Unitarian Society of New Haven
May 20, 2018
Rev. Megan Lloyd Joiner

Reading: “When the Author Was Painting the Vault of the Sistine Chapel”
Michelangelo: To Giovanni da Pistoia
Translation: Gail Mazur

 

Sermon:

The pen strokes astounded me: 500-year-old lines and curves and hash marks

made by the one known as Il Divino, The Divine One. My face was pressed up against the drawings. There were so many people packed into the Metropolitan Museum’s Michelangelo exhibit that January afternoon, there was nowhere to go, no other way to look at them, and, for that, I was deeply grateful. Because my breath and his mingled across the centuries, and I saw the concentration on the folds of robes, the muscles in the back, hair and fingernails and toes.

 

Yes, toes. The pen strokes astound me, but the toes slay me. Specifically, the toe study for the
“design of the Libyan Sibyl, a monumental enthroned female figure painted by Michelangelo in fresco on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel at the Vatican Palace.” His study is a series of drawings of a male model, his assistant. You can see the artist’s work on the exact placement of the foot, and, specifically, the big toe: the way weight is distributed across the toe, the way it falls depending on how a person’s hips are twisted.[i]

 

I can imagine the scene in the studio:
“Now this way.
Now that way.
Now press the toe into the floor.”

Everything had to be just so.

A huge amount of work went into that one detail, a big toe, lost to many on the foot of the Libyan Sibyl, one figure on the masterful, massive ceiling that caused Michelangelo so much grief that, in his frustration, he proclaimed: “I am not a painter.”[ii]

 

The creative process is not an easy one. Creating something when there previously was nothing—composing music, writing, painting, drawing, sculpting, “making a hat where there never was a hat,”[iii] drafting a covenant to refinance a congregation’s mortgage, starting a business, even, sometimes it seems, having a single original idea—is challenging to say the least.

I had a professor in seminary who used to say that writing is the act of staring at a piece of paper—or a computer screen—until blood literally comes from your forehead.

Creativity is hard-fought, painful, and requires, eventually, giving something of yourself you didn’t know was possible.

~

 

This has been quite a week, folks. On a personal level, I attended one wedding, two funerals—
one for an elder and one for a child—was present as 157 medical school graduates became doctors, and celebrated a decade of marriage to Anthony Clark.

 

On a community level, we suffered the shock of tornadoes in Connecticut; thousands of people in the state and many in our community are still without power.

On a national level, we are mourning the loss of ten lives in Santa Fe, Texas in yet another school shooting.

 

And on a global level, we have been witness to horrific violence between Israeli and Palestinian people, are following the course of anticipated talks with North Korea, and many of us (some of us?) watched along with a billion people around the world as the British royal family welcomed a new member and a gospel choir sang for what I am going to guess was the first time in Windsor Castle.

 

Post-wedding headlines today are proclaiming that yesterday was the “day when everything changed.”[iv]

Yes, it has been quite a week.

 

All of this, and our theme this month is creativity. And so, I’m thinking this week about how our lives are filled with creative responses to problems, to events, to horror, and to delight.

I’m thinking about the creativity that will be required by those graduates, now doctors,
as they save lives in ERs and laboratories, in operating rooms and rural clinics, and I’m thinking about the limits of their power, about the fact that they may feel like gods, sometimes, and wield, sometimes, god-like power, and yet they are simply human, and there are some things, still, that they cannot fix.

During the graduation ceremony this week, all those about-to-be-doctors bowed their heads
in “a sign of acquiescence” to take the Hippocratic Oath, ancient words in which they promised to lead their lives and “practice their art” in “uprightness and honor.” It is a noble art, a powerful art, the art of medicine, and it requires humility and acquiescence.

No matter our profession or vocation, all of us have the capability of powerful, creative possibilities. Sometimes, though, we have to acquiesce to the idea that our ability to influence the state of things is limited, and, thus, surrender to something beyond ourselves, something we might not understand, something that reminds us how small we are.

This being human business is both about being creators and remembering that we are part of creation, one tiny speck in the totality of existence, the span of cosmic history, the mysteries of the universe.

In a way, that which we create in our lifetimes—the various arts we practice, the things and people and organizations and ideas we give birth to—are an expression of both our power as god-like creators and our humble status as simple human beings.

 

Theologian Matthew Fox writes that “integral to an artist’s consciousness is a gift-consciousness,
a thank you for creation that is expressed in one’s creativity.”[v]

For Fox, the creative endeavor is both a mark of our divine inheritance and our gratitude for being part of creation. When we are creative, we are one with the divine and creation all at once.

 

While many of us are familiar with biblical creation stories of God as creator, I’m interested here in a difference conception of the divine. Specifically, I turn to the field of process theology, the complex system of philosophical and theological thought developed by philosophers Alfred North Whitehead and Charles Hartshorne.

A true confession here. I say complex. The truth is, I get lost reading the books that have been written about Whitehead and Hartshorne’s work, the “cliff notes” if you will. So, I’m not going to do a deep dive into an exposition of process theology here.

