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Photo Credit: Laine Lingle

By: Andrea Lingle

By: Andrea Lingle

It is evident therefore that colour harmony must rest only on a corresponding vibration in the human soul; and this is one of the guiding principles of the inner need.”

Wassily Kandinsky Concerning the Spiritual in Art, 26

My youngest daughter loves to make clothes. So far, she mostly repurposes (cuts up) her socks into doll skirts and crop tops. Occasionally, napkins or tie-dye t shirts get fragmented into Oscar-night ball gowns for Barbie. Her notebooks are full of confections made of colored-pencil imaginings and tulle. Recently, I set up her room up with my old sewing machine and serger and showed her how to make wash cloths. Because making Cinderella’s gown begins with learning to serge a straight line.

The greatest danger in considering creativity to be a spiritual practice is that that which is made becomes the measure of the quality of the practice. Surely, if my writing practice is efficacious, what I write should be transcendent. If my drawing is akin to prayer, shouldn’t people gape in wonder at the merest glimpse of my canvas? If music connects me to Spirit, shouldn’t my uplifted voice bring even Pharaoh to tears?

Yes and no.

I sincerely believe (for whatever that is worth), that creativity and grace are synonyms, and I have experienced ineffable moments when immersed in creativity—mine or otherwise. I remember standing in front of Picasso’s Guernica, shattered. The Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía in Madrid houses this famous work, and, partly as crowd spacing and partly to enrich the viewer’s experience, has an exhibit of images of the suffering of the Basque people of Guernica in the 1930s as historical contextualization. And sketches. Sketch after sketch after sketch. The whole torturous process of casting about for the right way to speak unutterable words. This was not a masterpiece from the beginning.

As I wandered a little behind my family, trying to read as many captions as possible, my mind raced with the images of broken buildings and bodies lined up on the road and survivors covered in grime and sorrow. As I passed a room divider, Guernica came into view. It consumed a whole wall, confronting the viewer, not with the suffering of a group of people at a certain time, but Suffering through a group of people at a certain time. My thoughts broke. It was as if the stream of commentary flowing from the historical context fell away into a bottomless trench. This was a glimpse of the horror of what it means to be human at another’s expense. This was the very heart of the universe reduced to sobbing on its knees, swaying in despair at the Suffering of its children.

This is Pathos. This is Creativity. This is grace.

But Guernica was wrestled into being. The sketches show a soul trying to speak, not a man trying to create an iconic piece of art. The God who created calls each of us to practice creativity out of obedience to the generative nature of love, not to generate applause. When we practice, what is made is not important. Picasso's finished works were a product of skill, persistence, and circumstance, but creativity is not a snob. Creativity is asking you to try.

What if it isn’t good?

No one will be harmed. If you have a story to tell or a thing of beauty to create, keep working at it, but don’t discard the seventy-five wonky wash cloths as meaningless. To try is to participate courageously.

Amid the depth
Of those enormities, even thinking minds
Forgot, at seasons, whence they had their being;

The Prelude, Wordsworth, 187

In Simone Weil’s essay on the sacraments, she begins with the easily skimmable sentence, “Human nature is so arranged that a desire of the soul has no reality in the soul until it has passed through the flesh...” My eyes don’t even want to stick to those words long enough to allow them to register in my mind. Blah, blah, blah. Yes, yes, I want to get to the heart of her thoughts on this religious life we are trying so hard to join in. Just get to the good stuff.

But this is a thought of ultimate importance. Before we argue about the bread and the wine or remonstrate about the ideal quantity of baptismal water, we must acknowledge that we live in bodies. Whether you think of your body and soul being fundamentally separate or not, we, practically, deal with life from two angles: the physical and the mental or spiritual. Before delving into the theological, Weil states the conditions of participation. That which is spiritual must be incarnated. For us to brush the ineffable, we must do so from the pile of carbon and stubbornness we call the natural world. In other words, we have to try. We have to pick up the pencil and sketch out the desire of the soul.

Far too often, we don’t start because we can’t get our minds around the entire thing. We don’t take the first step because we can’t figure out the seventeenth step.

Rob Bell, How to Be Here, 92

Long ago, in my back yard, my oldest son was trying to blow the seeds off of a dandelion. The dandelion is my favorite flower, not because of the flower, which isn’t that astounding, but because of the globes of seeds. I have always delighted in blowing dandelion seeds and watching them fly beyond me, and I hope I never outgrow it. I just love a thing that has the courage to fly.

On this particular early spring afternoon, I was trying to show my son how to blow the seeds off in one pass. This requires a couple of things, but the most important is knowing what the globes look like when they are ready to be blown. Pick one that isn’t ready, and it won’t go. I pointed and demonstrated and giggled as the seeds danced around our heads. I picked out a pretty good globe, just right for blowing, and handed it to him. He took a big breath, opened his mouth super wide, and stuffed the whole thing in. Needless to say, this was a shockingly unsuccessful effort at seed dispersal, none of them made it farther than a four year old can spit, but the blue sky was spangled with the sounds of our laughter.

Spiritual practice is not an invitation to immediate perfection. Creativity as a spiritual practice isn’t aimed at critical acclaim. Practice isn’t even a mandate to efficiency or getting stuff done. It is a jocular invitation to love, to play, and to

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