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AND ON THE EIGHTH DAY...

AN_INQUIRY INTO HUMAN CREATIVITY AND SPIRITUALITY

JOHN M. BUCHANAN
Senior Minister
Fourth Presbyterian Church
Chicago, Illinois

- PRESENTATION TO
CHICAGO SEMINARS ON THE FUTORE

The University of illinois at Chicago
and
The illinois Humanities Council

MAY 24, 1989

Something remarkable is happening throughout the world, What a
time to be pondering the future -— at the very moment a new future is
evolving. Huge forces are surfacing in China, the Soviet Union, Eastern
Europe: forces sa big and changes potentially so radical that no one even
pretends to comprehend them, while the whole world Looks on with anxiety
and great hope.

One characteristic seens common to them all - the aspiration of
the, human Spirit to be free: free te express itself and ta experience the
expression of others: free to vote but also free to sing and dance and read
and laugh and love and Pray, all of which constitute a particular way of
defining our humanity. 7

A central dimension of Mikhail Gorbachev's cultural revolution
— perestroika — may be characterized by a virtual explosion of activity in
the arts and religion.

More than 200 experimental studic theaters have sprouted in

Moscow...

* artistic exiles have been joyously welcomed hone,

* you can buy Doctor Zhivago in a book store —

* and, advises Time Magazine, “Forget those quiet
Moscow nights of song. There are not enough evenings in the
month now to attend all the theater premiers, art exhibitions, poetry
readings, film previews and cultural debates taking place in the
Soviet capital.”

Similarly, religion is suddenly flourishing. The 1,000th
anniversary of the Russian Orthodox Church last year not only called the
world's attention to the remarkable life of that venerable institution, it
also seemed to generate public interest and an apparent new spirit of
accommodation on the part of the Soviet state. Churches are growing and
it's not only the babushka's who are attending. Baptisms, confirmations,
seminary enrollments are up. The first school for Rabbis in 60 years
opened recently and the Lithuanian Roman Catholic Church was pranted its
first full compliment of bishops in four decades.!

Among the many changes occurring so rapidly in the
Saviet Union that you and I can barely keep up with them, the new freedom
for the arts and for religion is perhaps the most remarkable and perhaps
the most hopeful.

Why should it be different? In my Arts and Religion file, which
interestingly is the fattest folder by far in my file cabinet, I found a

clipping from the New York Times a few years ago. “Russian Arts Evolve on

the Brink of Dissidence... New Plays Open in Basements, Jazz Echoes in
Factory Halls..." The article which followed described an art exhibit in
the dark basement of a Moscow coffee house. Many of the paintings were

simply hung by string from steam pipes, their titles announced on

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typewritten scraps of paper glued to the wall. It was the first public
exhibition of the work of an artist whose paintings had been seen only
secretiy before. What made this art so dangerous? What was there about
this art which led the state to regard its exhibition, its creation by the
artist an act of political subversion? (Fools, it is said, rush in where
angels fear to tread... but never having many characteristics anyone ever
described as-angelic, here goes.} What possible interest does the city
Council have in what is displayed within the walls of the Art Institute?
Why does any government care what people paint, look at, read or listen to?
The news article about that secret exhibit in the Moscow coffee house
described the work as “bold canvasses, austere sketches, bright graphics,"
hardly the stuff that might inspire reviewers to leave the gallery and go
out and break the law or commit acts of high treason.

Those in any land, culture or period in history who would
exercise absolute political control regard the free expression of artistic
creativity as dangerous. With remarkable consistency, totalitarianism
comes to the same canclusion about the free practice of religion.

Adolf Hitler loathed modern art, thought it decadent, tried to
eliminate it, at the same time sponsoring an official art which
romanticized and ornamented the values of the Third Reich. Of course
Hitler was acting prudentiy, if you grant his assumptions which a free
society cannot, of course. He remembered Spain, I suppose. At the time of
the Spanish Revolution, Hitler threw in on France's side and used the
exercise to practice the new concept of saturation bombing. The first
target was Guernica, the town in which Pablo Picasso was born. In profound
rage the artist painted "Guernica"; a brutally powerful picture which was

immediately banned by the government for its eloquent protest. It is stil]

a powerful statement of protest against political oppression and for human
dignity. to
Dimitri Shostakovich, in a life-long uneasy truce with the state,
was officially criticized in the 1930s for composing music which was
described as “cheap, tuneless, vulgar, with bourgeois tendencies.” But
when his 6th Syaphony was premiered in 1937 the audience responded with
wild enthusiasm, standing and applauding for several hours. What was that
about? On the nights I attend Chicago Sympheny Orchestra concerts people
can barely wait for the last note before literally streaking up the aisle
and out of the hall, obviously on some mission of enormous consequence.

