“This just came to me.” Said by everyone all the time. But, came from what? A triggered thought of a past experience is just our hard drive finding a factoid. But some are driven by necessity to follow this spark of synapses and create. The idea turns into a passion, the metronome of life’s rhythm. The origin of creativity has long held the imagination of philosophers, theologians, and those who depend upon it for their livelihood. Does creativity arrive, as unbidden as a summer’s downpour, or is creativity the servant of habit, the product of disciple, effort, and skill?  Spoiler Alert: I think creation happens when we are touched by God.

I am an architect. Creation is essential, but execution is necessary, and overwhelming in its burdens of following technology, commerce, and community. But others can find beauty in the worlds within and without them. Writers, painters, sculptors, composers all enact “inspiration.” Joy reveals itself in the connection between insight and outcome. Even still, the process of creation, how ideas arise and then transform into finite reality, is as frustrating as it is wonderous.

Human creations, unlike God’s, never arise out of nothing. The act of pure creativity, one that has no origins or antecedents, arising mythically “out of nowhere” (so to speak), is a characteristic that can only be said of God. While God invented language to craft something where there was a void, humans’ creativity stand further downstream, wielding pigment and paint, notes and rhythms, boards and beams. God created time, and we necessarily reside within its flow, moved by that which was first set into motion.

For the composer Martin Hebel, musical creation arises from the silence in his mind, then hand, then through the hands of the musicians who follow his designs. But where do designs come from — for any of us? “When I embrace extra-musical inspiration and respond musically to a particular issue, I think of it as acting like a societal mirror, showing listeners something beyond myself in the hope of inspiring change.”

Finding the rationale behind the inexplicable beauty of creation is how humans make sense of the mysteries artists find dropped into their lives every day. The thrill of discovery is not the satisfaction of obtainment: we simply see the beauty that is there, in and before us — and it is often not enough. Our humanity needs to connect the intense joy of beauty to the lives we are given

Likewise, the choreographer Elisa Schroth created a piece called “Body & Land.” Her work addresses God on many levels, but here, she wanted the beauty of movement to have a resonance beyond the physical context of the dance. Schroth connected dance and its divine genesis directly when she produced her work: Theologian Ellen Davis stated in a lecture accompanying this work, “Land is not an ‘it,’ an inert thing on which we humans perform certain operations for our own economic benefit, or our own pleasure. We do both those things, of course, but if we are wise, we recognize the earth for what it really is, namely a living creature of God.”

At the essence of discovering beauty is the reality that beauty is not made by us, no matter how diligent we are in trying to define or justify it.

For Christine Woodside, writing is like breathing, a natural act, fully part of who she is. But there is more. She says:

Although I felt called to write from a young age, I spent years learning to channel God in my work. I don’t think writer’s block is real, but it might exist when I’m not in the channel where God intervenes. Once I start writing, if I let it go long enough, words and connections start coming out that I did not know resided in me. That’s because they didn’t! This stuff is not from myself. I am delivering it. The key is to hear it.

Creation is a kind of mimicry, but one that seeks its templates beyond what is already known, delights that reside somewhere beyond the recipes of control.

Beauty is never under our control, but the reverse: beauty controls us. I think, I know, that for me in the daily focus of finding beauty, I am left at the feet of the God who made me, you, everything. The art we are compelled to find in the world that we did not make is often just before us, there, unseen until completely compelling.

It might seem like artists manipulate the physical world and bend it to their will. But as told by the sculptor Susan Clinard, the reverse is true:

After thirty years creating art one would think there is little left that would surprise me, leave me in a state of wonder or bring me to tears, instead, I experience these things nearly on a daily basis. I am constantly reminded, although this may sound cliché, I am merely a vessel that precious energy, hundreds of collective voices and beauty flows through. There have been clear and luminous examples in my art journey that I have witnessed the genuine power of ART and artmaking. It can initiate change, evoke compassion and empathy, share ideas and sensations that speak loudly and taps into parts of ourselves that uses no words.

There is no reason in any art. Those I know, here in this piece, all have made lives from creation and sharing art that is fully useless — and essential. In that way the art we create is our feeble reach to connection with God, who is paradoxically the origin of everything we discover — including us. Finding what has always been there may just be our humanity, and creation to the ends of revealing beauty is the most direct outcome of our hope.

Life in the world we live in is transactional to the point of being oppositional. We find our lives in response to those around us. We make money, to do the necessary things of providing sustenance and safety, and transact living in the machine formed around us, by us. But that world, that life, is simply incomplete.

Without love our lives lose the meaning we know it has. Because love is the fundamental and unnecessary gift of God, manifest for some of us in the unrelenting love of Jesus – of us, for us, by God. Art touches that.

When I asked the poet Sheila Dietz Bonenberger how she finds the words for her writing, she responded with words that found her, words given to her:

Could God Create a Meadow
and Still Be Love?

I am still waiting for you
in the meadow. Remember
wildflowers, that shattering
of gold cloud? I am
waiting for you in the dark,
nestled under rocks,
in tight places, like alleys
you have to walk through sideways
and in the smoke-filled trenches
of your heart, in barren fields,
in the yawning wilderness,
in the moist dark earth
beneath fallen leaves —
in the shadows that are
coming, in the shadows
that are here. Is God love,
you wonder? Hush, slow your heart
and the mystery will let you in.

“The mystery will let you in,” because the miracle of faith is the terrifying beauty of the gifts every one of us have been given. All we have to give are those things seen, heard, expressed by each of us — artist, baker, or candlestick maker. It is never enough, but it is all we have.

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