Be Creative

I decided to walk to the Poor Clare monastery for Mass this morning, both because it was almost warm enough, and because I needed to have two homilies ready. You see, I wasn't sure if Colette of Corbie would be a feast or a memorial for them. If it was to be a feast, there would be proper readings for the Mass, and if a memorial, we would use the readings from Monday of the fifth week of Ordinary Time. As it turned out, even though my ordo indicates that St. Colette should be a feast for Second Order Nuns, which these ladies surely are (and an obligatory memorial for us of the First Order), their ordo indicated that it's only a feast for Colettine Poor Clares, and was just a memorial otherwise.

So we had the readings for the day, in which we begin today at the beginning, with the first creation account in Genesis, shifting from four weeks of trudging through the letter to the Hebrews. As I was reflecting on the creation story on the walk over (and it was just about dawn, perfectly) I started to think about creativity, and the necessity of creativity for happiness and thus for salvation.

If the creation, and us in it, comes to be by God's speech, "God said...and so it happened," and we confess that this same Word of God became flesh in Jesus Christ in order to draw our common humanity into the blessed life of the Trinity, then it seems like our own salvation and happiness is very much bound up with our being united to the creativity of God.

This is plainly seen by common sense. Our greatest joys and satisfactions in life derive from our creativity and generativity. From parenthood, whether it be in the historical or spiritual order, to teaching and mentoring, and to the writing, music, and art by which we give 'grandchildren' back to God, our greatest happiness is our imitation of and assimilation to the divine creativity.