The Art of Life

In one translation of Exodus 31. 6 God says, "To all who have an aptitude for crafts I've given the skills." Creativity, this passage suggests, is a gift of God.

This phrase however can sound as though it is only certain chosen people who have the aptitude for creativity but that is not the witness of the Bible, taken as a whole. God's Spirit gives each person gifts, as Paul writes in 1 Corinthians 12, but the gifts that we are given differ from person to person. This means that we are all creative but in differing ways. As the Archbishop of Canterbury has said, "artists are special people and every person is a special kind of artist."

Ultimately, creativity is a gift of God because God is creative and we are made in his image. He is the Creator, the one who said "Let there be" and life came to be; the One whose glory is proclaimed by the heavens and the work of whose hands is proclaimed by the skies. We are made in the image of the Creator God and therefore we too are creative.

God is the ultimate creator, who created from nothing, and we are sub-creators, able to, as Dorothy L. Sayers put it, "rearrange the unalterable and indestructible units of matter in the universe and build them up into new forms."

Does this mean that we should all strive to be 'artists' in the sense of being musicians, novelists, poets, painters etc? Edith Schaeffer, in her useful book Hidden Art, answers that question by saying no, of course not:

"But it does mean that we should consciously do something about it. There should be a practical result of the realization that we have been created in the image of the Creator of beauty ... the fact that you are a Christian should show in some practical area of a growing creativity and sensitivity to beauty, rather than in a gradual drying up of creativity."

She continues by writing that, "it may be helpful to consider some of the possibilities all of us have for living artistically, but which are often ignored." This is what she calls 'Hidden Art'; the development of our talents (whatever they are) and their use in a way which will enrich othr people's lives. By doing so, we express the fact of being creative creatures made in the image of our Creator God.

Just as the expressions of our creativity will be diverse because we all have differing gifts and differing contexts for the use of those gifts, so creativity itself often also results from diversity. This is increasingly being recognised within society as, for example, in the recent sixth Brussels Debate where participants argued that cultural diversity enlarges and values the different ways of seeing and doing things in other cultures and that this opennes gives the capacity to select and absorb elements of other cultures, helping to produce new ways of thinking, seeing, imagining and creating.

Each photo in my weekly Windows on the world series (see examples above) aims to tell a similar story. Each photo has both a foreground object which acts as a frame through which we glimpse something beyond. This mirrors the way in which each of us view life both from our own individual perspective and are able to see and engage with the perspective of others and, even, of God. These photos are, therefore, an attempt to see ordinary scenes from different perspectives and through fresh eyes. This is what art at its best does for us and, through seeing differently, we are opened up to new possibilities.

The philosopher Paul Ricoeur has argued that human being is possibility; that we are constantly changing by constantly exploring the possibilities of who we are and who we can become. This exploration occurs as we imagine possibilities that help us clarify the essence of who we are. We come to know the essence of a thing by exploring its various possibilities through imaginative variations. The philosopher Edmund Husserl gave an example of this in identifying the 'Essence' of a table. By 'free imaginative variation' we can alter the form, colour or material of the table. WE can also imagine possible uses of a table: we can eat a meal on it; we can write letters or do a jigsaw puzzle on it; we can stand on it to fix the lightbulb etc. By then looking to see what there is in common among the various examples, we can determine the essence of the table.

We see this happening too in what is otherwise a rather strange Bible story. In Genesis 2. 18-25, God brings all the animals in the Garden of Eden to Adam for him to name and, at the end of this naming process, Adam recognises Eve as his soulmate. The key to this story is that names in ancient times described the essence of the thing that was named. So Adam looks and listens in order to understand the essence of each different creature and then creates a name that reflects that essence. By so doing, he also sees what is different between himself and the creatures, so that when he sees Eve he is able to immediately recognise her as his soulmate.

This is also what I understand the Bible as doing for us. The Bible is a diverse book. In fact, it is more of a library than a book; a library of 66 different books containing biography, drama, history, law, letters, prophecy, poetry and proverbs. Mike Riddell calls it "a collection of bits" assembled to form God's home page while Mark Oakley uses a more poetic image in writing of the Bible as "the best example of a collage of God that we have." They use these images because the Bible contains, as Oakley writes, "different views, experiences, beliefs and prayers" drawn "from disparate era, cultures and authors" which are not systematic in their portrayal of God. As Riddell states: "The bits don't fit together very well - sometimes they even seem to be contradictory. Stories, poems, teachings, records, events and miracles rub up against each other. They come from all over the place, and span at least 4,000 years of history."

The point is that the Bible gives us many different perspectives on God and on human beings. These different perspectives produce new ways of thinking, seeing, imagining and creating in us. As we see God and human beings from different perspectives and through fresh eyes we are opened up to new possibilities. As we see and imagine possibilities we have the same experience as Adam and come to know ourselves better - we see the essence of who we are - and we change to become more like the people that God created us to be.

This is living creatively, living artisically, and it is something each of us are called to do and be. The art of life is to be open to the diversity of life in order to see life's possibilities from different perspectives and, as we compare and contrast these possibilities, to identify the essence of who we have been created by God to be and to become. By understanding ourselves and by responding to the essence of otherws, we are able to develop and use our talents for the enrichment of other people's lives. In doing so, we express the fact of being creative creatures made in the image of our Creator God.

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The Call - Uncovered.