European-American University™

by John Kersey

Rabbi Zusya said, “In the world to come I will not be asked, ‘Why were you not Moses?’ I will be asked, ‘Why were you not Zusya?’” The problem is how to be the person we were meant to be.

When we consider creativity we are considering the most elemental and innermost and deeply spiritual aspects of our beings. The great mystic Meister Eckhart asks: “What is it that remains?” And his answer is: “That which is inborn in me remains.” That which we give birth to from our depths is that which lives on after us. That which is inborn in us constitutes our most intimate moments—intimate with self, intimate with God the Creative Spirit and intimate with others. To speak of creativity is to speak of profound intimacy. It is also to speak of our connecting to the Divine in us and of our bringing the Divine back to the community.
Revd. Dr. Matthew Fox, from "Creativity: Where the Divine and the Human Meet".

Faith in itself defies description, yet we know it when we have encountered it, and sometimes recognise it in hindsight, when we reframe events in the light of their successors to establish threads and paths of understanding. The contemporary Benedictine mystic Bro. David Steindl-Rast has said "What catapults our awareness to a higher level is our capacity for surprise." If we recognise God in the essence of surprise, we must be eternally thankful to Him for allowing us that surprise as a constant and abiding feature of faith.

In liturgical worship, although we encounter change in various aspects, we are called to find that higher awareness, that surprise in oft-repeated words and actions. This is a challenge to our spirituality, for the danger is there of mere routine, of action absent from the Spirit. This danger can be overcome through an openness to the surprise of faith. Here, too, I believe we have lessons to learn from the Benedictine practice of lectio divina; of allowing our minds to be directed from the mere concentration on language to Spirit-led spontaneous reflection on the thoughts and images language evokes; a space opened in our hearts and minds into which God can move as befits His will.

I am strongly in favour of liturgical worship, but I believe that conventional liturgies often allow insufficient time for this individual communion with God in silence. When one is moved by a particular passage of Scripture or by a particular aspect of liturgy - be it music or language - we need to process this encounter, to experience it to the full and to be rightly and properly thankful for it. As leaders of worship, we must bear in mind that we minister to individuals and that our words and actions may be channels through which the Holy Spirit can move. And we must equally encourage those who are present to open their full sensitivity towards God, who accepts us for who we are, and to "be prepared" for the God of surprise!

In a passage which I quote elsewhere, Bishop Jonathan Blake guides us by saying "Devout Christians shouldn't be surprised if atheists know God better than they do, or drug addicts better than the archbishop, or a Muslim better than their priest. Do not be shocked when God speaks to you more powerfully through the Sun than the Bible or through Eastenders rather than Songs of Praise or through walking over mountains rather than a church service." This points out several important things to us. Firstly, God does not confine His actions to the faithful in the pews or to those who have made a religious profession. Transcendence - the experience of God in His Creation - is not something over which we as Christians have a monopoly. The Bible tells us how men and women who were far from orthodox believers became vehicles for His love and His work. Indeed, there is a radicalism in the life of Jesus that should be calling to us as a counterblast to the  hierarchical church structures and dogma of much of today's Christian practice. Just as it can be an intensely moving experience to worship with hundreds of others in a monumental cathedral, so it can be in an informal house church or in the open air. God is beyond confining in a building, or a liturgy, or a Church teaching. He is wherever men and women are, and He is calling us to experience Him in our daily lives, not merely on a Sunday morning.

Some people assume that Old Catholics are invariably traditionalists who believe that the Roman Catholic Church is altogether too liberal. There are many such, and they include those of profound faith. But from the first moment I knew that this was not my understanding or experience of God. I belong to the significant part of Old Catholicism that regards both Romanism and Anglicanism as excessively conservative and hierarchical and that regards these qualities as barriers to the experience of God. We liberal Christians seek to understand God and His Son not just as scriptural or historic figures but as living influences in our being, speaking to us through the whole of God's Creation, be that in human affairs, in nature, in music, poetry or art, or through meditation and inspiration. That which does not change is dead, but the Christian faith as I experience it is not like this. The constant feature of our path through faith is its mutability, outcome both of our free will and of the guiding nature of the Holy Spirit. As we live in His Creation, we have the opportunity to deepen our experience of God - though in the awareness that it must in this life remain continually imperfect. Slowly and surely, we are drawn towards the beautiful, creative art of a close relationship with a loving God.

