Creative Work Can Be a Connector
LETTER BY GRACE POUCH
Anne Morrow Lindbergh’s classic book Gift from the Sea is a meditation on shells — whelks, double sunrise shells, and oysters. It came out of a time of intense grief after Anne and Charles’s oldest child was kidnapped and killed. The grace this mother needed was not a pretty shell collection, nor a portfolio of artfully crafted essays. It was healing. A fresh encounter with God’s goodness. Wisdom for navigating life in the face of intense suffering. Grace to reconnect. “If one is out of touch with oneself, then one cannot touch others,” Anne wrote.
Creatively reflecting on shells and life became the means by which Anne Lindbergh received the gift of reconnection with herself and with God. Creative work can be a connector in that way.
This week’s podcast guest, printmaker Sally Kendrick, invites us to look at plants and flowers and feathers “a moment longer than pragmatism requires.” She continues, “Such attention grows into love … [which] is nothing more than a response to the greater Love that created beauty.”
Appreciating the peculiarities of God’s design and responding creatively is something that all of us can do in our own way. Raw materials become touchpoints with invisible truths when — and sometimes only when — we touch them. Working creatively with a piece of wood, for example, puts you in touch with the smell, the grain, the orderliness of growth patterns, the uniqueness of each plant —and this, in turn, can put you in touch with the goodness and nearness of God.
I grew up in a household of professional painters and sculptors, so I had an abundance of opportunities to play with different mediums of fine art. But creativity doesn’t have to be formal. It can look like arranging flowers, making jewelry, painting portraits, quilting, gardening — anything that helps us slow down and pay attention to the reality that, in the words of poet Christian Weiman, “God goes belonging to every riven thing he’s made.”
Whether you consider yourself creative or not, receive the offerings below as an invitation to experiment, even clumsily, with stepping into God’s gift of himself by playfully following in his own Creative footsteps.
Grace Pouch
Content Manager
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LET’S DIVE IN...
CURATED BY GRACE POUCH
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NEW EPISODE of Life With God: A Renovaré Podcast. Nathan Foster talks with artist Sally Kendrick. Listen on Apple, Spotify, or the Renovaré website.
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Read about the unusual and startling displays of beauty that have drawn Sally closer to God in “Attention Grows into Love.”
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Sally traces her creative work back to a sun print kit she had as a child. For a kid-friendly creative activity, try this: Our 10 year old son Henry loves making tiny sculptures out of acorns and sticks, inspired by David M. Bird’s “Becorns” of YouTube fame. All kids need is a bag to collect things in the yard or park and a hot glue gun. It’s an excellent way for children to wander, play, and create in ways that serve as touchpoints with God’s goodness. (See also this recent headline article from Christianity Today editor Russell Moore).
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Carolyn Arends writes “apprenticing ourselves to great art is one of the spiritual disciplines we can use to cooperate with God in the sanctifying of our imaginations.”
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An upcoming creative arts gathering in North Carolina called The Breath and The Clay is an invitation to “participate in the continual unfolding of our creative inheritance.”
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Sadao Watanabe artfully depicted scenes from the Bible with traditional Japanese techniques. His contemporary sacred art now graces the walls of the Vatican and the White House, but in his home country he remained relatively obscure. Read “Profound Faith, Profound Beauty: The Life and Art of Sadao Watanabe.”
Grace Pouch
Content Manager