Across eternity, ultimately - creativity is the most important thing of all.
This may sound to be rather an elitist and intellectual perspective; but that is the conclusion I draw from my life. First is love; and from love springs creativity. Love is the necessary context of goodness, a good life; creativity is what we 'do with it'.
Of course, it requires a considerable amount of definition and background clarification to explain what I mean...
Heaven is a place of creation, development, eternal growth. My understanding is that Heaven is the way God devised to enable Men to create with God, in the context of, and extending, God's original and continuing creation. Heaven is what enables Men to create with God, and with each other, in harmony and with the same goals.
The implied reference to the first and second commandments (to love God and Neighbour) is deliberate; because I regard creativity as linked to love, in polarity with love: an overflow of Love; just as God's work of creation is the overflow of our Heavenly Parents' love for each other; and the yearning for more people like themselves, more love.
Thus creation is linked with procreation - with the having and raising of children.
So creation is for everybody, one way or another. In this earthly mortal life, the creativity of a genius is most obviously like that of God; because the genius creates somewhat new from-himself. But procreation is also potentially a divine kind of creation - for the same reasons.
What of children, the simple minded, 'uncreative' people? Well, if the genius and the parent are types of active creation; then children and others may participate passively in the work of creation that is 'led' by others. If the genius creates from-himself in freedom, the creative participant chooses or consents to join-with this creation - not to originate, but to assist.
Different people are differently constituted - for some (for me), their nature aims to be a primary creator, as much like a genius as possible - at whatever scale and with whatever scope.
Others prefer to be part of some scheme that originates elsewhere, with someone else - like actors in a drama, or the builders of a great cathedral, or young children in a family.
The link to love is absolute - because primary creativity emerges from love. It is love that is the difference between mere novelty, or destructive innovation that tends to destroy primary creation - and contributes to the permanent and eternally-growing work of God's original creation.
Thus Heaven is entered only by those who love: who love primarily Jesus; and via him the work of God and other Men.
The transformation that is resurrection is enabled by this love (it is this love that makes a person and and commit forever and irreversibly to resurrection and its conditions) ; and resurrection into Heaven is what enables the permanence of love and the harmony of creation.
And - since evil and un-love cannot resurrect, cannot enter Heaven - it is love that ensures the indestructibility of creation.
2 comments:
Comment from JD:
Good analysis.
But you ask - what of children? Perhaps instead of calling it creativity it might be more accurate to say 'using the imagination' which is what children do all the time before they are corralled into school.
"Shades of the prison house begin to close upon the growing boy" - Wordsworth, Intimations of Immortality.
And William Blake equated imagination with eternity.
I think creativity is part of our learning process here in this life and curiosity, an enquiring mind, is also a part of using the creative imagination.
Love is an overloaded word, and really as someone who writes poetry my aim is to erase words with words. My aim is to convey something wordless in a form that erases itself as it infuses within the reader something akin to my state while in the process of creation. (No, not the editing and refining of a word here or a phrase there, but the impetus behind that.)
But, what of love - the state not the word?
Love, I am forced to use words again, and how insufficient they are. When the words dissolve, when time slows to a crawl, and everything beams with "ah and ooh", much like a baby cooing, I just sit in that space - losing the chitter chatter for a little while. I love that space, that place where beauty shines me the way a ruby is shone when held between the eye and the sun.
We each have our particularity in the unfolding tapestry, and yet, even within that particularity is a general, a common well of potent impetus to be, to become, to unfold, to reflect, to pulse, to shed the surface effortlessly as new ones - related and different - burst forth.
Words are snake skins. They attempt to convey something that arises from the occluded spaces, and within limits they are useful, and they also create a basis for being able to do things together. However, in the age of dezinformatsiya, they can misshape an honest apprehension of the wordless. They can become frames that distort our ability to be honest and to deep dive into the less certain places where all the cool stuff resides.
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