“Our worst trouble today is our feeble hold on creation.” Dorothy Sayers, writing this from within the foreboding darkness of WWII Europe and witness to the gut wrenching fallout of war, was quite serious. The essay the quote originates from is entitled, “What Do We Believe” and revisits core Christian doctrines. First, and my focus, God the Father Almighty, Maker of all things. In other words, Creator. The essence and ultimate image of creative activity. And we, humanity, are “most godlike and most ourselves” when occupied in the work of creation. Do you believe that?
God is a creative God. We, made in that image, are made to create. Yet, as many of us in today’s world experience, our creative energies are diffused by endless distractions, given over to an ambient anxiety fueled by our late night screen time, social media obsessions, and enforced through a materialistic outlook on life. Our materialism habits and increasing disconnection from “nature” continue to prop up our material world, while the artificial and manufactured environments we create form us in their own image. As Sayers says, “to sit down and let ourselves be spoon-fed with the ready-made (artificial) is to lose our grip on our only true life (creative activity) and our only real selves (image of God).”
Ironically, I just spoon-fed myself some boxed cereal (Honey Bunches of Oats – come on!). Who knows where any of it came from, all I know is I get to eat it and I can throw the waste away. I don’t have to worry about where the food comes from or where the waste goes, I can eat, drink, and be merry and I myself testify to the truth of Sayer’s point. The passive consumer unconcerned about waste and production, unskilled and unpracticed in the art of creating, unformed in the character crucible that is the art and work of creation – loses something of genuine human life.
In this vein I feel caught between. On the one hand, my own upbringing on a farm (still very caught within the industrialization of America and the technological revolution) that valued creation and instilled that value in me. On the other hand, I find myself swept along in the tide of my generational and cultural moment, imbibing largely in secular thought, practice, and philosophical assumptions about life, meaning, identity, and purpose. I’m mobile, educated, technologically laden, digitally adept, globally “aware”, mostly isolated from traditional cultures and helplessly idealistic. I live in a large metropolitan city and the more I try to be unique, the less I can pick myself out of a big city crowd. My life is increasingly lived in manufactured spaces, dependent on artificial goods, and mediated by digital devices. Can you relate?
The ready-made, artificial convenience and the easy-everywhere of the internet makes my life convenient to the 3rd power. I have more access to knowledge than I could ever integrate in 10 lifetimes. But these trivialities, conveniences, and levels of access do not share answers to the deepest questions of life. Maybe more accurately, these realities of our lives do not shape in us the capacity of thought, character, or life together necessary to formulate meaningful answers to life’s deepest questions. This is one reason therapy has such attraction today for myself and my peers. Uprooted from our lived memories with family in a central location and embedded in the matrix of a largely material, mechanistic, secular way of viewing the world – our meaning making is short-circuited. A metaphor I often think about is that my existence is increasingly mechanically separated (canned chicken anyone…). Therapy holds the promise of integrating and making meaning of our experiences and the existential void felt in our largely artificial world.
The truth I want to make clear is painfully simple – God is Creator. Creation is given. You as a human are made to be creative and live in a creative harmony with creation. You are created in a specific image, the image of God. Two major aspects stick out to me:
1) To live a truly human life means one of creative activity – work. That the term “work” almost never connotes for most of us, creative activity, shows the distance from recognizing and welcoming this creative activity we were made for as extremely valuable for self and society. In other words, a Creation theology would instill in us a deep value for work-as-creative-activity imaging God our Creator.
2) the Creator has made us creatures and embedded us within a world we did not make with responsibility to care for and rule. Exploit, abuse, and treat with contempt has no place within the Genesis text before Genesis 3. The essential harmony we are created for with God included a harmony and relationship with nature. This relationship as experienced post-Fall is estranged. Particularly in the modern West it is largely forgotten and confused with some conservation movement. The issue is not conservation (that is great), the issue is use. Not, how will we not use certain pieces of land, but, how will we use the land we do use. Most of our use assumes no inherent value of land, plants, animals, place, soil, etc. until we assign monetary value or can orient it to production of consumable goods for profit. However, how we can we claim to become people of reconciliation or peace while we enact violence and oppression to the very land nurturing our life? God as Creator means the land we inhabit, resources we use, and waste we create matters to God and is relevant to every person inhabiting this earth. The artificial bubbles we assume we live in may be increasingly possible with technology, but deny the depth of human existence we are created for.
The meaning and contour of life foisted upon me to consume inane trifles manufactured to please, to make convenient, and to be discarded treating creation as something to be used, abused, or a problem to solve is false. It is a false way to be in this world as a creature. It is a false way to be in this world as co-creators. The current mental health crisis, opioid epidemic, racial upheaval (needed), political discourse (generous term for it), existential angst, seem to me to betray a fundamental wrong view of our world and self within it.
Today, creation spoke this truth to me. I sit by a beach off the Gulf Coast on a little island off the panhandle. As I write a storm begins to stir up tossing waves and throwing rain in its wake. We walked out expecting sun (thanks Accuweather) and got rain! A paddle boarder hoping for calm got a little more chaos than their sense of balance could handle. My toddler thought he could conquer a wave and realized fast the waves don’t respect his budding independence like mommy or daddy. Next to the ocean – you respect given nature and its demands on you. Otherwise, people die. On a lighter note – even the island’s architecture bears witness to this basic relational quality. Houses are built on stilts; it will flood. Windows have shutters; hurricanes will blow in. What I love most is the surprising lack of ostentatious manufacturing of homes or landscaping. I am at the beach. I am not there to look at a house or the carefully manicured grass. The architecture and land care (natural vegetation) does what it can to complement the place it is. This is a way of respecting nature, not treating it as material vacuous of value until you use it or make money off it. The landscape is mostly natural and naturally occurring. How refreshing! It tells a story of life, growth, death, return, and resurrection as the natural life cycle runs its brilliant course. The beauty of plants able to bloom with the morning dew and fold in magical disappearance from the afternoon heat. The waves themselves, an eternal now, inviting you into the present moment, whisper, shout, crash to the glory of Creator God.
Creation matters. And if you find yourself struggling with “sin”, frustrated by the frenetic frenzy of your life, seeking for an identity that eludes your grasping, and feeling largely prideful, in control, or anxious – let creation speak truth to you today. Perhaps Dorothy wouldn’t mind me updating her phrase to include, “Creation’s hold on us.” Perhaps you release your hold on subjectivity and let Creation be subject. Or better yet, get knocked down by a wave. As the wave holds you in its grip, give glory to God.
*(To be fair, I got here by amazing machine technology – Iphone alarm, Uber, Starbucks, security, Southwest!!!, airplane, rental car, I benefit from these amazing technologies. I am not trying to rid myself of all technology, but to question the way of life assumed by unconscious use of our modern tools and ways of life.)
– This essay is written reflecting on the essay “What Do We Believe” in Letters to a Diminished Church by Dorothy Sayers.
To Be Human 