I want to talk about creation, or the act of creation — the act of creation as an act of worship. It’s not my intention to get all theological or mystical about this, although inevitably some of that creeps in depending on your existing perspective on those concepts. But I consider every act of deliberate creation to be an act of worship of sorts. Or maybe I don’t mean of sorts, I mean very concretely. But I don’t mean that the act of creation is worshipping at the altar of art or creativity or the Judeo-Christian deities or Buddha or whatever.
In my opinion, every act of worship is inward pointing, regardless of the religious tradition in which you situate yourself. Things like meditation and prayer, which in my mind are two sides of the same coin, are very introspective and personal rituals that I, to a degree, can’t see a dramatic difference between meditation and prayer and the act of creation, be that music making or painting or sculpture, anything, any act of creation that’s deliberate. And especially when the act of creation is absorbing — to use an overused term, mindful — when it triggers a state of flow and a state where you are no longer fully aware of your surroundings. And I think the act of worship is independent of the outcome. So in my mind, an unsuccessful creative activity is still an act of worship.
It’s an active, inward, introspective, and personally valuable. I’ve used too many adjectives there and I’ve run out of runway, but I think you get the point. And for me, this very much reflects prayer in particular, which if you’re doing meditation properly should be directionless, causeless, outcome free, and totally inert — as an activity, is kind of the point. Although I think most people, especially within the yogic traditions and similar, it’s a very active activity that does have, depending on your point of view, ends. Prayer, prayer I think should not, regardless of your tradition, have an ends. I find the idea that people are praying for outcomes very, very unchristian, very spiritually bereft or inadequate.
But whereas praying as a form of introspection and the shoring up of psychic energy, psychological strength, praying to be better or stronger is directly comparable to the type of outcome that you’re trying to achieve during a creative activity. Now, if your prayers result in something, i.e. there is some outcome that you believe came about because you were praying, or actually came about because you’re praying — for example, you’re on your knees and your knees hurt. But I think the act of prayer is always independent of outcomes, but may achieve them. And I think that when you think about activities with some sort of extrinsic outcome by their nature, so the act of creation, and I guess this could include things like cookery, those acts of creation change the world in some small way or large way and allow the acts of worship to be made concrete in a way that other people may participate in it by way of being an observer or someone who’s hearing it or tasting it or touching it or whatever it is.
And that’s very powerful. And in that sense, it makes creation very much an active worship and it makes the creator someone who is actively participating in contributing to the symbolic realm of human consciousness. And I do mean that in concrete rather than mystical terms. I think that artistic artifacts, created artifacts change the world in some small way, regardless, be that a blockbuster movie or a painting that only two people see. And when a person encounters an artwork, they encounter a symbol or set of symbols that has expanded in some way their lexicon of symbols, that in their own right are meaningless in the sense that, you know, all art is pointless, to paraphrase Oscar Wilde. That it doesn’t mean that those symbols are worthless.
In fact, if anything alters the world, is encountered by sentient beings or consciousness, is of some value, has had an impact. And it doesn’t mean to say that the impact is positive. It doesn’t mean to say that the impact is anything of any size or importance. It’s just a symbol and an artifact in a cultural realm that’s jam-packed with symbols. And those symbols aren’t always man-made.
I think a tree, for example, is a symbol in its own right. It represents something to someone. It represents something to anyone who’s ever encountered a tree, as does a car or a cloud or a hedgehog. So real independent entities have symbolic meaning, so do creations of any sort — a spider web, for example, or a sculpture or a sculpture of a spider’s web or a painting of a sculpture of a spider’s web or a photo of a painting of a sculpture of a spider’s web. And we get these ladders of meaning and every rung on the ladder is a level of abstraction and that’s exactly as it should be.
And therefore the landscape painting of a house in a field is an abstraction of the creation that is the house and perhaps the field itself if it’s on some sort of farmland, say. And then someone has chosen to abstractify that one further level away by depicting it in whatever form they choose to do so. So anyway, back to my core thesis of this ramble, both figurative and literal since I’m walking through some woodland. And there’s a buzzard. Oh, amazing.
Beautiful birds. Always getting in fights with crows. Anyway, I think that, as I’ve heard stated by JF Martell, who wrote a great book that really affected me called Reclaiming Art in an Age of Artifice — I don’t know if he says it in the book, but I’ve heard it on his podcast — that every religious act is an act of creation. I mean, an act of art. Religion in his mind is a subset of art and not the other way around.
Because if you strip away all the artifacts, you’re just left with a guy telling you stuff. And what the religious practice, the worship practice is, is a big performance. And he would consider that performance art, which is a point of view I’m inclined to agree with, I’m certainly sympathetic with. And every person in the room in front of that evangelical preacher or whatever it is, is having a very personal experience and is interpreting the performance in their own way. And very much that the experience of being preached to — it’s an experience where there is a person stood in front of you who is in dialogue really with themselves, and a bunch of people who are in dialogue with themselves in an environment where other humans are using the performance of the preacher to guide their introspection.
And it feels for me, the idea of worship, whatever that means to me or anyone else, I find that quite exposing. I find it quite — it should be a very, very personal thing. And I don’t feel comfortable and I won’t be comfortable around other people doing it. I won’t achieve what I would consider worship, which is the state of absorption in the activity. I’m not going to feel that around other people.
I’m just not wired that way. I’m pleased that other people may achieve their optimal experience by being in that environment, or perhaps they’re singing, or gospel singing or singing hymns or whatever that is, chanting. For me, the presence of other people is not something I can tune out ever. The moment I feel that I can be perceived by other people, my consciousness is aware of them like a stone in my shoe, whether or not they’re actually paying any attention to me or whether or not it matters or is relevant is kind of beside the point, because of my levels of empathy, I can’t tune it out. So another way of interpreting my being drawn to the arts and the act of creation is that I was looking for a way to worship on my own terms and to achieve these states of introspection that people get from things like organized religion, but in a way that I could do on my own and that I can still achieve the extrinsic celebratory elements that come from things like religion by communing with others who worship in the same way as me, and by experiencing each other’s creations with a level of deference and an open mind and friendliness and love.
And so for me, I think the word religion is a very fraught and loaded term and not one that I want to associate with anything that I do. But as an analog, yeah, it’s somewhat accurate. But worship I do in my own space, in my own time, in my own way. And it’s my conviction that that’s what any artist or creator who makes their work with a sense of their whole self and their whole attention and with a sense of honesty and care and love — I think they’re worshipping as well. I’m no theologian or philosopher, so no doubt someone can pull out some Nietzsche or something to blow holes in my argument here, but in some senses it doesn’t matter whether you agree with me or not, since it’s sort of how I see the world and I didn’t come to that realization necessarily from being guided, although diverse inputs have sort of helped me to get to where I am, but it’s a fairly personal thing, a very personal realization.
Anyway, that’s all I’m going to say on this. I’ll see you all soon.