originally published at http://nomosjournal.org/columns/cultivating-a-co-creator/creating-in-the-shadow-of-suffering/​

Over the last month or so, I’ve woken up to news article after news article about tragedies: the massacre of LGBTQ latinx and others at a gay club in Orlando, the attack on a Bangladeshi café, the failure of DAPA in the Supreme Court, and so many recent instances that cry out for recognition that Black Lives Matter.

Some of these are failures of humanity to be good and just to each other – they are crimes against humanity, in the truest sense of the phrase. They remind us that tragedy comes in many forms and is often outside our control.

These tragedies happen on a public scale, and they require a public response.

Public responses to these particular tragedies, and to the problem of evil more broadly, have been expressed in books, songs, poems, rants, Facebook posts, tweets, and visual art created as a way to make sense of suffering and pain around us.

We see examples of this in Jesse Williams’ recent speech at the BET Awards. His words paint a picture of the history of suffering for African-Americans in the United States and call the audience to remember their power in a nation that allows black children to be murdered. And in the wake of the Orlando massacre, Tony Award winning director and songwriter Lin-Manuel Miranda wrote a sonnet to express his commitment to love in whatever form it takes. These creations rise up in protest – life finding a way in the face of destruction.

These are tragedies and struggles that can stir religious questions within us – “where is God in the murder of black lives?” and “where is God in bombings of cafés and airports?” In theological circles, we call this questioning “theodicy,” the big conversation about why God allows evil in the world.

Many people, in the midst of personal discernment, illness, or struggle, turn to art therapy as a way to work through questions and find answers, to bring shape to intangible parts of life in this world. I’m not a therapist, but as an artist, I can say that the act of bringing something into creation has a way of making us more resilient. It reminds me of the way saplings will grow out of the carcass of a felled redwood, creating something new out of the death of an old tree.

Over the last two years, I’ve gone to worship services with broad questions in my mind and heart: why, God, is the world so broken, and why do people hurt on personal and systemic scales? These questions, for me, began soon after I left my first job in a church, when I was wondering who I wanted to be in the world. It was hard to read articles and not turn my face heavenward, echoing the words that we in the Judeo-Christian tradition attribute to Psalm 13 – “how long, O Lord,” will you forget us?

The prayers of confessions in the church services I’ve attended have just scratched the surface for me and are no longer enough. I’ve begun to carry crayons with me – because there’s something else going on, something we can’t always put into words, something that happens every time I go to church.

Somehow, putting wax to paper, I begin to understand the messiness of life – once blue runs into pink, purple happens, and it’s not always beautiful. And in adding colors, shades, and shapes, the questions remain, but they’re no longer the only thing I have to hang on to. These are prayers that bring a vividness to the questions of “why?” and “how long?” when those words are not enough.

This last month, I’ve been working on the question of where God (however we dream of her) is in the shooting of black men by police in the United States. Alton Sterling and Philando Castile were struck down by a racist system that has drawn lines in our society. I’ve wondered, with others, how we color outside those lines, and claim the space that remains for something more beautiful. How do we create something new?
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And at some point this past week I was moved by the story of Shadrach, Meschach, and Abendengo, a story from the Torah in which men were condemned unjustly to death by fire by an empire. The story ends, not just with their survival through the fire, but with God going into the fire with them. The story leaves me with more questions than answers, and perhaps, right now, that’s an invitation to create more.

From my front yard, I often watch hummingbirds make their nests and sometimes spy tiny, furry animals burrowing into the ground, creating homes. Their homes surround mine, our lives intertwining. There is a creativity to those connections, which nurtures in me a sense of creating in response to my experience of the Divine in creation. I’ve begun to see this creative response to the Divine around us through the making of home, the experience itself of the Divine, and the understanding that when we create (particularly art) we get at something beyond ourselves.

Moving to the coast of Northern California, I was instilled with the awe fit for the oceans and the redwoods. I wanted my home to feel part of nature, and I’ve longed to be part of creation myself. A re-thinking of what it means to be a creative part of creation has helped me see how I get at the Divine.

It is not a long leap to connect my home with the home of creation (the world). The prefixeco is from the Greek word oikos and means “household” – we use it to begin words likeeconomy and ecology. How we see home is both a matter of place and resources.

