You Are a Creator

Dorothy Sayers’ The Mind of the Maker is an extended reflection on this idea.  Like many a Great Book it roams all over the place, but for a moment, think about her central thesis.  If we want to understand the Trinitarian God, we can begin by thinking about the creative human.

Genesis actually tells us to do this.  On the sixth day, when God creates Human (which is what the Hebrew word ‘adam  means), Genesis tells us God creates Human in His own image. 

And what is the only image of God which the text has presented to this point in the narrative?  God is a creator.  God the creator creates Human in His image. God creates creators.

How does Creativity work according to Sayers? 

First there is the Idea, the controlling thought. 

Then there is the Energy, the actual implementation of the idea. 

Then there is the Power, the effect of the implementation of the idea. 

Think of a book. There is the idea in the mind of the author (what is this book attempting to say?), the actual words of the book (how can the author’s idea be communicated?), and the effect the book has on the reader (what does the reader think or feel after reading the book?).

God the Father is the Idea; God the Son is the energy; God the Holy Spirit is the Power.  All work together as one creator, no part can be removed and still have the Creator intact, each part is distinct and yet fully the being of the Creator.

Like all analogies of the Trinity, this one breaks down if you lean on it too hard.  But, the importance of Sayers’ book is not as another attempt to explain the Trinity.  Rather, the book is a marvelous examination of the idea of Creativity.

If Sayers is right, then we, created in the image of God, are created to be creators.  All of us. 

We will not all become Michelangelo or Shakespeare or T.S. Eliot or Bach.  We will not all be famous.  But, there is inside each of us an inner creator screaming to be let out.

Our problem is that we often do not let out the creator within. 

As Sayers notes, the image of the perfect Creator is one in which all three parts are equally there, an equilateral triangle. We need the controlling idea, the means to cause the idea to become incarnate, and the power to enable the creation to work in the world.  

But we are all too often scalene triangles (unequal sides). Artists fail when they are either too driven by one part of that trinity or when one of the parts atrophies.  

(Remember when you took Geometry?  When you asked why you need to learn the subject, did your teacher say, “So you can think about God”?) 

Sayers notes the distinction between
1. the Father Driven artists, possessed of an intellectual idea but never learning the craft of expressing their ideas;
2. the Son Driven artists with the tools to express, but nothing to be expressed; and
3. the Spirit driven artists who imagine they can work their Power on the world with neither Idea nor a Means to express an idea.  

(Sadly, Undergraduate artists are almost always that last group—nothing to say, and no skill at saying it, yet they spew their emotions onto the page.)  

None of us are perfect Creators.  Indeed, most of us are very bad at it.  But, our lack of moral perfection is not an excuse to cease from trying to do the right thing. Similarly, our lack of creative perfection should not stop us from creating. 

So, create something today.  Write a poem, even a bad one.  Draw a picture.  Put a plant in a pot or arrange some flowers in a vase.  Cook a meal you have never made before.  Tell a friend about something you read and awaken in that friend the desire to read it too. 

You are made in the image of the Creator God. So: Create.