Let It Be

I wait all day 
for the Light to come 
right here, right across 
fabric stretched open 
like a prayer 

I am full of questions 
being worked out in color 
humming, I pause 
I step back, I step closer 
I stretch open 

Light is finding me 
listening. 

​“Light is finding me listening,” a poem by Kaysie Strickland

Last year, in the midst of a deep discernment, I entered my studio restless. That word restless doesn’t fully hold everything I need it to, but it’s close. It’s not anxious energy. It feels more like a stirring that refuses to be contained — a longing for contact, a search for the right language or materials or prayer that will allow something to be seen, something to be named. On this particular day, I found myself sitting in front of a cold lump of clay. The smell of earth brightened in the presence of sunlight and filled the space around me as all the static noise in my mind began to grow quiet. Now, there is only listening to the way dirt and water move with touch. At some point, I realize: this is prayer.

I’ve come to understand that creative work is, at its heart, a form of communion — a mysterious exchange between the human maker and the Divine Maker. It is an act of listening, consenting, receiving, offering, blessing, and even breaking. Acts done not in isolation or domination, but in communion with myself, creation, and the One who makes all things. In other words, when I sit before a blank canvas, an empty page, or a lump of clay, I am not the only one initiating; I am entering into something — into Someone — who rises to meet me. Creative work from beginning to end is prayer. A prayer that begins long before the artist is aware of the opening line. A prayer that surprises us along the way as we cooperate with what is asking to be bodied forth.

On this particular day in my studio, cooperating with the clay, she asks to be bodied forth as the wheel turns. I do not need to ask her name. I know it. Mary. This catches me off guard and opens me. As the clay moves, I see Mary at the Annunciation — her hands open, her whole body softened by consent, receiving the Word who desires to become flesh in her. The posture is not passive but brave: an active surrender, a courageous hospitality to God’s own life. And her voice echoes into me: let it be.

Creative work is a labor of willingness and love that asks if we will offer ourselves to something that needs to pass through us — something we cannot predict, manage, or control. It asks for our bodies, our vulnerability, our time, our attentiveness. It asks us to say yes before we know the consequences. And like all births, it is both miracle and mystery.

To create is to give birth.

Mary, the poet of the Magnificat, shows us this vertical dimension of creativity — the relationship between creator and Creator. She consents, receives, listens, and answers. She magnifies. Her life becomes a vessel that holds and reveals the life of God, yet she never abandons, nor is she asked to abandon, herself. Mary is receptive and questioning. She offers herself, and she needs the community around her.

This vertical communion — this surrender — forms the inner life of the artist. And as Madeleine L’Engle reminds us, creative work has a horizontal life as well. In Walking on Water, she writes that the author and reader ​“meet on the bridge of words.” Creativity is relational. It is hospitality. We offer our work so someone else might cross toward us. ​“Art is communication,” L’Engle says, and ​“if there is no communication it is as though the work had been stillborn.” A work of art longs to be received. It lives in the space between giver and receiver, in that charged landscape where recognition and meaning spark.

L’Engle describes creative work as ​“incarnational.” The artist, she writes, ​“is a servant willing to be a birthgiver… the work of art comes and says, ​‘Here I am. Enflesh me.’” The artist either answers with Mary, ​“my soul magnifies the Lord,” or refuses. Creativity, like communion, requires love — which is another word for willingness. It requires receptivity, an openness to be surprised, to make room for God’s life and God’s desire to be seen and touched through us. It is risk. It is labor. It is surrender. I often feel this in my creative work: I am not the source so much as the servant of its becoming.

It begins with opening to Love. And that is quite the work, isn’t it?

The prayerful creative does not invent but receives: a tug, a vision, a phrase, a color, an ache. When I began sculpting this piece I later titled Let It Be, I felt myself participating in something older and larger than my own imagination, as though Mary’s yes was echoing through time and inviting me to offer mine. The clay — earth and water — held a means of grace. My task was not to force but to attend. To let the shape emerge. To hear the Spirit breathe. To listen and be willing. And then to offer it to the world, to hope that when your gaze meets her now, you are touched by God somehow — that you are brought into the hospitality of my yes too.

This is what makes creative work not merely a craft but a communion — a way of being with God, of participating in the ongoing incarnation of grace. Every poem, every painting, every sculpture, every story is an invitation to say yes again — to become, like Mary, a bearer of Light.

When I look at her — hands open, head lifted, heart vulnerable — I see my own posture too. The artist’s yes. The mother’s yes. The disciple’s yes. The human yes. This is the yes that makes art possible. The yes that makes communion possible. The yes that makes us most like God. She reminds me, in Rowan Williams’s words, to live with ​“an openness that demands everything.”

Creative work is a profoundly human and profoundly holy act. It is our way of saying, through a thousand stanzas, mediums, and materials:

Let it be.