I have spoken above of our God of surprises. And now we add to this the complementary view of God the creative artist. Exodus 35:30-35 gives us an example of the unity of creativity with God's work,

"And Moses said to the children of Israel, "See, the Lord has called by name Bezalel the son of Uri, the son of Hur, of the tribe of Judah; and He has filled him with the Spirit of God, in wisdom and understanding, in knowledge and all manner of workmanship, to design artistic works, to work in gold and silver and bronze, in cutting jewels for setting, in carving wood, and to work in all manner of artistic workmanship. And He has put in his heart the ability to teach, in him and Aholiab the son of Ahisamach, of the tribe of Dan. He has filled them with skill to do all manner of work of the engraver and the designer and the tapestry maker, in blue, purple, and scarlet thread, and fine linen, and of the weaver; those who do every work and those who design artistic works."

I believe that we all have within us the capacity to be open to creativity, even if we are not ourselves artists, or writers or musicians. The act of love is creative. Sensuality - which is of God - is creative. The understanding and appreciation of the art of others, or of nature, is again creative. The essence of God - powerful, moving, but also playful and joyful, is in the creative spirit in all of us. When society suppresses our creativity, it turns its back on Him and embraces death. We must all work to ensure that the potentially uniform implications of the technological revolution on our lives do not overwhelm us or reduce us to mere machines. To think, to imagine, to create, to share, to pray - these are the key elements of the heightened awareness that will lead us towards His design for us. These must be our priorities in the world, not materialism for its own sake.

I began by quoting Bro. David Steindl-Rast. Let us return to him again, with another thought on these matters: "The world today needs most the witness of people who show how they love one another by upholding one another in their difference, and reveal the enrichment, the variety that springs out of that." You may be forgiven for thinking that this is an unusual teaching for a Christian to put forward; yet it is no such thing. Hierarchy, such as that of the established churches, can only survive ultimately through imposing authority and enforcing conformity in the form of dogma. But human beings are not designed to be conformists, nor is the Christian church designed on the model of army discipline. Our differences, and our individual gifts, are means by which we can express the wonder and diversity of God's image. We should never be ashamed to express our individual sensitivities, nor to experience those of others. God means us to use our gifts as ways for others to experience inspiration and love. If we suppress these things in favour of a way of life that is narrow, guilty and afraid, we cannot live fully and we deny ourselves the joy of knowing God.

Nor can we find safety in conformity, for when events change as they often do we may find all too quickly that what we thought a hiding-place is in fact exposed. Where we are more likely to find safety - of a kind, though never guaranteed - is in a personal relationship with God so that, in accepting ourselves for who we are, we may ask for His guidance and that he will be with us when we come to the time of trial. We are not spared the time of trial, for all that we may wish it to be  otherwise. All we know is that God will be with us as we pass into the darkness, if we ask Him.

One answer to some of these issues is to seek God in smaller rather than larger groups and thereby to allow Him to work fully in each one of us. Matt. 18-20 tells us that Jesus said, "When two or three are gathered together in my name, there am I in the midst of them." A large crowd hides us when we should be at our most exposed. Yet at the same time, smaller groups when properly constituted are a support for the gift of individual faith. We should, indeed we must, share our experiences and our worship, but also recognise that some individual revelations of the Spirit are made to us in private, so that a group encounter is complementary to the personal. Above all, we should recognise that faith, as a living entity, is nurtured by our openness to God. If we let God in and experience Him daily, we will reach the point where our faith is as natural as breathing; not a matter for self-consciousness, but a path through life that calls on us to celebrate beauty, tragedy, joy and compassion.