Seeing God in Fanciful Creatures and Made-Up Worlds
“Dad, do you know why I love to sing and dance?”
“Why?”
“Because I was born to sing and dance!”
She smiled proudly and, without a word, went back to eating her cereal. I smiled, too, as I looked with love at my daughter, the artist.
She’s grown up a bit since then. This year she turned 13. She still sings and dances through most days, but now she also draws, paints, sculpts, and writes stories. She lovingly crafts and creates. She dreams up entire worlds and fills them with fanciful creatures, then brings them to life on the page or in clay.
My daughter is an artist. I love the art she creates. But I love watching her create even more than I love the result. Her eyes… her whole face comes to life as her pencil hits the paper. As I watch her, I feel like I catch a glimpse of what God looks like.
I love to think about God as an artist. I love to think about God as a creator and as creative! I’m not hung up on the creation myths of Genesis. Trying to force fit those stories into a historical record like someone was walking with a video camera filming the whole episode to be played back later (to me) misses the point of the story. The Genesis creation stories tell of a creative God who made all things in love. This starkly contrasts the other creation myths of that age… where it was often told that creation was made out of conflict and war with other gods or so a god could have a people to rule over and dominate. The creator (and creative) God we read about in Genesis is different. In these stories, God created the earth, and all that is in it out of love. God looked at what God created, loved it, and called it good.
As I watch my daughter, the artist, as she creates, I get a glimpse of what things might have looked like in the beginning. I sense God’s presence. I sense God’s love… for me. My daughter has no idea, but as she creates her art, she becomes a living, breathing expression of God’s presence with me.
We all have that capacity within us. It’s like Thomas Keating said,
“We all have the innate capacity to manifest God because we already are that image by virtue of being created.”
The creative creator made us in the image of God. We don’t all draw, paint, sing, or write stories, but each of us was made with the capacity to participate with God in revealing the love that created the world. The task, then, is to learn to see God in and through one another. We tend to write people off. We dismiss one another because of our failures and shortcomings. What might happen if we could learn to look at one another through the eyes of the love in which we were created?
What if today, we would take a long, loving look at someone around us? This is not an invitation to be creepy. Don’t gawk or stare. Just look at them. Look beyond the surface. Look at them as one created in love by a loving creator in the image of that very creator. Look at them and say the same thing God declares about all God creates, “It is good.” I wonder if we might see God more clearly.