The Soviet critics attributed it to his return to socialist
acceptability. Other analysts now think the audience heard something else,
namely a piece of music which gathers up in its magnificent sonerities the
motifs of human dignity, human aspiration and the unrelenting reach of the
human spirit for freedom, or, if you will, salvation. .

What is it about art that is regarded with such respect and
suspicion and fear? Why do the arts which we, in the comfortable context
of a free society, regard as a gentile, leisure-time interest, pose a threat
to political control?

Dictators are threatened by art because art needs freedom and
thrives in freedom, therefore celebrates freedom and inevitably will become
an advocate for freedom. Art sees a deeper significance in ordinary
humanity in a way that consistently reminds people of the transcendent. It
just happens. Even when the artist doesn't mean it, it happens.

Rembrandt's portraits of simple people are luminous, pointing to something

important about each of them, something invisible, mystical, spiritual.

Totalitarianism cannot stand that for long. Totalitarianism can grant no

truth, no reality, no authority which it does not define. And so it sees
in the arts a very distinct threat to its Philosophic foundation.

Totalitarianiam comes to the same conclusion about the free
expression of religion. If we had nothing else to do with one another, the
Simple fact is that we have been the objects of the dictator's suspicion
down through history. Poets and playwrights, prophets and priests have
often been in the jail together and only then sometimes have we begun to
see a kind of mystical kinship which has, I propose, been around for a very
jong time and the existence of which in the future is a matter of
importance for all of us.

Which brings me, finally, to my thesis. My title is And on the

Eighth Day, an Inquiry into Human Creativity and $ Spirituality. As a matter

of fact I shamelessly borrowed it. The allusion to the first chapter of
Genesis has been used hundreds of times, I suppose... one time eloquently,
I thought, by the late Nicolas (Nikolai) Berdyaev (1874-1948), a Russian
theologian who said - "God made the world in seven days, and whenever a
human being creates, it is the eighth day.“ Is this the time to deal with
the matter on everyone's mind? What's a minister -doing here? I wondered
that too. There are, I told the very gracious representatives of the
project, literally hundreds ef scholars in this virtual Mecca of
theological inquiry and artistic creativity who have spent decades thinking
about these matters. I suggested that they go out to Hyde Park, walk down
57th Street, pick the first person over fifteen years of age and ask hin or
her.

They persisted. And I'm glad. I am very pleased to be here —
and honored ~ and happy to have had the excuse to read and think and work

on this project.

Someone described the sermons of a famous television pulpiteer in
this unflattering way. "He tells them what he is going te tell them. Then
he tells them. Then he tells them what he just told them."

My thesis ~- what I am going to tell you is this...

There is a long and honest and fundamental relationship between
art and religion which suggests a deeper experiential relationship between
creativity ard spirituality. The relationship has been stretched, weakened
and occasionally broken. A safe and gecure future depends on its being re—
established. We've been in jail together but there is sore; such, much
more.

Theodore Gill, Dean of the John Jay College of Criminal Justice
in Manhattan, and before that a Seminary President, says that people in
religicn and the arts are “up to the same things. We are members of the
same family of insight, expectation and ambition. We are siblings."@

In antiquity it is virtually impossible to tel] us apart. Early
art seems to have had religious or devotional intent. Early religion often
used chant, dance, rhythm, symbol, gestures.

