My brother Sam and I are both artists. He works in ceramics and, though he’s proficient on the potter’s wheel, he has a special capacity for capturing personality and expression in humorous figural sculptures of dragons, trolls, and other wild creatures. Our house is full of these hilarious critters peeping out from nearly every corner. Even the urn that holds our coffee grounds is a grinning, fat troll wearing a yellow tie whose head is the lid.  

The last few years Sam and I have both worked from home. The two-car garage is his ceramic studio where he sculpts during the day and teaches classes occasionally. My little recording studio is set up in the extra bedroom. We’re both coffee drinkers, and our routine is to spend the first hour or so of each day at the breakfast table chatting over hot mugs of coffee as we gear up for whatever we’re working on that day. 

As you can imagine, one of the recurring topics of conversion is the creative process. We’re always comparing notes on art-making itself – the processes and materials and inspiration, the travails of trying to get some meandering idea worked out concretely in our respective materials, and the further travails of trying to make a living at it. On top of all that, we tend to land in a place of gratitude sensing that, as we subcreate (to use Tolkien’s term), we are entering into a great and abundant mystery of making that is ultimately sustained and overseen by God himself, and not our own powers or achievement.  

The invitation to make stuff is fundamentally an invitation constituted by God’s grace. Now, that may just come across as a Christian-y thing to say, so let me push into it a little more. By “grace” I mean a few things. One is that the invitation is a form of hospitality – God is calling us to collaborate – to take up whatever raw materials we gravitate towards, whether clay, music, words, food, wood, fabric, decor, space, ad infinitum, and develop those given things into something new that honors their inherent nature and qualities, but that realizes in new ways their internal potentialities. God could do all of that himself, but he chooses not to. Instead, he has chosen to graciously, hospitably invite us in to share in the fun. God says, “Look at this stuff, I call it clay. Do you like it? Take some home with you, see what you can make out of it. I can’t wait to see what you come up with!” So that’s one thing I mean when I say the invitation to make stuff is constituted by God’s grace.  

Another thing is that grace, by its very nature, is unnecessary. Grace is, you could say, “extra”. My friends from Louisiana would say lagniappe. Lagniappe means some extra unexpected goodness that comes after something that was already good. It’s overflow, more than what’s required. The fact that we are invited to work and make and love and sing and dance and cook – all that’s extra. As if creating the galaxies, gooses, and grackles wasn’t enough, how about topping it all off with people. And while you’re at it, Lord, how about topping that off with marrying those people, through Christ, into the life of the Holy Trinity? And, then how about topping that off with a new heavens and a new earth… and who knows what the Lord will top that off with? Our God is a most persistent topper-offer! He seems to get so caught up in the joyous overflow of making that he’s always doing more than is required, always pouring out grace upon grace upon grace. 

That being the case, the invitation to live our lives contextualized by that overflow and to creatively collaborate with God through the materials at hand in this world is characterized by grace. In other words, because there’s goodness aplenty, you don’t have to be all that good at it to participate. Grace means we can take creative risks. It means we can get started before we have any idea how to do it well. We can jump in and learn as we go, because our identity and the cosmos, in general, are not dependent on our proficiency. Those have already been taken care of, so we’re free to be no good at it, but do it anyway. We’ll get good at it eventually, unless we never get started.  

I remember something a friend said years ago when he was a new dad. He said that as he learned to enjoy his children, he was learning to be enjoyed by God. I can still hear him say, “Children are completely incompetent. They’re not good at anything.” One thing about little children though, they aren’t afraid to get started. They don’t mind getting born, even though they have no idea how to do anything. Be like a little child, get comfortable with your incompetence and go head and get started. The world is not at all depending on you, and it’s absolutely fantastic that you are in the world. 

