By Rev Fiona Bennett (From Seeds August – September 2024)

As Julia Cameron has written, ‘Creativity is God’s gift to us. Using our creativity is our gift back to God.’

We are entering the Seasons of Festival (August) and Creationtide (September), both of which invite us to remember and develop the joy and discipline of creativity.

Creativity is not the sole province of those who can draw or make music, it is about ordering and re-ordering our world through the stories with which we shape our existence. To relearn to live without a loved one takes a creative reshaping of the story of our lives. To find a new route home when our train in cancelled takes creative problem solving. To work out what shopping we can buy for the week takes creative planning. Our creativity is about our ability to imagine, reimagine and shape our world, and the stories by which we perceive and express our lives.

The seasons of Festival and Creationtide are reminders that our creativity is a gift of God and a fundamental part of our humanity as God has intentionally created it. In Genesis chapter 1, God created patterns of life from the chaos of existence. Later, Jesus re-ordered the world around him, welcoming those deemed dirty or dangerous and adapting the rules and expressions of faith. There is a clear sense that God’s call to humanity is about creating and re-creating abundant life for all. Creativity is a divine gift which can offer deep joy and satisfaction, but is also a discipline involving risk and growth.

The season of Festival is a time in Edinburgh to encounter human creativity expressed in the Arts (see p.10). As they have always been, the Arts use the discipline of creativity to express highly condensed pictures of Life. As humanity grows increasingly anxious and desperate in the shadow of the environmental crisis, conflict, and the divisions between rich and poor, we are in emaciated need of nourishing, truth-filled stories of Hope, Love and Faith to honour and steer us. If we can value, nurture and support them, the Arts are the tellers of these stories. There are challenges in the Festival and Fringe of cost and crowding, which need creative consideration and perhaps reordering, but it is still an incredible opportunity to catch imaginative glimpses of those pictures of Life which the Arts offer.

The Season of Creationtide invites global humanity (us!) to use the discipline of creativity to re-order our world so that all may live. Taking the wisdom of our faith story (that each and every life and species is divinely intentioned as critical parts of a healthy whole), Creationtide urges us to use the discipline of creativity to re-imagine what as Christians we treasure, and re-order our world to reflect those values and treasure. Julia Cameron (author of The Artist’s Way) said: ‘Creativity is God’s gift to us. Using our creativity is our gift back to God.’

Whether or not we can paint or write, using our creativity to re-imagine, reorder, re-shape our minds, lives and world, to bring fullness of life to all.