Aperture Image

In this month of March we find ourselves in Service to the Mystery of Creativity. Creativity is a founding principle of Christuman. “We are created in the creative image of the Creator and our acts of creation make known this Imago Dei impressioned upon our hearts: all believed and all beloved.” This principle speaks to the importance of creative acts and it points to the main purpose, if not the sole purpose, of creative acts—to make known the Imago Dei (Image of God) impressioned upon our hearts. 

I think of the image that is captured by the “old-time” cameras where their aperture would allow in the right amount of light to impression onto a photographic plate or film, the target image. While the image carried a two-dimensional likeness of the original, it required a process to develop the image so the image would emerge out of the dark film with full color and dimensionality. The image lodged on the film was only as good as the artistic process that let that image develop and take on pixels of light and dark emerging into something that we recognized as carrying the likeness of the original. In similar fashion, the Imago Dei that is impressioned on our hearts is not fully revealed until the mixing process occurs, that is until that image is mixed in with the earth of us, the creative acts of our day-to-day lives allowing us to give it full color, full dimensionality, full expression. 

Perhaps, this imaging or imagining process is revealed in the metaphor of the Creator creating creation and through an imaging or imaginative process the Creator calls into being, light. It would appear that out of the proverbial darkroom—out of the formless, the void, the darkness—the waters began teeming with swarms of living creatures and the skies began to fill with flocks of birds and the human was created in his own image. Perhaps this is best conceived as an imagining process that is an active imagination acting in and upon all varieties of media. The founding principle of Christuman suggests that it is our courageous and spirited acts of creation that will reveal this impressioned Imago. It will not be our beliefs or our understandings of God that will reveal the Imago but it will be the developing process, the process of our creative acts that will reveal the Imago.

As our creative energy is expressed through our prayers and our daily actions, the imago burrowed in our hearts will emerge and take on a likeness of our Creator creating. Though created, we are aglow with creation; though finite, we are alight with the infinite, though hidden, we are making known the the Imago Dei. We co-create that we might become children of creation, images of God, revealed through a process of a Divine imagination. May it be so