If you were born
before 1960, you are most likely familiar with the Baltimore Catechism. The
little book was based on St. Robert Bellarmine’s Small Catechism, and memorizing
certain lines of the catechism was an integral part of early North American
Catholic education.
The catechism was formatted in question and answer format. The teacher (usually
a religious sister) would ask the students: “Why were you created?” And the
children would answer in perfect harmony: “To know, love, and serve God in this
world and be happy with Him in the next.”
For many, perhaps that answer suffices. But some of us, surely, would like a
few more details. If you belong in the latter group, you’re not alone.
There is plenty of focus on our need for a saviour and on our need for
redemption. But something that is really missing from the collective Christian
experience is what comes next, after we’ve been redeemed by Christ’s sacrifice.
Were we created just so that we could be redeemed? Surely not. We were created
quite theatrically and gloriously (although the details are still a bit hazy)
but we really messed things up and needed rescuing.
We don’t spend a lot of time considering a very crucial and somewhat obvious
point: Where were we headed before the messing up part? What did God have in
mind for us? We hit a huge distraction (original sin) and never quite got back
on track.
Russian philosopher Nikolai Berdyaev in his 1962 book The Meaning of the Creative Act writes about how redemption is not
merely an absence of sin; it is creative. He bemoans the fact that we are so
consumed with being rescued and redeemed but not the part that comes next: our
being restored to our “full stature in Christ.” Once we’ve been claimed by
Christ, we were not created to remain in stasis; we were created for continual
re-creation and the renewal of our minds. We were created to be creative; to
facilitate God’s continual act of creation by uniting our will to God’s and
becoming an instrument in his hands. In short, we were born to create.
“Salvation from sin, from perdition, is not the final purpose of religious
life: salvation is always from something and life should be for something. Many
things unnecessary for salvation are needed for the very purpose for which
salvation is necessary - for the creative upsurge of being. Man’s chief end is
not to be saved but to mount up, creatively,” Berdyaev writes.
Later, Berdyaev
writes that freedom is required for creativity. This is why our creativity
presupposes our redemption. We can only create that which is life-giving if we
are unfettered, unimpeded by the weight of sin and concupiscence. Since we will
never know complete liberation from the latter until the other side, we can
only experience glimpses of creative liberty here on earth.
St. John Paul II summarized these thoughts in the opening lines to his 1999
Letter to Artists:
“None can sense more deeply than you artists, ingenious creators of beauty that
you are, something of the pathos with which God at the dawn of creation looked
upon the work of his hands. A glimmer of that feeling has shone so often in
your eyes when – like the artists of every age – captivated by the hidden power
of sounds and words, colours and shapes, you have admired the work of your
inspiration, sensing in it some echo of the mystery of creation with which God,
the sole creator of all things, has wished in some way to associate you.”
In those moments where we do get to see above the clouds and participate as
co-creators, the view is otherworldly and completely convincing: we were
created for beauties that eye has not seen and ear has not heard. In the
meantime, we can keep trying to capture foretastes and know that our input is
not frivolous but altogether hoped for and in keeping with our divine calling.