By Andrea Lingle

“Since once again, Lord . . . I have neither bread, nor wine, nor altar, I will raise myself beyond these symbols, up to the pure majesty of the real itself; I, your priest, will make the whole earth my altar and on it will offer you all the strivings and sufferings of the world.” (Chardin, The Mass on the World, “The Offering”)

“Is not this the fast that I choose:
to loose the bonds of injustice,
to undo the thongs of the yoke,
to let the oppressed go free,
and to break every yoke?
Is it not to share your bread with the hungry,
and bring the homeless poor into your house;
when you see the naked, to cover them,
and not to hide yourself from your own kin?”

— ISAIAH 58:6–7

In the beginning was the Word... In the beginning, God said let there be…

What does it mean to create? To utter beginnings into existence? What does it mean to find oneself looking over a vast expanse of what could be?

The blank canvas, page, mind; the turned soil of a garden; the breath of a melody lurking in the mind: creativity is rife with beginnings. The home that holds the crib of a grandchild was begun with a plan and a cornerstone. The branches that bend under the weight of harvest were once folded into a seed. To live alongside creativity is to see what might become—to refuse to be convinced by what is. The universe quite simply longs for you to wonder aloud.

What will become of it?

On Valentine’s Day 2009, my husband and I took our first child to a sheep shearing at a local farm. That’s was the advertised activity. What I didn’t know was that it would also be lambing season. We walked into the barn to find a lamb still rusty with birthing. It was mostly knees and wagging tail, and my heart, so freshly come from the birthing room myself, broke. It broke for the uncertain life of a lamb, it broke for my baby-son who would grow into a man in an ungentle world, and it broke for myself. To love is to be broken. It is joy too, but it is a deep breaking. The ewe dutifully licked the lamb clean as I shattered before her. She and I tended our babes. Had this lamb changed her as much as my baby had changed me?

To create is to be changed.

To create is to see what could be.

To create is the refuse to be convinced by what is.

To be creative it to become the lamb in the face of injustice. To wobble forward into places where love and forgiveness has no business being. It is to fast from cynicism, answers, foregone conclusions. To be creative is to run the experiment again when the failure of last time lies under a thin scab.

Every time I think about creativity, I am reminded of the scene in C. S. Lewis’s book, The Magician’s Nephew, when Aslan sings Narnia into creation. Narnia was so soaked in life that iron bars, brandished as weapons, sprouted into lamp posts. Creativity puddled around the padding feet of the leonine singer. Most of the time, this scene quiets my breath. I become happy to sit in my soul and eager to toss my weapons to the ground to see what blossoms. But, sometimes I don’t have it in me. I walk up to the edge of the beginning and sag to the ground, too weary to hum along. Sometimes I, like the lamb, need to wobble at the edge of newness, letting the song lave my soul. And, sometimes, after I sit in the afterbirth of a creation I didn’t design, breath fills my lungs, and I begin to sing.