If you’ve spent any time with me in the past week, you may have heard that I just began a membership at a community pottery studio in my neighborhood. I’m over the moon about it! I took a couple of classes last year, and am at a point in my skill level where I understand the basic ceramics process and just need to devote the time to practicing, over and over again.

I’m sure there’s a sermon in there about patience, or discipline, but that’s not what I want to share with you today. I want to share about creativity as a spiritual practice, and a joyful one at that.

In high school, I lived in the arts wing. I identified as a theater kid, but also spent time in drawing, collage, printmaking, and dance classes. And, because I wasn’t particularly gifted at any of it, and had other career plans, I believed that my era of creativity, at least in a traditional artistic sense was over. A decade later, I’m needing to unlearn some of those assumptions, to take my own creativity seriously, and I encourage you to do the same.

In our capitalist culture, we are taught that people who are truly gifted at an art form might get their “big break” and go on to make a life of it. Others might cobble together a teaching career out of it. And crafty folks are pigeonholed into turning their creative practice into a “side hustle”. All of these are valid ways to incorporate creativity into a life, but we must also realize we have more options than this! May I remind us that the God we meet in Genesis, who makes humans in their own image, and is primarily a creating god?

To create is an expressive act, it is alchemy. It is clay vitrifying into ceramic. It is pigment becoming landscape. It is emotion breathed into melody. It is story come to life on stage. 

My time in the ceramics studio is time that my hands are too dirty to read the news or check email. It is time that my hands learn that the smallest movements can bring new forms into being, or cause them to collapse. It is a time when I can be alone with my spirit, while pouring gratitude into gifts I make for my loved ones.

In this hard world, we need alchemy, and beauty too. You are made in the image of a divine creative spirit. What do you create?