But I do want to lift up process theology’s idea of divinity, or God, which is far removed from the white, bearded creator Michelangelo painted on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. For process theologians, one aspect of God is a “primordial envisagement of the pure possibilities.”[vi] In any situation, there are possibilities that have never before been seen or even imagined. In process thought, the source of this novelty is divine and is constantly opening up for us “a space for freedom and self-creativity.”[vii]

This idea of God is one that, according to theologians John Cobb and David Ray Griffin (who are the authors of one of those “cliff notes” books), this idea of God “implies a continual creative transformation of that which is received from the past…to actualize novel possibilities.”[viii]
The persuasive power of divine creativity is, they say, “the most effective power in reality.”[ix]

In the words of Alfred North Whitehead, father of process theology, “the pure conservative is fighting against the essence of the universe.”[x]

 

The pure conservative is fighting against the essence of the universe.

 

The creative force is the essence of the universe. And when we don’t fight it, we are privileged enough as human beings to be able to channel it.

 

And we are going to need to channel it, in order, friends, to come up with a different plan for how our nation interacts with guns, how we keep our children safe. We need some novelty in Washington that says we can transform what we have received from the past into new possibilities.

 

We are going to need to channel the creative force around the globe, to say in Israel and Palestine: we need some novelty, some transformation of what we have received from the past
into new possibilities.

The same is true in North Korea.

 

The way it has been is not the way it has to be.

 

We need some novelty, some creativity, some of that essence of the universe injected into the seemingly intractable problems we have created as a species.

One thing I know for certain: we can’t do it alone.

 

According to another theologian, Unitarian Henry Nelson Wieman, paraphrased by scholar David Lee Miller, “creative interchange” is “the experience of spontaneous human-heartedness
and human thoughtfulness that opens us to an increasingly widened and deepened appreciation
and understanding of ourselves as individual persons, and to all other persons everywhere on the earth.”[xi]

 

We cannot do it alone.

 

I believe the experience of congregational life, of choosing to live together in a covenantal community like this one, is fundamentally an experience of creative interchange. Here, we model what we would like to see in the world. This is a place where we are invited and asked to be open to others, to hold an appreciation of our connection to each other and to all creation, to say “thank you” through our individual and collective creative expressions, to allow for novelty and the persuasive power of creativity as we make our way together.

 

This is a place where we create community, ideas, ways of engaging with each other and the world, that have never before existed, where we use our human heartedness and our human thoughtfulness to work together to create the world we dream of, a world where all people are free and safe to live creative lives and where creation, itself, is free to flourish.

 

Creating this kind of community is not always easy. It may not require literal blood to spring forth from our foreheads, but it does require work and openness and commitment. It requires making space for creativity in how we approach our worship services, our finances, our programming, our parking lot.

It requires listening and studying and paying attention to individual brush strokes as much as the entire ceiling.

Sometimes, it means we have to “finish the hat” or get the sky just right on the canvass
before we can go outside to feel the sun on our shoulders. Sometimes, it means paint will drip in our faces and the process will feel uncomfortable and maybe even not worth it. We may declare ourselves “not painters,” or not in the right place. We may feel like giving up.

 

I assure you, it is worth it. We are creating something here of which we can all be very proud.

In closing, let me quote the words of my colleague the Rev. Barbara Wells who expresses so well what I wish for us here at USNH.

She writes:

“It is my hope that our [congregation] can be a community where our imperfect, creative spirits can find a home. It is my hope that this [congregation] can be a place where everyone can bring their whole selves, where we can touch the deep spirit of creativity that lives in each of us and in the universe and make it come alive. What we create in our individual lives matters and what we create here matters, too.

May we be blessed with an abundance of creativity, and use it to make this world just a little more beautiful, a little more exciting, a little more whole.”[xii]

 

May it be so. Amen.

 

[i] https://www.artsy.net/article/artsy-editorial-create-mets-once-in-a-lifetime-michelangelo

https://www.metmuseum.org/blogs/now-at-the-met/2016/drawings-and-prints-work-of-the-week-october

[ii] https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/57328/michaelangelo-to-giovanni-da-pistoia-when-the-author-was-painting-the-vault-of-the-sistine-chapel

[iii] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ducG55pfCMQ

[iv] https://www.cnn.com/2018/05/19/europe/royal-wedding-windsor-castle-intl/index.html

[v] Matthew Fox, Passion for Creation: The Earth-Honoring Spirituality of Meister Eckhart, 2000.

[vi] John Cobb and David Ray Griffin, Process Theology: An Introductory Exposition, 1976.

[vii] Ibid.

[viii] Ibid.

[ix] Ibid.

[x] Ibid.

^[xi] David Lee Miller, “The Experience of Creative Interchange,” American Journal of Theology & Philosophy Vol. 7, No. 1 (January, 1986), pp. 17-27

[xii] Rev. Barbara Wells “The Spirit of Creativity” February 10, 2002. http://www.pbuuc.org/sermons/archive/sermons0102/spiritofcreatvity.html