Creator Dude

Last night, at our weekly reading and discussion group, we got onto the topic of concepts of the Creator. Some in the group considered the Light Within more of an abstraction of a great life force. Others saw it as a distinct thing of creative power. Some thought of Supreme Being as a verb, and some, as a noun. By this time, we were way off topic, so we just went with this idea.

BH talked about a painting class he'd once taken, where everyone had to paint the same collection of objects on the centre table. What he marvelled at was how everyone's paintings were completely different, yet all very clearly were paintings of the same set of objects. By the end of the course, he could look at a painting and know which person had painted it -- through the light and tone, the brush strokes, the favourite colours and textures.

That of the creator gets left in the creation. BH compared this to his concept of the Creator Being. We can't know It or see It, but Its creation bears its imprint. We carry that of the Creator in us, as creations ourselves.

William Littleboy in the old blue Faith and Practice (#82) says "God is above all the God of the normal." The Creator is invisible, soundless, beyond senses, inseparable from any part of creation because we lack the means to separate It out from what It made. We can see that of the Creator when we study creation, sit with it, rub against it. Nowhere is one more close to the Creator than when canoeing or showshoeing.

We talked about the problems that occur with images of the Creator. The fallacy is to assume the Creator is anything like us: that the Creator feels like us or thinks like us -- or feels or thinks at all. This is the heresy of anthropomorphism. It leads to more heresies: God as Bogey Man. God as Santa Claus. God who is always on our side in any war. God who has a Chosen People above all other people (usually ourselves). God who wants us to harm our enemies. God who worships our Bible or Koran or our rules for living. God who loves or hates, wants or doesn't want, says or doesn't say, does or doesn't do.

The greatest heresy of all is to think that the Creator in any way resembles what is described in the Bible or Koran. All we can glean is the ideas of the individual writer-creators of the stories -- their desires, their dreams, their experiences, their fears, their favourite images and words. Their stamp is in the stories. The Creator's stamp is in creation.

We decided that the truest and least erroneous image of the Creator that humans can come up with is that of an amorphous blob, an amoeba, a great glowing humming sphere. The image has to be so different from our experience of ourselves as to defy our projecting of our own personalities, shortcomings, and desires onto it. It would be hard to fight a war over a blob.

So then what can we know about the Creator? Assuming we conceive of the Creator as a being, we can see flickers of It in creation itself.

The Creator's favourite colours are green and blue. Its favourite shapes are the circle and the elongated ovoid. It likes numbers, especially big ones, but also 2, 4, 5, and 10. It loves sound, tonality, and rhythm. It likes things to spin and circle, bounce and roll. It likes yin-yang balances, complementary opposites. If favours brushstrokes of many colours that blend to form one great mass of a single colour, like hairs on a head, or pine needles in a fuzzy forest.