Broadly, where we call home and what we do with those spaces are issues of creativity. A colleague of mine, Veronica Kyle, who is the Outreach Coordinator for Faith in Place in Chicago, says that we have to see something as beautiful in order to care for it. If we see the place where we live as ugly, we will not be inspired to take good care of it. And so, most of the walls in my house are covered in art – pieces that I’ve made or pieces that have been given to me over the years. This has been the case of every home I’ve lived in, but it feels especially true of this place in which I dwell on the coast of the Pacific Ocean, where the beauty of nature seems to wrap its arms around me. Nature does that – as Mary Alice Armstrong writes in Dianne Glave’s Rooted in the Earth, “one practical result of…nature should be to surround our homes and schoolhouses with the most beautiful thing attainable. It should instill the spirit of creating and preserving the natural beauties of roadside and field and forest rather than that of ruthless destruction.” That is, the beauty of the natural world has made me much more attuned to the beauty with which my home is filled.

That sort of realization can push us to consider context and pay attention to the places we call home so we see the creativity of the Divine around us. In “A Native Hill,” Wendell Berry writes that our deepest questions about our context are, at their core, “religious, because they are asked at the limit of what I know; they acknowledge mystery and honor its presence in the creation.” Thus, when I stand in my yard, slackjawed at the hummingbird hovering over the flowers, I’m honoring the mystery of divine creativity (for what else, I wonder, but imagination cloaked in science leads to such a tiny, beautiful bird?).

But, if we acknowledge creativity as a response to a divine creator, we also have to understand our relationship to the Divine. One of the ways that I’ve begun to understand my creativity is as what theologian Phil Hefner calls “created co-creator.” He suggests that we think about the separateness and connectedness of humanity as making us “created co-creators,” and with this identity, humanity is called to recognize itself not just as made of the topsoil, but also as made in God’s image (Anna Case-Winters explores this more in her book Reconstructing a Theology of Nature). Hefner’s concept of the “created co-creator” asks humanity to consider not just who we are but also how we relate to the rest of creation. How are we to exist as both the created and the co-creator? For me, our created status means that we are made by God, and we are created out of the biological processes of nature. Our co-creator status points out that not only are we meant to see and love the world around us, but we are meant to add to it.

And that requires creativity. Perhaps impossibly, I want to be able to describe what it means to create art in response to experiencing the Divine in creation. From a strictly Protestant standpoint that sets me apart from God, I could feel so inadequate if I believed that only God can create what is beautiful. But, if I see my creativity in solidarity with how all parts of creation create, it is an invitation to connect. It feels like a privilege when I pull out my crayons or my paints to birth an image, but it also feels like a prayer. Colors over colors, lines into lines. Whatever comes next adds to creation.

And so I think about the birds making their nests, and the trees preparing to put their first buds out to the branches, and I feel my own creative juices churning. My spirit aches for the joy of creation in making art and home.
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And I ache, too, to connect with other artists. How are you creative? How does that creativity make you feel connected to the world around you?

Originally published at nomosjournal.org/columns/cultivating-a-co-creator/creativity-alongside-creation/

in this post-Easter world, I'm thinking about Advent.

how God breaks into our world, claiming us and the world, calling us into peace, hope, joy, and love.

how this claiming causes Jesus to love the world so extravagantly that he was crucified because he threatened the world as we had imagined it.

in Advent, we wait for the world to turn. in Easter, we experience a great turning. in ordinary time, we hope to recognize God's love for us.

cosmically, the world is always turning. how will we let grace emerge in that turning?

When Jesus died, the Scriptures tell us that many people reacted and mourned… and the religious institution tore in two and the earth broke apart. It was a wilderness suddenly encompassing all things in the great web of life and creation; it was a mourning that left no one or thing on the margins. All creation groaned under the weight of suffering and pain and sin, groaned under the wait to be transformed. All creation rejoiced with the coming of God-With-Us in the man Jesus (do you remember how the heavens shone with joy on the Bethlehem night?) All creation tore their garments of atoms and matter, rending themselves in grief for the One they thought had come.

All creation wept.

“I want… that wherever you go, the least plant may bring you a clear remembrance of the Creator… one blade of grass or one speck of dust is enough to occupy your entire mind in beholding the art with which it has been made.”—St. Basil the Great

I never thought I’d be a creator.

I fell in love with God the first summer I worked at a Presbyterian camp in Northern Illinois. I felt the Spirit stirring in me as I hiked between activities with campers. There, in the woods, amidst the prairies, under the stars, I felt deeply connected to the people and the creation around me, and I felt how powerful life can be in our connections.

In those connections, I discovered my desire to create. In high school, I created mixed-media art pieces (primarily out of garbage) because I was interested in giving new life to discarded things. I spent hours toiling over license plates and empty bottles and wood scraps, thinking about what connections to make. And then, I went to college. I hung up my glue gun and put away my hammer. It wasn’t so much that I didn’t have time, but that I didn’t make space for that part of me in the middle of reading, writing, and negotiating new-adulthood. And, I thought I didn’t miss it.