Later, when history begins to be written and artifacts are left
for us to touch and see and read and wonder at, something like a marriage
between art and religion occurs. In Greece it was under the rubric of the
holy and the beautiful or what the Judeo/Christian tradition has always
called the beauty of holiness. “Worship the Lerd in the beauty of
holiness," the old hymn says and what a provocative suggestion — holiness
is beautifull

The earliest Greek minstrels were thought to be mouthpieces of
the gods, Greek architecture owed much of its origin to the need for

temples. But the brightest achievement of Greek art and religion was the

drama. Yale scholar, Jaroslay Pelikan, observes that “in its drama rather
than its philosophy the Greek mind came to grips with the deepest and
bitterest realities of human existence. Greek tragedy embodied the best
that Greece was able to discover about the paradox of human life in
relation to the ultimate under which it lived,"

Pelikan cites the choruses of Sophocles, passages of "moving
religious content" in which are “described the sense of defeat and
frustration epitomized by Oedipus as the law of existence: that the very
devices by which I would seek to escape my destiny have become tools in its
hands for the realizations of my inexorable destiny."?

Even though the Christian theologians looked to Greek philosophy
for an intellectual foundation, the Greeks themselves seemed to prefer the
poet...the bard..the playwright..to be steward of the mysteries of life.

The shapers of Hebrew religion in the meantime had theological
reservations about the artistic portrayal of deity, but their prophets were
in fact matchless poets, and they wrote and sang songs about their struggle
for freedom and identity and justice and they worshipped their God with a
wonderful symphony of harps and lutes and trumpets and cymbals. And when
their King had no words big enough to contain his exultation, he “danced
before the Lord.“

In that period of Western history designated as medieval a
growing mysticism kept alive the relationship between the holy and the
beautiful and sometimes, Professor Pelikan observes, it was in opposition
to a religion on its way to becoming intellectual, and cerebral at the
expense of the sensual, embodied religion of the ancients.

Centuries later the Romantics remembered that older wisdom and

said again that within the aesthetic the deepest human yearnings found

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expression. Both art and religion acknowledge a mystery not accessible to
the human intellect. The Romantics were excessive, of course. It was
their nature and they made the theologians nervous by suggesting that
flowers, poetry and music are extensions of God's creativity and that
humans participate in the divine creativity when they learn to appreciate
the gentle beauty of the arts. Holiness was not only beautiful. The
Romantics seemed to be saying that beauty was holy!

In the Enlightenment, the guiding motif had been symmetry: the
balance and precision of art would reflect the symmetry of the universe and
of God. The minuet and gavotte exemplified the graceful balance of the
universe and the musician who expressed it most eloquently was J. S. Bach.
Freedom within form. Praise within discipline. Beauty in structure.

The history itself makes for fascinating inquiry. But the point
of this is the future and so we must push on. A break came: the siblings
parted ways. Today, tragically on occasion, art and religion seem at times
to be antithetical, rivals even. People who have given up on institutional
religion find transcendence in the arts religion either sponsored or one-
time inspired. People who wouldn't think of engaging in an act of
corporate, intentional worship, will weep during Bach's St. Matthew
Passion.

“Picasso once chastened Matisse for designing and decorating a
chapel. Both men were professed atheists. Matisse retorted, "Yes, I do
pray: and you pray too, and you know it all too well: when everything goes
badly, we throw ourselves into prayer... And you do it too; you too. It's
no good saying no."4
What happened? Why the break? Well for one thing there was a

revolution in the 16th Century. It affected all of life but its focal

point was religion. The Reformation set out to re-think the going theology
and then to recast the religious structures. And as is the case with
revolutions, things occasionally got out of hand. In the interests of
affirming the intellectual respectability of faith the reformers reworked
the literature and liturgy and put it in common language. The zealots took
it from there - broke the stained glass windows so people could read,
ripped out the statues and ornate stone screens se people could have access
‘to the altar. It is said that in Zurich, Huldrich Zwingli supervised the
white-washing of the cathedral walls. We have always been nervous, you
see, that people would confuse the reality the art was representing with
the art itself. We call it idolatry and the zealous Protestants thought
the way to guard against ft was to rid religion of art,

What we got, of course, was not less idolatry but bad art,
sentimentality, kitsch, Christ as blue-eyed Anglo-Saxon, with trim beard
and straight teeth, syrupy hymnody, sticky rhetoric...what C. S. Lewis
once called “ugly music, ugly architecture and bad poetry." At which point
the artists, once our relatives and allies, stopped taking us seriously.

