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Rev. Chris Jimmerson
May 28, 2023
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
www.austinuu.org
We need our most creative spirits to manifest the holy in our world. Indeed, becoming, changing, engaging in constant acts of creation and re-creation are the essence of our growth and spirituality, And we are at our most transformative and transformed when we co-create in communion with one another and the web of existence.
Chalice Lighting
This is the flame we hold in our hearts as we strive for justice for everyone. This is the light we shine upon systems of oppression until they are no more. This is the warmth that we share with one another as our struggle becomes our salvation.
Call to Worship
The universe buries strange jewels deep within all of us and then stands back to see if we can find them. The hunt to discover those jewels, that’s creative living.
– Elizabeth Gilbert
Big Magic, Creative living Beyond Fear
Affirming Our Mission
Together we nourish souls, transform lives, and do justice to build the Beloved Community.
Meditation Reading
CREATION IS MESSY
Rev. Laurel Mendes
Creation is messy,
Inconvenient,
And often uncooperative.
Take a look at the cosmos.
Go ahead, close your eyes and imagine the stars.
When you do, forget the Franz Josef Haydn “spacious firmament” bit. His images are far too tidy.
See the real mess the universe made of itself 14 BILLION years ago.
All of creation is still trying to clean THAT up.
It’s called the Big Bang,
Not the Grand Coalescence,
For a reason.
Mistakes were made (probably),
And incorporated into the whole anyway.
And wonders never cease, here we still are muddling along 14 billion years after the fact.
Now open your eyes and look around you.
You are surrounded by the most astounding miraculous wonder of all:
Each other,
Community,
Life ongoing caring about life ongoing.
So it is.
So it shall be, because we do care
Sermon
VIDEO
Our reading earlier was about how creation is messy.
So, I thought the Blob Opera exercise from “Google Arts and Culture” made a great metaphor for this.
The video you just saw was from my experimenting with it. You just go to Blob Opera online.
Then, you use your pointing device to to drag the blobs in different directions, which allows you to create different voice types and melodies.
You literally create a musical “opera” out of some blobs. And our creative process is so often like that.
Our creativity emerges out of the “blobiness”.
It seems science and philosophy have both begun to posit that our greatest creativity most often comes out of messiness, when we are blocked, confused, unsure.
Creativity arises from uncertainty; our unknowing.
Mystery holds almost infinite creative potential.
Chaplains, hospice workers and artists will tell you that there is even, or maybe especially, creativity bound up with our grief also.
So, as we examine creativity, our spiritual topic this morning, we do so with some humility, knowing that so often we owe our creative spirit to the uncertainty, sometimes even the great challenges or difficulties in our lives.
Here is an example from our own Unitarian Universalist history. II Each Sunday morning, we begin and end our worship services by lighting and then extinguishing our chalice, which is a symbol of our faith.
SLIDE
In fact, this is the current logo of our Unitarian Universalist Association.
Well, Unitarian Universalist minister and historian Susan Ritchie describes how this symbol of our faith came to be.
During World War II, the Unitarians formed the Unitarian Service Committee, which operated a rescue and relief operation helping folks escape the Nazis in Europe.
Its director, Rev. Charles Joy, began to feel that the operation needed a symbol of hope that both refugees and those trying to assist them could carry on paperwork to denote that they could be trusted, as German informants were widespread across Europe at the time.
Rev. Joy turned to an artist who was himself a refugee from the Nazis, Hans Deutsch, to create a symbol that would represent the spirit of their work.
Deutsch created the flaming chalice design.
Eventually, sympathizers would also begin to draw the symbol in the dirt outside their home, as a signal to those in need of a safe place to stay: a light in the darkness.
Deutsch’s flaming chalice, ensconced in a circle representing unity, would become the symbol of the American Unitarian Association.
When the Unitarians and the Universalist merged in 1961, the Universalists had a similar symbol that “featured a large, open circle with a very small, off-centered cross inside … that … signified how Universalism had grown out of the Christian tradition but was still held open to a world of other possibilities … “
Out of the two, the newly formed Unitarian Universalism adopted the flaming chalice with two overarching circles.
As to how this two dimensional symbol developed into the three dimensional actual chalice we light to mark our services today, Ritchie says we are not entirely sure.
However, she writes, “All evidence, though, suggests that the path leads through our children’s religious education programs.” Beginning in the 70s, our religious educations programs started teaching children about the chalice and encouraging them to make chalices using different media.
They eventually created objects which could be lit.
The first documented uses of lighting a chalice in the main sanctuary occurred when children and youth led worship and demonstrated the practice to the adults.
How wonderful then, that it seems children may have taken a symbol of hope, created out of the worst of situations, and turned it into a symbol of faith for our entire denomination.
There is something very spiritual about that.
And indeed, for all of recorded history, we humans have associated creation, creativity, the creative process with spirituality. I’ll share just a few current examples with you.
The first is a concept called ontological design.
VIDEO
Here is a brief explanation. So, what we create then directs what we become.
We create language and then that language creates us. It defines the parameters of our becoming.
Our technology, these smart phones, social media, scientific experimentation, and on and on, they come out of our seemingly almost endless creativity AND they are creating who we are becoming.
Certainly, our architecture, our urban design, our energy production and use (and our pollution), all products of human creativity, also form the environment in which we live and therefore the manner in which our continuing evolution will turn.
I think this is true of the the cultures and societies we envision and create also.
Will we dream ourselves into ever more powerful ways of creating the Beloved Community?
Will our ontological designing create liberation for all?
Rev. Dr. Martin King, Jr. once said, “Human salvation lies in the hands of the creatively maladjusted.”
Given our current status quo, that creative maladjustment is still a necessary component of dismantling that status quo and designing something new that will in turn create us anew.
