Friday, July 17, 2009

Mairs Has Got me Thinking...

...and I think I was just plain wrong in the opening sentences of the post before this one. I wrote:

God did not create the world, as some say He did, in order to have for Himself some outlet for His creativity. How do we know? Because that would be a self-serving reason to create, and in Christianity, God is not self-serving; He is the opposite. God is love. Neither did God create the world in order to have some form of self-expression. That, too, would be self-seeking.


But in God, self-expression and loving are all the same thing!

And in people, self-expression can be a wonderful, beautiful thing as well. Whether you are expressing yourself on paper, on canvas, in sculpture, in dance, in music or words, your self-expression can be a spiritual or a carnal thing. It depends on which self you are expressing, on whether you are expressing your spirit, which is to say the Image of God in you, the Light that illumines everyone who comes into the world - or whether you are merely indulging your passions.

The former, IMO, is Art, and it's something sacred, or very nearly so.

The latter is trash.

The point I was unsuccessfully trying to make is that God doesn't do things to glorify Himself or to indulge any passions. He has no passions and does have the plenitude of glory already. Everything He does is for Love.

Sincere apologies to all artists!

1 comments:

Claire said...

I love that phrase in the Psalm about "that Leviathan which He has made for the sport of it"--I think God creates out of superabundant overflow of delight, out of play, as we do at our best moments...