There is a serious religious critique of the excesses of
Romanticism, however. All theology recognizes the power of art and
therefore the danger of distortion — or what religionists have called
idolatry. Wagner believed that music was capable of dealing with the most
profound realities of human existence, reached into German'folklore for
stories with which to frame it and - no fault of his - gave Adolf Hitler
an aesthetic which could be accommodated to Fascism.

Nietzsche, perhaps more than any, knew the dilemma. In The Birth
of Tragedy (What a shame that you're 19 when you have to read that!) he

argues that the two alternate streams of consciousness within Greek

culture, Apollo - the rational and orderly, and the Dionysian — the vital,
intoxicated passion of the artist, are out of sync.

Nineteenth century German philosophy was too rational, too out of
touch with the sensual, imagination, the aesthetic. We need more

Dionysius, less Apollo. The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music is

dedicated to Wagner who Nietzsche said taught him “that art is the highest
task and the--proper metaphysical activity of this life."

Nietzsche is not usually cited as a friend of religion. He loved
Wagner but detested the sentimentality of the Romantics. He particularly
disliked Christianity for its celebration of self-denial, submissiveness
and negation. The ethical model for Nietzsche was the Superman - a break-
through to a new evolutionary level of humanity, free from the bonds that
shackled European thought ever since the dominance of Christianity. "God
was dead” Nietzsche declared - long before it was fashionable. Superman
must kill God and ail the paraphernalia of traditional valves in order
to survive, even — and finally — art.

Nietzsche died insane, but the scholarly community knows that he
took the claims of religion more seriously than many of its advacates and
believers; and that he understood profoundly the connection between
spirituality and creativity, the holy and the demonic, ecstasy and tragedy.

The similarities, in spite of the tragic distancing between art
and religion, are profound. ”

Some familiar volces give testimony:

In Isak Dinesan‘'s story, The Cardinal's First Tale, a man lives

out his life uncertain whether his true vocation is to be an artist or
priest and comes to the conclusion that there is not so much difference

between the two... One of the things they have in common is that “each is

id

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Placed, in his life on earth, with his back te God and his face to man." 5

Charles Ives whose strong music often surprises us by evolving
into or out of a hymn forms once said, “I think there must be a place in the
soul all made of tunes."

Could one achieve any more credibility or regional orthodoxy than
with a reference to Louis Sullivan? He designed a few religious buildings,
was frustrated by the experience,... But about the enterprise he wrote:

The structure aust “stand for the actual, first~hand experiences
of the one who made it, and must represent...not only...physical nature but
more especially the outworking of that Great Spirit which makes nature so
intelligible to us that it ceases to be a phantasm, a sweet, a superb, a
convincing Reality..."

The only way to enhance credibility here might be to call in
Frank Lloyd Wright, Sullivan's student, which I will now do. Wright said
Sullivan was “baying at the moon" when he talked like that...that the -
artist stands alone and needs no mode] other than a set of building blocks.

And yet he gave his fellow members at Unity Temple in Oak Park
“what many regard to be his most complete and satisfying work of art.“

His son John said that Wright “was convinced that a Source
existed which, by its very nature, produced ideas in the mind that could be
reproduced in the worlg."®

John Updike is a writer who gees to church - or a believer who

writes books. In his recent meonoir, Seif-Consciousness, very near the end

he declares:
“Imitation is praise. Description expresses love... I bave felt free
to describe life as accurately as I could... What small faith I have has

given me what artistic courage I have. My theory was that God already

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ote

knows everything and cannot be shocked. And only truth is useful. Only
truth can be built upon. From a higher, inhuman point of view, only truth,
however harsh, is holy."”

And one of the more popular writers of modern spirituality, Henri
Nouwen,

"There are many times when I cannot pray, when I am too tired to
read the Gospels, too restiess to have spiritual thoughts, too depressed to
find words fer God, or too exhausted to do anything. But I can still look
at these images {icons} soe intimately connected with the experience of
love. "8

Now - shall we go in a little further and inquire about the
nature of creativity and spirituality? My experience is that it is
increasingly difficult to keep the two categories of human experience
distinct and apart: that it becomes increasingly easy to move from one to
the other almost as if they were synonymous.

