and what we do in our lifetimes is going to make us or break us. Creativity can counterbalance the fear and isolation that are so prevalent today. It can free us from our former modes of thinking and living that got us into our current mess.  It can help us remember our connection to the Sacred and to each other.  Furthermore, it can give God a direct means of working in this world.

Now does this mean that creativity is only a positive force in our world?  Not at all.   Let me explain with another story. In  Chaim Potok’s book, called My Name is Asher Lev, we are invited into a world unfamiliar to most of us, the world of very conservative, religious Jews called Hasids. Asher Lev 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 simply talent or skill, Asher Lev is blessed with an extraordinary gift to draw and paint–at a level not unlike the young Mozart’s gift of music. This gift was unasked for and in many ways undesired. His artistic ability made him suspect in the conservative religious community where he was born and raised, a community which did not appreciate this remarkable ability he had because it involved the creation of “graven images.”

Yet Asher Lev 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. But it did not come without a cost.

Asher Lev the artist, the creator, was torn asunder by the power of his artistic gift. He discovered how truly difficult it was in his world, in our world, to understand and answer the call of creativity, particularly when everyone around you insists that what you are doing is wrong, maybe even evil. For here is where his story becomes something truly heart-rending. When he has finally matured in his art, he begins to paint the story of his family and their suffering. Asher Lev, Hasidic Jew, found that he had to use the crucifixion as a metaphor in a series of paintings that featured the faces of his mother and father. For a Jew to use such a symbol was sacrilegious. Yet Asher Lev knew he must answer the call to his truest self, and this true self insisted on the crucifixion, one of the most powerful symbols of suffering, as a metaphor. And in answering this call to his true self, he alienated those he loved the best–his mother and father. His call to creativity was fraught with pain as well as joy. Yet he found in answering it a connection to the life force that both creates and destroys. In other words, he began to truly understand God through his creativity.

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. Asher Lev discovers that authentic art is not always beautiful or easy. He learned that his spirit could only be whole when he lived his creativity.

Now most of us are not born with the kind of artistic gift given to Asher Lev. There are always only a handful of humans alive at any time who manifest such rare and extraordinary talent in any artistic field. But all of us are co-creators with God in the making of this world.  We do our world and ourselves an injustice if we passively sit back at let “God’s will” be done.  We were given minds, heart and hands; we must use them as best we can to help heal the world.

So let us all take the risk of being creative to see what we can unleash into the world. If we can recognize that each of us will express creativity in our own unique ways, if we can take failure with good humor, learn from our mistakes, and keep trying new things, maybe we can imagine ourselves into a new level of love and peace, a new consciousness even.  And is so doing, may we can create a world where there is enough food and water for all, where nature is revered and where we finally get a glimpse of the Promised Land.

May it be so.  Amen

PRAYER

Creator God,

May this be a place where everyone can bring their whole selves,

Where we can touch the deep spirit of creativity and make the Mystery come alive.

And may we use it to make this world more beautiful, more equitable, more whole and more holy.  Amen.

BENEDICTION

May you take the risk of discovering the divine within you and around you.

And may the spirit of life bless you with courage and hope.

Go in peace and know that you are loved.

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Copyright 2008, Rev. Kate Lore.  All rights reserved.