There—on a cave wall,
deep inside the earth,
deep inside long memory,
a torch reveals
red bear, bison,
horses, lions, panthers,
fighting rhinos—and
a handprint.

Signature on stone,
syllables in red ochre,
five-finger haiku.

It seems that from the first appearance of some of our earliest ancestors perhaps we now think, as early as 65000-70000 years ago, we humans and humanish creatures seem to have a need for a creative response to life, one that as N. Scott Momaday says, “puts us in the frame of the picture.”  So that “there” on a cave wall of some 25000 years ago, we still recognize an artist—perhaps a child—working diligently, giving color to awe, weaving a cluster of images and associations, mimicking the lab of nature, inventing landscapes and fauna, and placing themselves “in the frame” with a five finger signature, children making human, human making gods.

Perhaps we humans are “cosmic curiosities” who from longest of recorded time have made ourselves the objects of our own fantasies projecting as we do, our images on gigantic walls of caves and eventually theaters and digital walls and even into the circuitry of avatars  -- always dazzling ourselves with our own perceptions. Rarely, we grow circumspect and become self-reflectively philosophical with ourselves.  

Once in a while, we may even try to step back and take ourselves objectively out of the picture. Occasionally, we attempt to ignore the form, the words, the search for origins and meaning – but we don’t seem to be able to help ourselves and always, generation after generation, thrill over a child’s first kindergarten finger-painting. We love and cherish the five-fingered signature. For in such creation, lies the rich potential to discover ourselves in relation to space, sound, light, color and movement – and to all other creation. Willingly or not, it seems we are creators, receivers and transmitter of symbolic form, of logos.

With art defined as a skill acquired by learning or practice, it can be said that everything we do is art – some days good art, and other days, bad art – but always our lives are works of art. In our service to the Mystery of Creativity today, we will name and celebrate so many forms of this making. Since the beginning to time we humans have been making; we are spitters, blowers, singers, whirlers, potter and sculptors; as we say today, we are orderers, writers, speakers, painters, dancers, searchers, meditators, readers, dreamers, researchers, toolmakers, discoverers, adventurers.   

Today we celebrate our Four Prayers of the Mystery of Creativity -- the mystery of this creative response, the deep impulse to act in the image of the Spiritual Source of all Creation…and the belief that our acts of creation make known an Imago Dei impressioned upon our hearts. Today is a good day to sing the new song of Christuman…”never ask who the I is, for the I is insignificant”. It is as Dante, perhaps the greatest artist of all time said in answer to who had authored these new rhymes….“I am one who, when Love breathes within me, takes note, and to the mode dictated within me, I set down the significance.”

And yet, I have found that there are days when it feels difficult to feel this creative force – as if sitting by the waters of Babylon, as if in captivity to a weighty past of which songs are being demanded of us by our captors. We ask ourselves how it is we may meet this obligation to respond creatively, and to prepare ourselves to see the demand in the moment it appears.  For we know all too well that art is also akin to a “fitting together” as in weaponry – and we are all too familiar with the destructive capabilities of creative reactions, rather than responses  – what we might call “Promethean creativity” of the one who would react with seeming rugged independence, stealing and harnessing the power of the human imagination without first, the sacrifice of ego or a vision of the human potential to live as a blessing upon the earth.

In our prayer today, we ask what must die in us for this creative response to produce new beauties in the world. Many of us  -- young and old --  grow burdened and hopeless in the face of the shame and grief of so many human uglinesses – the contortions and excesses of this Promethean creativity that drain and weaken the human spirit  Today, we join Jacob at the water’s edge, coming home as he is “to face the music” and ask ourselves how do you let go of all those things you creatively contrived to gain, but no longer serve you …how do we make fertile the new ground…shake off the old, and look to the work of today and the work of seven generations to come?

In our grieving, we have come to feel that historical time is not as absolute as it used to be. Increasingly we feel that anything that has ever happened to anyone, any image or dream or belief experienced by another human being is potentially now a part of us. This is a weighty realization.

…Yet, even in the midst of all this ponderous musing, the most amazing thing has been happening to me this week.  I have begun to experience moments of hopefulness.  I am coming to realize that hopefulness may be something you catch from another person, usually a young person. Thanks to Benjamin, we’ve been watching “A Brief History of the Future”. The more episodes I watch, the more I catch a glimpse of hopefulness on the faces of folks (all younger and way smarter and even wiser than me) busily creating the future they want to eventually become their history  -- and I’m afraid I’ve realized too late that hopefulness is contagious –that the more I watch, the more I am coming down with  a very good case, maybe fatal even, of hopefulness, like Howard Thurman’s “greening edge” and feeling something like an excitement for the future. 