Rolla May, distinguished acholar, author, therapist, set out in
1931 as a young man, to pursue the enigma of human creativity. He has

written about it in @ lovely book which also contains reproductions of his

own sketches and paintings, titled My Quest for Beauty. Traveling through

the Tyrol he observes that “the Human species... seems unable to repress the
desire to adorn clothes with every color of the spectrum... and to plant
flowers so thick in front of their houses that you cannot walk between
them. "9

Later May would return to this theme in another book..., The
Courage to Create, “Is it not the distinguishing characteristic of the

hunan being that in the hot race of evolution he pauses for a moment to

paint on the cave walls at Lascaux or Altamira those brown and red deer and

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bison which still fill us with amazed admiration and awe,"29

May argues that this trait, this urge to create, this awareness
of and striving for beauty is what makes us human and puts us in touch
with the transcendent, the holy - what some of us call God.

What is it exactly...? Carl Jung in his analysis of unconscious
and conscious suggested that creativity is a breaking through of the
unconscious not unlike a sudden moment of spiritual insight, a "revelation"
to use religious language. May suggests that it is a product of the
tension between chaos and order - that creativity looks at chaos, and
organizes it. He writes "The capacity to create, which we all have, though
in many varying degrees, is essentially the ability te find form in chaos,
to create form where there is only formlessness.“41

That is what the Judeo/Christian Creation Story says about the
Creator: form out of chaos. "In the beginning...the earth was. without
form and void, and darkness was upon the face of the deep; and the Spirit
of God was moving over the face of the waters. And God said, ‘Let there be
light and there was light."

fo create, in this sense, is also to destroy ~ here to destroy
chaos, to break with the given, the known, the traditional and to make
something altogether new. It requires some tolerance for the chaos as the
starting point for creativity, and it requires courage. It's also nice,
if your desk is in a state of chaos to remind yourself or any snide critic
— that chaos always precedes the moment of creativity — that form follows
formlessness .

Describing his art, John Updike explains that since he has
stopped using tobacco, alcohol, salt and caffeine, writing is his sole

remaining vice. "It is an addiction, an illusory release, a presumptuous

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taming of reality," and then playing, I presume, with Mila Kundera's
enigmatic title, “a way of expressing lightly the unbearable."12_

Rolio May and others propose that the moment of artistic vision
and the moment of religious revelation are either very similar, or
radically stated, one and the same.

“Creativity is an emulating of God in that we destroy the cosmos
and then build it up again." 43 May wrote — and...

“the experience may have a religious quality with artists. This
is why many artists fee] that something holy is going on when they paint,
that there is something in the act of creating which is like a religious
revelation."14

He is not alone in that notion. Wordsworth, for instance,
celebrated:

“A presence that disturbs me with joy.
Of elevated thoughts: a sense sublime
Of something far more deeply interfused,
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
And the round ocean and the living air,
And the blue sky..."

2,500 years ago a Hebrew poet wrote:

“One thing have I asked of the Lord,

that will IT seek after:

That I may dwell in the house of the Lard
all the days of my life,

to behold the beauty of the Lord..."
[Psalm 27:4]

The ancient Psalmist... “the beauty of the Lord...” What a lively

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notion, that among the traits of the deity accessible to human perception
is beauty. Holiness we think we understand: love, forgiveness, judgment,
power, all these categories are familiar ~ but beauty...intriguing, I
think.

In his Quest. for it, Professor May writes:

“Beauty is the experience that gives us a sense of joy and a
sense of peace simultaneously. Other happenings give us joy and afterwards
a peace, but--in beauty these are the same experience. Beauty is serene and
at the same time exhilarating: it increases one's sense of being alive.
Beauty gives us not only a feeling of wonder: it. imparts to us at the same
moment a timelessness, a repose — which is why we speak of beauty as being
eternal."15

If you substitute God for beauty in that Paragraph you would have
a pretty good definition of spirituality, it seems to ne.

