A broken tulip

Many life-changing events are not dropped on us with fanfare. Most of the time they happen in the normal course of things. It’s only looking back that we realize how our path veered off into a new direction.

Fall 2015 “Words” class was that for me. Before class even began, our professor asked us to each to find an unlined notebook and good pens; I knew I would love her class.

I entered that class denying that I belonged in any “artist” category. I left still unsure but with a new vision. Kathleen Norris was assigned as reading, and her writing showed me what I never knew I was looking for: how faith, life, and words can intersect. Each week of class, our professor gave a sentence prompt. Taken together, what we wrote off of those prompts became a Theology of Craft, drawing together our unique theological understandings of creation, risk, rest, humility and solidarity.

That professor was the first to call me a poet and be dead serious. The next year and several poems later, I signed up for a six-month poetry class. I gave as my reason for signing up, “I want to learn how to live faithfully as a creative child of God.”

I’ve been on a journey to understand creating as an act of faith ever since.

Tomorrow I will post part one of my Theology of Craft, focused on creation with the prompt, “Words have power”.

Two things you’ll notice in this Theology of Craft are liturgy and the use of other languages. Both are important to me; both have journeyed with me my whole life and taught me the power of words. The liturgy comes mostly from the Northumbrian Community which draws on the ancient Celtic tradition. A Puritan prayer and a Josh Garrels song are also included.

Fall 2015 was certainly life-changing. In looking back, we see what changed. But we can’t see into the future. That is why it’s good to set up milestones along the way. This is one of my milestones. I’m currently in the process of re-writing my Theology of Craft. I’ve journeyed further down this road since 2015, but that doesn’t discredit the start.

What life-changing events do you look back on? Where are your milestones?

“The God who is ever uttering himself in the changeful profusions of nature; who takes millions of years to form a soul that shall understand him and be blessed; who never needs to be, and never is, in haste; who welcomes the simplest thought of truth or beauty as the return for seed he has sown upon the old fallows of eternity, who rejoices in the response of a faltering moment to the age-long cry of his wisdom in the streets; the God of music, of painting, of building, the Lord of Hosts, the God of mountains and oceans; whose laws go forth from one unseen point of wisdom, and thither return without an atom of loss; the God of history working in time unto Christianity; this God is the God of little children, and he alone can be perfectly, abandonedly simple and devoted…Our longing desires can no more exhaust the fullness of the treasures of the Godhead, than our imagination can touch their measure.” (George MacDonald)