Then seminary happened. It was the second week of my first year, and the worship team was looking for someone who could sew. I blindly volunteered. The act of connecting fabrics for the purpose of worship drew me back to the sense of connection I felt in the woods. I breathed over the sewing machine and prayed the beginning verses of Genesis. Creation!

Later in seminary, I discovered ecofeminism. At its heart, ecofeminism centers on two concepts. First, all of creation is connected. Second, patriarchy has created a system that devalues both women and earth. But because of our connections, what happens to a part of creation affects the rest of creation.[1] It’s not just women who are affected by the desecration of creation; patriarchy forgets that men suffer too when we devalue any part of creation. Ecofeminism points to our collective dependency, including but also beyond our biological connections. We are dependent upon all of creation for so many things—for food, energy, breath.[2] We’re connected to all of creation in our creativity.

One of the ways that I’ve begun to understand my creativity is through what theologian Phil Hefner calls “created co-creator.” He suggests that we think about the separateness and connectedness of humanity as making us created co-creators, and with this identity, humanity is called to recognize itself not just as made of the topsoil, but also as made in God’s image.[3] His concept of the created co-creator asks humanity to consider not just who we are but also how we relate to the rest of creation. What does our role in the world mean for the rest of the world? How are we to exist as both the created and the co-creator (an idea which holds both stories of creation in Genesis together in our identity)? Our created status means that we are made by God, and we are created out of the biological processes of nature.[4] Our co-creator status points out that we are specially created with the ability to have more responsibility in the world.

God is Creator and guide. I believe in God the creator who loves all things into existence. Out of chaos, God dreamed order. Out of darkness, God painted light. And then… came everything else.

To be co-creator refers to the human freedom to make decisions which change humans and the world around them.[5] Humans have the ability to create systems of society that separate and oppress, but humans also have the ability to create in a way that lives into our connectivity. Patriarchal modes of development have traditionally emphasized definitions of “development” and “productivity” that value profits and quantities.[6] Ecofeminists, on the other hand, define development and productivity in terms of life and sustenance. What if we saw our creativity as a sign of development? By valuing the profit that can be extracted from the earth (or from women), patriarchy has regulated both the earth and women to roles of passivity, as if objects intended to be acted upon and used. Ecofeminism, instead, picks up this idea of co-creator and asserts the radical and inviolable agency of all humanity, including women—an agency that replaces objectification of people and of the earth with mutual relationship.

C.S. Lewis describes the creation of his fictional world of Narnia in his book, The Magician’s Nephew.Lewis describes how the lion Aslan sings Narnia into existence.

The Lion was pacing to and fro about that empty land and singing his new song. It was softer and more lilting than the song by which he had called up the stars and the sun; a gentle rippling music. And as he walked and sang, the valley grew green with grass… the  Lion opened his mouth, but no sound came from it; he was breathing out a long, warm breath; it seemed to sway all the beasts as the wind sways a line of trees. Far overheard from beyond the veil of blue sky which hid them the stars sang again; a pure difficult music… and the deepest wildest voice they had ever heard was saying: “Narnia, Narnia, Narnia, awake. Love. Think. Speak.”[7]

I never thought I’d be a creator, until I realized that my own Creator meant me to be one. I don’t know if I was sung into being like Lewis imagines or sculpted into humanity as Genesis reads. I do know that all of us—humanity and the rest of creation—are connected in our possibility. We are not just created, but creators, and our capacity for creativity stretches over the trenches that patriarchy has dug between us. All humanity—all creation—is connected by our common source in God, and through that connection we are being transformed into who God created us to be.

originally posted at Unbound

Read more articles like this one in the Nov 2012–Jan 2013 issue, “Hope for Eco-Activists: Discovering an Environmental Faith“

Notes
[1] Judith Plant, “Learning to Live with Differences: The Challenge of Ecofeminist Community,” inEcofeminism: Women, Culture, Nature,ed. Karen J. Warren (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1997), 127.
[2] Susan Griffin, “Split Culture,” in Healing the Wounds: The Promise of Ecofeminism, ed. Judith Plant (Philadelphia, PA: New Society Publishers, 1989), 11
[3] Anna Case-Winters, Reconstructing a Christian Theology of Nature: Down to Earth (Burlington: Ashgate, 2007), 114.
[4] Ibid., 118.
[5] Philip Hefner, The Human Factor: Evolution, Culture and Religion (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 1993), 38.
[6] Vandana Shiva, “Development, Ecology, and Women,” in Healing the Wounds: The Promise of Ecofeminism, ed. Judith Plant (Philadelphia, PA: New Society Publishers, 1989), 83.
[7] C.S. Lewis, “The Magician’s Nephew,” in The Chronicles of Narnia ( New York, NY: HarperCollins Publishers, 2002), 64,70.