God, the religionists of history maintain, may be apprehended, at
least in part, as creator. Indeed, at its best the Judeo/Christian
_Xradition has maintained that creation, because it is God's, is
essentially good. We have had to struggle with that a bit. The Greeks
weren't at all sure that the created order was good. In fact there have
been times when we have seemed to believe that creation was a big mistake,
that God must have been distracted when human beings were given bodies,
Senses, appetites and passion. But at heart, at our best, we have affirmed
the goodness of creation. :

A witty Episcopalian, Robert Farrar Capon, puts it this way:

“Man should net be viewed as a lonely sketch of God tucked inte a
book of meaningless scribbtes. Rather he should be seen as the best self-—

portrait in a whole exhibition of portraits. Everything in the world laoks

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like God, to one degree or another."!®

Beyond the internal correspondence between holiness and beauty,
religion and art, there is, it seems to me, a remarkable similarity between
creative people and spiritually sensitive people. They act a lot alike.
They lock alike on the stage of history. Yeu could confuse one for the
other.

For one thing, they dan't seem to fit. The artist as rebel is
almost a cliehe but it is, in part, true. To be creative is to live with
at least a bit of “dis-ease” with convention.

“Do not go gentle into that good night,” Dylan Thomas advised,
regarding our common and conventional accommodation with death.

"Rage, rage against the dimming of the light."

Both deeply religious people and creatively artistic people have
difficulty fitting into accepted cultural expectations, behaviors and
attitudes. Both, for instance, are not quite as hostile to chaos; both
see its potential, both on occasion may even nurture it, celebrate it and
God forbid, create it. The life of Jesus is a good example. He parted
dramatically from convention by asseciating with the wrong peaple, eating
the wrong foods at the wrong time, by talking with women, and on one
gicrious occasion by allowing and then appreciating an artistic gesture of
generous excess... a woman broke open a bottle of very expensive perfume
and poured it over his feet - simply for the iove of it.

Both artist and religionist, because the cultural fit is not
easy, are occasionally regarded as neurotic, or at least peculiar.

And both artists and religionists serve a vital function as
critics of culture, The best of them do not live outside the culture as

eccentrics or hermits, although that style does commend itself to both

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types with some regularity. Rather, the best of both live thoroughly in
the world without giving their heart to it: "in, but not of the world" is
the way the Bible puts it.

And, with remarkable consistency both creativity and spirituality
depend on the same kinds af disciplines... listening for instance,... waiting
in anticipation,

Archibald MacLeish, when asked about how he went about his craft
quoted a Chinese poet... "We poets struggle with non~being to force it to
yield Being. We knock upon silence for an answering music."17

Monet looks at haystacks a thousand times and each time sees
something new and different. An artist, says Professor May, waits with
full attention, net passively, but nimble, intense waiting, 28 like that
magnificent waiting Greg Louganis did at the end of the diving board in the
Glympic finals, Waiting, waiting, until the right moment and then
responding almost, it seemed to me, to something which called that perfect
dive out of him,

That sounds like spiritual neditation to me. It sounds like what
the spiritually sensitive cal] prayer... being quiet, useless in the
presence of God.

Is it pushing the comparison to suggest that waiting in
expectation for inspiration is like praying and that the experience of
creative break-through is like revelation, and that the act of painting, or
Playing music, or writing a clean line, giving yourself utterly to an
endeavor, or loving someone wholly, is like participating in the creation
of the world? I think not...

It was theologian Berdyaev, from whom I borrowed my title, who

Said: “Most artists are aware that during the deepest moments of that

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creation they are out on the other side of themselves, and are so free from
time, with the same joyousness that comes in moments of prayer."29

Spirituality and creativity: both are an openness to mystery, an
active waiting and listening, a leaning out into time and space and
transcendence. We are never more human, I would propose, than when we do
that...never more human than when we acknowledge the “greater than us," the
truth and goodness and reality which exist beyond our own capacities,
skills and pifts.

We are never more hopeful, that is to say, than when either
creativity or spirituality reside in us, and by now you must know that I no
longer believe there is much difference between them. And that is what all
of this has to do with the future.

I read a remarkable paper recently with an intimidating and

unlikely title, A Survey of World Trends Shaping the Future Business

Environment...prepared by the special assistant to the Deputy Secretary
of Commerce, U. S. Department of Commerce...William VanDusen Wishard. When
I finished I wondered if Mr. Wishard's supervisor had read his essay. It
contained data about the fantastic changes occurring in our werld —
denographics, economics, technology, communication. Some of it was very
encouraging. More of it was frightening. All of it was fascinating...the
modernization of China, the increase of terrorism, the end of the age of
print communication, population shifts and explosions, environmental crises
and new worlds energing in bio-technology, genetics, fiber optics,
lasers...and always weapons...

