Creativity and God

Creativity & God

As we come to holiday time again it's a chance for rest and recreation.  That word ‘recreation’ shows that it's about allowing God to create us anew – physically in rest, but also spiritually.  We need this re-creation after all the work of the last few months.

As we welcome Jane and Martin Colley to our churches, and see Susan Hargreaves-Butler begin her Reader training, we know that they are in a process of re-creation too – being transformed in ministry for God’s service.  As with all creative acts, this will have moments of beauty as well as some messy mistakes too – it's the only way to learn, to explore and create.

We believe that creativity is a gift from God.  Indeed, part of what it means to be made in the image of God is that we are endowed with the gift of creativity that is ours to use freely.  Every song written, every poem; every painting or sculpture; every construction of stone and steel or of the mind; every thought, word and deed is an outcome of the great truth that we are made in the image of our Creator.

I hope you will come and share this truth with us, and marvel at human creativity in the All Saints' ArtsFest – and so I’d like to leave you with a poem I love, by Gerard Kelly, about our creative God:

This God

This God,

Who watches worlds,

Sees my heart.

This careful calculator,

Counting countless millions,

Counts me in.

This artist,

Whose canvas outstretches

Eternity at both ends;

Whose palette out-colours planets,

Paints my portrait.

This lover,

Who dreams in universes,

Dreams of me.

This creator,

Whose breadth of vision spans time

And spawns a cosmos;

Whose woven tapestry of purpose,

More compound than chaos,

Eclipsing complexity,

Rolls out like a highway through history;

Whose heartbeat deafens supernovas:

This father

Kisses me.

This playwright,

Playing

With the deaths and entrances of stars;

Scripting

The end from the beginning;

Knowing

The purpose of the play:

Watches

My feeble audition,

And writes

Me

In.