It’s worth emphasizing: if you are in the world, then it’s because the Lord, the Giver of Life, enabled your existence. Existence itself, because it is a gift from God, is valuable in and of itself, without any further qualifications. Now that you are here, the work of being a living person is only secondarily to be proficient or good at stuff. Competency isn’t where you start. It may not even really be the goal. I mean who will ever be as good at anything as God? The main work of being a living person is responsiveness. Your very existence is grace, which means the supply of goodness and love is a question that’s already been abundantly addressed. God has already proclaimed an endless chain of “amens” to your presence here, that’s what you’re made out of. Even if a person only made it a few days, weeks, or years in this world, that chain of amens will go on. 

But for those of us here, now what? What happens next? Next, we open our eyes and ears, stick out our tongues, feel with our fingertips, sniff with our sniffers. We go exploring. We go on a life-long scavenger hunt, looking in every neglected field for treasures. And when we find them, we get very still. We do a special kind of work called beholding. Beholding means to sustain a loving relationship of true knowing, true perception. Beholding is what allows us to understand the nature of a given thing within the context of it’s preciousness to its Creator. Beholding is the patient practice of entering into and honoring the life of a thing and learning its true name. In other words, beholding places us in a position of humble wonder as we look for Jesus’s intention within the things that he has made and that he continues to bless and sustain. 

Just like the first job of the apprentice is to do nothing but watch the master work, beholding is not about getting anything accomplished, it’s just about paying attention. It’s about reverence. Once reverence has taken root, it blossoms into response. Now that I’ve seen what I’ve seen, I start making attempts to respond. I love because I was loved first. That is where art-making best begins – as a response to having beheld goodness. 

And different materials, different mediums, call for different responses, according to what we’ve perceived of their nature, through the practice of beholding. Clay calls for a certain response, because it has its own kind of given life. Paint calls for a different response that corresponds to its particular qualities, which are the things it “loves” to do. A good cook has reverently beheld the nature of ingredients and therefore knows how to respond rightly and creatively to their inherent qualities. In other words, how to work with them to realize and develop their potential, rather than work against or in spite of them. A true artist is a humble collaborator, who takes joy in lovingly listening to her materials as she nudges and nurtures them onward to unfold their potential in new ways. She sees how an alphabet can become a sentence, and a sentence might grow into a sonnet. He sees how a block of mute wood might carry silent songs, and he responds by crafting a singing instrument like a guitar or cello. In Lord of the Rings, the Elves taught the trees to talk and they became Ents, but even in this world, ordinary men and women teach trees to sing. To sing perhaps a song they knew but could never hope to sing without our involvement. 

Art-making then, like life itself, is a call to mutual reverence and responsiveness. It is a call to love, and in loving to waken and raise up all that God has graciously given us to steward. The perfectionism that paralyzes us from getting started is a trap laid by our Enemy, who loves to block our participation in God’s life. Don’t beat yourself up about it, but recognize it’s based on a lie about the way things are. It’s based on the lie that we have something to prove, something to earn, that competency is what justifies our existence. But the invitation is especially extended to the bumbling and incompetent. Jesus was always telling adults to be more like children, not the other way around. To our heavenly Father, we are all little incompetent children anyway, and we meet the Most High God not by being really good at mountain climbing, but simply by our infantile reaching. Fellow children, in Christ, we have already seen him bend down to us, take us in his arms, and raise us up to his shining face.

A Collect Prayer for Creation 

By W. David O. Taylor, from his book “Open and Unafraid: The Psalms as a Guide to Life”

Maker of heaven and earth, all your creatures, animate and inanimate, stand before you.

In Christ, who stands at the center of creation, we see how mysteriously well-pleasing it is to you.

In Christ, the mediator of the whole world, we see how broken it is.

In Christ, the firstborn of creation, we discover its final destiny: new creation!

May we take pleasure in your creation as you take good pleasure in it.

May we care for the earth as you lovingly care for it.

And may we offer up all the creative work of our hands in praise of you, in service of our neighbor, and in anticipation of that day when the cosmos shall be made forever alive.

In the Triune Name.

Amen.