And then, on the next to last page, the remarkable observation:

*The central struggle for the future is for the individual - for

every person on earth to knaw who we are and why we are here - integrated

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with every part of ourselves and at home with people from every part of the
wordd."

We have paid a very dear price for the material benefits of
Western civilization, Says this essayist: "... in the past 100 years we
have alienated ourselves from the deepest raots of our own inner being... We
have created people who can absorb massive amounts of data, who can manage
complex mechanical and bureaucratic systems, but who are unable to provide
a depth of meaning that links the individual to some larger significance
beyond material gain, technical achievement, or personal advancement."

We seem to have arrived at a point in time when the most critical
issues facing us and our future are issues about which science and
technology and economics — have little to say... They are issues of how we
shall live on this planet and with one another.29

And for those issues creativity and spirituality becone saving
pessibilities.

We'll have to learn to slow down.

We'll have to learn to find value in human enterprise which does
use up the resources of our planet.

We'll have to learn to produce less stress and less toxic waste.

We'll have to learn to love one another,

And, with all "those things" as Lewis Thomas calls our nuclear
arsenals, pointed at each other, we we will have to be more creative than
anyone in all of history in order to pull it off,

My own faith position — my own hape — is based on my sense that
there is something almost primal in us that is creative; that there is a
place Jn our souls full of music, that we are unable not to ornament our

clothing and draw pictures on the cave wall with the blunt end of a stick

is

or on our memo pad with a Cross Pen, that there is dance in us and a
responsiveness to rhythms which have their source somewhere beyond the
boundaries of our own rational selves or life experience. We are creative,
that is to say...because ~ and here I preach - because we are part of
creation...part of that astonishing process sometimes characterized as the
unfolding of God, and never more eloquently posed than by William
Blake... and with his mystical puzzle I conclude...

“Tiger! Tiger! burning bright

In the forests of the night

What immortal hand or eye

Could frame thy fearful symmetry?

When the stars threw down their spears
And watered heaven with their tears,
Bid he smile his warks to see?

Did he who made the lamb make thee?"

26

NOTES

l“Tambov: Perestroika in the Provinces," TIME Magazine,
April 10, 1989, p. 86,

“theodore A. Gill, Sibling Rivalry, a lecture at Nassau Presbyterian
Church, Princeton, NJ, 1981.

3 yaroslav Pelikan, Fools for Christ, Essays on the True, the Geod and
the Beautiful, (Philadelphia: Muhlenberg Press, 1955), p. 119.

4 John Updike, Seif-Consciousness, Memoirs, (New York: Alfred A.
Knopf, 1989), p. 220,

Srdward Robinson, The Language of Mystery, (London: SCM Press LTD,
1987), p. 85.

Sroger G. Kennedy, American Churches, (New York, Stewart, Tabori,
and Chang, 1982), pp. 26-29.

TUpdike, op. cit., p. 281.

SHenri J. M. Nowen, Behold the Beauty of the Lord, (South Bend, Ave
Maria Press, 1987}, p. 11.

9Rollo May, My Quest for Beauty, (Dallas, New York, San Francisco:
Saybrood, 1985}, p. 15.

10rollo May, The Courage to Create, (New York: Bantam, 1975),
Preface vii.

llMay, Beauty, p. 197.
l2undike, op. cit., p. 226.
i3yay, Beauty, p. 144.

| 14uay, Courage, p. 75.

1Syay, Beauty. p. 20.

16Robert F. Capon, Hunting the Divine Fox, (San Francisco: Harper and
Row, 1974), p. 58.

lTMay, Courage, p. 89,
18May, Courage, p. 91.

ivadeleine L'Engle, Walking on Water, Reflections on Faith and Art,
(Wheaton: Harold Shaw, 1980), p. 163.

20m. VanDusen Wishard, A Survey of World Trends Shaping the Future
Business Environment, paper presented at Cabo San Lucas, Mexico, 1987,
p. 25-27.

2lwilliam Blake, 1757-1927, Songs of Experiences, “The Tiger,"
stanzas 1, 5.