There's a part of us that, deep inside, stays free, curious, risk-taking, creative, and imaginative.
If that part of us died, a good part of what makes us human would die.
I love to create - songs, poems, novels, blogs, plays; I've dabbled in acting and art. I also love creating tasty chili, apple pie, pumpkin chocolate chip cake, and a home with comfortable furniture, different types of art work, and a combination of pastel and vibrant colors on my walls - a home to be enjoyed by family and friends. I love creating relationships among people, building a happy, collaborative team at a work place, introducing friends to one another whom I know will enjoy each other.
I especially loved creating five beautiful children with my husband while the two of us worked to create - and still work to create - a harmonious, honest, spiritual relationship with each other.
I am awestruck by the creative glory of beautiful buildings and gardens, by thoughtful, creative work in all the arts and sciences.
I am also awestruck by other people's daily creativity: creativity at work in recognizing and enhancing others' skills, forming new companies to meet new needs, re-habbing old, precious buildings, diagnosing the problem and then repairing plumbing, paving streets, mediating to bring about peace, creating and diligently maintaining honest and accurate business plans and records.
Some create things I never could - they make jewelry and beer, knit, crochet, make patterns for and create clothing. Doctors, nurses, pharmacists, social workers, counselors, priests, deacons, ministers, rabbis, shamans, imams, religious women, and dedicated laity work to create physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual health in us. Hospice workers create supportive and tender environments for the dying and for the grieving.
And I've only scratched the surface in describing and affirming how incredibly creative every human being is! That YOU are, whether you've realized it or not!
I enjoy the creative unity and creative diversity in life as we know it. Our bedrock unity as human beings is that, whatever our color, tribe, race, religion, nationality, or sexual orientation, we all love, weep, bleed, are awestruck by a flaming sunset or a haunting piece of music. Our bedrock diversity as human beings enchants us: the marvelous rainbow of our skin colors, the glorious sounds of multiple languages, the fascination of multiple cultures, the many wonderful ways we worship God and pray together- music, dance, meditation chants, reading from sacred books, sacred meals like Passover or Eucharist, blessings with incense, blessings with smoke. The deep mystery of how we all love and make love in a diversity of ways.
To be human is to live in awe of our unity. To be human is to live in awe of our diversity. Love and love alone celebrates the creative reality of both our unity and diversity, our unity IN diversity - a paradox, a Both-And.
We are and we create because we are created in the Image and Likeness of God. Creativity is our nature because it is God's Nature first. Gaze in awe at the incredible unity and diversity in what God has created and creates! God the risk-taker has a Nature of endlessly unfolding creative Love - that is Who God is!
God has set in motion the development of an incredible, endless array - sometimes even bizarre! - of creatures, from this glorious Nicobar pigeon you see in the photo to every conceivable color and shape of jellyfish, dogs, cats, platypuses, mosquitoes, wasps, bees, twenty-five hundred varieties of cicadas alone..... Even hurricanes, tornadoes, and floods have reasons to exist in the Grand Scheme of Nature. Our relationships exist, our unity and diversity as humans exist, because we have a relational God Who delights in both unity and diversity and Who has created a Universe in which everyone and everything lives in constantly unfolding relationships.
Today, meditate on the glorious individual that you are, constantly growing and unfolding in your gifts, unique in your diversity - no one else has your fingerprints! - and unique in the ways that you are one with God, one with others in your relationships, one with the Universe. Unique in who and what you create and give to the world!
Meditate today on this awesome Truth that describes who you are: "God created human beings in God's Image; ... male and female God created them." (Genesis 1:27)