And it doesn’t get much more spiritual than that.
Author Elizabeth Gilbert, best known for writing, “Eat Pray Love”, has another spiritual concept about our creativity.
In another book, “Big Magic: Creative Living Beyond Fear“, she writes that we might think of our creative impulses coming to us from these sorts of spirits she calls “geniuses”.
These spirits can be tricksters, ornery and demanding.
This is actually an ancient idea. The concept of a Genie was related to this.
These geniuses are the source of our creativity if we remain open to them, find them, pay attention to them.
If we don’t, they may well move on to someone else.
Gilbert tells the story of this happening after she met and became friends with another author, Ann Patchett.
Gilbert had been neglecting a genius that wanted her to create a novel set in the Amazon jungle.
In letters they were exchanging, Gilbert learned that Patchett had also begun working on a novel set in the Amazon jungle, though it was too early at the time to know exactly what it would be about.
Here is how Gilbert describe what happened the next time they met.
Ann told me that she was now deep into the writing of her new book …
I said, “Okay, now you really do have to tell me what your Amazon novel is about. I’ve been dying to know.”
“You go first,” she said, “since your book was first. You tell me what your Amazon jungle novel was about – the one that got away.”
I tried to summarize my ex-novel as concisely as possible. “It was about this middle-aged spinster from Minnesota who’s been quietly in love with her married boss for many years. He gets involved in a harebrained business scheme down in the Amazon jungle. A bunch of money and a person go missing, and my character gets sent down there to solve things, at which point her quiet life is completely turned into chaos.
Also, it’s a love story.”
“You have got to be” … (word that rhymes with trucking) … “kidding me.” (said Ann)
“Why?” I asked. “What’s your novel about?”
She replied, “It’s about a spinster from Minnesota who’s been quietly in love with her married boss for many years. He gets involved in a harebrained business scheme down in the Amazon jungle. A bunch of money and a person go missing, and my character is sent down there to solve things. At which point her quiet life is completely turned into chaos.
Also, it’s a love story.”
Now, whether you completely buy Gilbert’s tale and her theory about “genius spirits”, many, many other people have also described this experience of what they create coming from something outside of themselves.
Something that often feels greater than themselves.
Author, artist, poet and playwright, Julia Cameron in her book, “The Artist’s Way: A Spiritual Path to Higher Creativity” writes, “The creative process is a process of surrender … In dance, in composition, in sculpture, the experience is the same: we are more the conduit than the creator of what we express.”
Theologian, Martin Buber said, “Creation happens to us, burns into us, changes us. We tremble and swoon. We submit.”
I have (only too occasionally) experienced this with writing poetry or sermons.
Every once and a while, not nearly always, I will sit down to write and will lose all track of time and my sense of self.
Not always – sometimes writing for me is more like pushing a boulder up a hill with lots of grunting, straining, occasional cursing and many, many stops, starts and rolling backwards.
But just occasionally, I will find myself sitting there, staring at a screen filled with words I don’t remember creating, and wonder, “Who wrote this?”
I shared this experience many years back, with our now Minister Emerita, Meg Barnhouse, and she replied with her best southern accent, “Oh, loooove it when that happens. That’s the holy spirit workin’ right there”
Anyway, Elizabeth Gilbert believes we made a huge mistake during the renaissance when we began to think of creativity coming from the self of the individual human genius, rather than from genius spirits.
Here is how she describes that mistake.
VIDEO
Perhaps, these “spirits” are actually the creative potential that arises within us when we glimpse the vastness of our true interconnectedness.
Research, has begun to find that our creativity is rarely a solo, individual act. Even the great artists produced their work out of creative interplay with others and their environment.
In an article titled “The End of ‘Genius”, the New York Times describes how creativity arises out of innovative networks, often creative pairs.
And many studies have found that we are the most creative when we work together with people whose life experiences are different than our own – whose world views differ from our ours.”
Diverse groups in terms of race, ethnicity, gender identity, sexual orientation and the like produce more creative outcomes.
And this idea meshes well with two theologies that support the values and principles of our UU faith.
For collective liberation theology, opportunity for each of us is bound together with liberation for all of us. Only together can we all reach for our greatest creative potential.
Likewise, process relational theology views each of us as processes of becoming, in every moment evolving into something new, all of us always and constantly changing.
Because processes by their very nature are relational, again, each of us can only become our fullest self when we answer the call to enhance the creative possibilities for all.
For this theology, the divine is the ultimate process, which holds all of us within and lures us toward our most creative potentiality.
In this way, we co-design the divine together, even as we are being guided in our own becoming.
Whew, that’s some heady stuff.
Perhaps Julia Cameron expresses the idea that the divine beckons us toward our most creative selves more simply when she says, “I would say that as we become more spiritual we automatically become more creative, and as we become more creative we automatically become more spiritual. I’m not sure why that is. It just seems to me to be a fact … And to be facile I might say it’s God’s will for us to be creative.”
Italian-American psychologist, art therapist, and writer, Lucia Capacchione goes further and says, “The person who says ‘I’m not creative’ is uttering blasphemy.”
And psychologist Dan Gilbert adds, “Human beings are a work in progress that mistakenly think they are finished.”
We are all artists then, even if we’re not painters, sculptors, musicians, poets, authors or any of the things we commonly think of us the creative.
Our lives are our art; our great creative endeavor. So, together, let’s:
Compose life as a great concerto.
Imagine it as a Pulitzer-Prize winning play,
Paint it as a magnificent painting,
Carve it into a breathtaking sculpture
Choreograph it as a dance in which all humanity moves in communion with one another and with all that is.
May we live life as if we are creating God together.
Because perhaps we are.
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