It seems like the contagion of hope takes hold first in the inner eye and ear.  It’s a sudden glimpse of a form that is not yet, but could be.  It’s a scatter of objects and yet a glimpse of order, a sense of rhythm that has not yet found its words, the stirrings of characters that have yet to announce their names or destinies. Most succinctly put, it is a renewed sense of amazement.

What kind of art will my living create this week? I wrote down this week but not who said it, “Seen in this way, the purpose of art is to change the state of being of the enjoyer, to awaken a sensitivity to the feelings of others, to reveal the unity underlying one’s own nature, and to fructify and refresh …a capacity for insight, understanding and joy.”  How do we renew our creative responses, regain A Beginner’s mind – as the Zen sages say so that our lives, seen as works of art, begin to  “fructify and refresh” those around us – especially those of our children?

For so long I think I associated creativity with becoming great or expert or achieve perfection in something…anything!  I read a story this week about a woman name Janet Heyneman who spent a summer in Kyoto studying Noh theater…and she discovered she wasn’t very good at it.  But she refused to go home as she learned something about her obligation to respond creatively to life in a way that fructifies and refreshes her soul and those around her. She said of her summer experience: “ I have always avoided people who I thought could see through me, but now somehow I feel a great sense of freedom: freedom from having to pretend to be strong, to know anything. I’m a student now, really for the first time. I’m opening the door to humiliation, to awkwardness, ignorance, embarrassment. I’ll go on with this study, ironically, because I’m not good at it. I’ve recognized something here that is deeply true; becoming ‘good” at it is beside the point. I’m making a vow to grow.” What a perfect creative response: a vow to grow!

Benjamin gifted me this morning with this from Abraham Herschel who said, “Our goal should be to live life in radical amazement. To get up in the morning and look at the world in a way that takes nothing for granted. Everything is phenomenal; everything is incredible; never treat life casually. To be spiritual is to be amazed.”

I feel myself lifting my head from the sand, like Blake’s long-sleeping and lethargic Albion …and looking around and listening again for the music that can be heard so deeply that it is not heard at all, but it is the music which you are.

We are works of art, maybe good and maybe bad,  but as such, storehouses nonetheless of psychic energy and we transmit this energy according to the quality of attention we bring to life. Every now and then, we experience certain works of art so deeply that the memory of them returns again and again to persuade us the energy is not lost but has been transferred to us and stored in the depths of our nature. There is a certain point of coming into contact with a work of art when one seems to connect with its emotional or symbolic message.

I am grateful to have felt hope again this week, to feel fructified and refreshed by people doing the art of their lives…by the looks on their faces, the quality of their voices, the excellence of their commitments, the calmness of their spirits, the beauty of their vision, the clearness of their sight. It makes me want to renew my vow to grow in kind and offer such a spirit to others as well.  Matter changes in response to them. Our body stretch again, our hearing becomes capable of finer distinctions. Our breath and fingers learn to match a sound. Colors blend or highlight or assault one another. This is how, writ large across a society, new substances are discovered, produced, combined. 

We’ve all been learning over the past few years that stories we believe, shape our perceptions of reality. For good or ill, we have access to multiple stories from other cultures. There is loose in the world at the moment an unprecedented quantity of images, stories, ritual and odd bits of knowledge to be used or misused.  And, there is little to guide us except intuition and affinity. Certainly, we should lift our heads and begin to challenge the objects and the rituals, the folklore and the scriptures we have been steeped in…it is a good thing to ask which of these things are eccentric survivals, or relics of another time, mere sources of information about a distant past -- and also, which are still access points to the sacred, places of sacrifice in creative response that can serve as guideposts and inspiration.

I began to feel hopeful this week, and I am not afraid to lean into and test the mettle of my golden chain of friends with whom I have walked …for I still trust them to help me start the even more important work of creating links to a golden chain of the future…looking for those who are creatively responding, not merely reacting to the challenges of today. Looking to those willing to sacrifice what is superficial and known, for what is essential to them, even if unknown. These are the people who by my own “vow to grow”, I may draw energy and inspiration for my own renewal and discovery: I must support their greening edge. For these are the ones of our time, these are our “syllables in red ochre, our finger-painting children creating their five-finger haiku”. These are the ones writing their history as they create a future. A future in which they, in themselves are a promise of what lies ahead.