Anam Cara

MAGINATION

The beauty of art is beauty born of the spirit and born again.

G.W.F. HEGEL, Aesthetics, vol. 2

EACH TRADITION IS AN IMMENSE ARCHIVE OF EXPERIENCE, MEMORY and wisdom. There are beautiful treasures in the Christian tradition and one of the keenest insights is that we are ‘made in the image and likeness of God’. We are from God and we carry in our minds and hearts the ripple of the divine mind. There are depths that keep watch in us, depths we have not created. When the neglected dimension of the Divine Imagination is brought in, we could restate that equivalence and say: we are made in the image and likeness of the Divine Imagination. The individual imagination is not its own invention: its source is elsewhere. The intuition, passion and luminosity of the individual imagination are infused with the urgency of the divine. Thus when we enter into our creativity, we are in the rhythm of the divine creator.

At the deepest level, creativity is holiness. To create is to further the dream and desire of the creator. When the world was created, it was not a one-off, finished event. Creation is a huge beginning, not a finished end. Made in the image and likeness of the Divine Imagination, human creativity helps to add to creation. The unfinished is an invitation to our imagination. This is what happens in experience: the unfinished reaches towards us in order to come to form and expression. Experience is also how we develop and grow. The human self is not a finished thing, it is constantly unfolding. Experience is, then, essentially creative. Everything we feel, think and do, even the smallest thing, expresses and unfolds the dream of God. No human presence is neutral for there is some deeper, hidden level at which all creativity comes together. Beyond the obvious psychological and social levels, the life and death of each of us exerts a secret influence on everyone else. There is a community of spirit but it is more subtle than overt social community. This is the realm of ultimate creativity. It is the arrival point – the harvest place of human presence and activity. There is an illuminating sentence by St Paul: ‘Videmus nunc per speculum in aenigmate, tunc autem facie ad faciem’ – now we only see in a glass darkly, then we shall see face to face. Perhaps after death we will be given a glimpse of how everything holds together and how each thing that happens to us fits precisely in the blueprint of our creative destiny.

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I would like to be able to take a photo of a dream.

HÉLÈNE CIXOUS

TIME BECOMES RESTLESS IN US. THE HUMAN HEART IS FULL OF quickening. Each pulse beat draws us towards new frontiers. In every moment we see and feel more than we can ever know. If we were to live everything, we would be too much for ourselves. Yet the life within us calls out for expression. This is what creativity serves. It endeavours to bring some of our hidden life to expression in order that we might come to see who we are. When we are creative, we help the unknown to become known, the visible to be seen and the rich darkness within us to become illuminated. No human being is ever actually there. Each of us is emerging in every moment. When we discover our creativity, we begin to attend to this constant emergence of who we are. Our creativity is excited by what is new, different and concealed within us. While the outside world has long settled for who we are in terms of name, personality and role, when we creatively engage our life, we enable the signature, taste and imprint of our uniqueness to emerge. This is what begins to emerge when we come to the desk and look into the mirror of the white page. Beneath that white page, in the stillness, a harvest of untouched possibility waits.