I delivered this short talk at the Unitarian Society of Hartford on Sunday, August 12, 2018. The theme of the service was creativity and spirituality.
How many of you liked to color with
crayons when you were a kid? How about
painting? Building things with
Tinkertoys? Legos?
When you were doing that, did you get so immersed
that sometimes you would lose track of time?
I colored with crayons and I made up
imaginary worlds and I loved everything about doing it: the colors, the feeling of the crayon on the
paper, the path to a dream world.
But eventually I stopped coloring with
crayons. The last time I did that, I
must have been in my early 20s, and I looked at what I made, and I thought,
“What’s the point? This is silly.”
When you grow up in a result oriented
culture, you put away the crayons unless you can make something worthwhile.
So I put away the crayons.
I went to college, then graduate school,
then law school.
Then I had a job and a family. The only time I touched crayons or art
supplies was when I was taking them out or putting them away for my daughters.
So maybe it was by putting away my
children’s crayons that I was forced to think about my younger self who colored
with crayons.
And I realized that the part of me that
enjoyed coloring with crayons WANTED OUT.
I had no idea where to start.
I was intimidated by the possibilities and
the likelihood of my success at any of them.
So what did I do?
I spun my psychic wheels for a few years,
and the idea festered.
Then I heard about The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron.
This book has 12 chapters, each of which is designed to identify--and silence-- the inner critic and bring
out the part of you that still wants to color with crayons.
Along with a group of other Unitarian
Society of Hartford congregants, I made my way through that book chapter by
chapter.
We learned that the enemy is the censor
that keeps up a constant stream of subversive remarks such as:
“You call that writing? What a joke.”
“If you haven’t done it by now you never
will.”
“Why are you going to do something you’re
terrible at?”
“It’s too late.”
The book helped me silence that inner
censor, shove that negativity away and just play without judging the intrinsic
value of what I produced.
My friend Meg told me yesterday that she
actually bought a rubber chicken with which to strike her inner critic.
Paraphrasing Julia Cameron: Because once
you let go of the negatives, and stop worrying about the quality of your work as
compared to that of great artists, you begin to open the doorway to
creativity.
You will tap into different parts of your
brain.
You create pathways in your consciousness
through which the creative force can operate.
Once you agree to clear these pathways,
your creativity emerges.
Call it God, universe, mind, source…Call
it, like the poet Dylan Thomas, the force that through the green fuse drives
the flower. And it is a force.
Or, in our fine Unitarian tradition, call
it the Oversoul.
Ralph Waldo Emerson described it: “Within [us] is the soul of the whole, the
wise silence, the universal beauty to which every part and parcel is equally
related; the eternal ONE,” --Essay, “The Oversoul.”
When that power “breathes through [our]
intellect it is genius; when it breathes through [our] will it is virtue; when it
flows through [our] affection, it is love,” he continued. Emerson didn’t say this, but I would add,
“When it flows through our soul, it is art.”
So in a way, our Unitarian traditions, to
which I turned as the Catholicism of my childhood morphed into something
broader and deeper, helped me grasp and live the concept of opening myself up
to the gorgeous and awe-inspiring power of the universe.
As Julia Cameron says, it doesn’t matter
what you call it but how you use it.
You have to be open minded and the
universe will make itself available.
And in that regard, in case the concept of
the oversoul is a little too much for you, I’d like to describe this miracle on
a physiological, rather than a spiritual basis by telling you about the man in
this photo. He’s a client of the
Chrysalis Center, a nonprofit social services agency in Hartford where I teach
quilting once a week. He’s hand-weaving
a rug, and he told me the other day that until he took up this tactile, repetitive
pastime, he was taking seven psychotropic drugs. Now, he said, he’s taking none, and has
become self-regulating. He attributes
that change to the act of weaving.
In my case, I explored the fiber arts,
because sewing was an art form that was open to me as a kid. Who remembers learning to sew in homemaking
class? I got into art quilting. By rediscovering the tactile joy of working
with fabrics, I found a direct path to transcendence.
This is how the creation of art works for
me. I get lost in the act of creation
and that process is a merging with transcendence, even an act of prayer.
I see art as a way to praise the natural
beauty of the universe, from the sand ripples on the beach at low tide to the
bright orange of a group of jack o’ lantern mushrooms growing against a tree.
When I see that kind of beauty now, I give
myself the permission to recreate it.
And in so doing, my art becomes an act of praise. Praise for the colors, the patterns, and yes,
even the holiness of creation.
“It is art that makes life, makes
interest, makes importance and I know of no substitute whatever for the force
and beauty of its process.”—Henry James
