I want to invite you to think of a time that you were captivated by something really wonderful, something that sparked your imagination, called to you and made you think: I want to be part of that.

Maybe it was an extraordinary meal that stirred your interest in cooking;
a work of music that made you long to play the piano or sing;
a sport you found challenging in just the right way that made you come alive;
a spreadsheet formula that elegantly solved your mathematic problem.

Whatever it was, it seemed to magnetically pull your interest. Got it?

What is it like to remember that magnetic call? Nostalgic? Sweet? Maybe a bit wistful?

When I was in the second grade, we had a book-a-thon and, for reading a certain number of pages, I was allowed to make a personalized plaque out of plaster and paint it. It could say anything I want, and I chose, in big second grade handwriting: “Books are my life.” I guess I knew really young that I was going to need to invest in bookshelves. Books endlessly stirred my curiosity, and set me on a path.

To talk about what it means to be human, what it means to bear the Divine Image, we have to start with Goodness, with the magnetic pull of creativity that we’ve all experienced.

You see, for centuries, the church has had an anthropology—a theory of what it means to be human—which focuses on sin and failure. Let’s call it an anthropology of wretchedness. Humans are sunk in sin, lost, and the main Biblical drama is: how will God save humanity from our deserved condemnation?

But there is an alternate anthropology: humans are created by God for Goodness, designed with the capacity of creativity. When we say humanity bears the divine image, we mean that we share in God’s overflowing creativity, that we are made for partnership in what God is doing—hovering over chaos to bring forth life.

These two anthropologies lead to very different ideas of salvation.

The first anthropology of wretchedness poses our problem as a matter of atonement for sin, and the metaphors are all legal. To be saved is to be pardoned for our offenses.

The second—let’s call it an anthropology of creativity—poses our human problem as one of finding our way toward our capacity for goodness. Given that humans are made by God for creativity, what enables us to pursue that goodness, and what hinders us? Why is it that we so often get mired down and turned away from what is good? What can we do to join God in creative goodness?

The Eastern churches have tended to stay closer to the second anthropology, and out of the Eastern church comes a model for unfolding our capacity to join God in creative goodness: Katharsis, Fotosis, Theosis.

Katharsis - purging, cleansing.

Fotosis - basking in light.

Theosis - union with God.

To set the stage for these three moves and their picture of human development with God, I like to use a metaphor:

You have a piece of property at the ocean (what luck!) with a cliff overlooking the sea. The bluff has grown over with brambles and brush, but you clear it away, cutting out weeds and transplanting good plants, and create space for a wooden bench. And then, having cleared space, you go out each morning to sit and wait for the sun to rise.

Katharsis

Katharsis is the first movement of that metaphor: pursing, cleansing. It is our initial response to the call of the Good.

The only reason to pull out your hedge trimmers and gloves and start pulling weeds on your coastal bluff, is because you are stirred with the idea, magnetically pulled by the appeal of making room for the beauty of the sunrise.

We humans, being made for goodness, sooner or later become captivated by something wonderful, moved by something we want to be a part of—a trade, a craft, a vocation, a social cause. But that magnetic call lands on a person whose capacities are as yet undeveloped. You’re inspired to play the piano, but you can’t right away play music. You’re captured by the need for racial justice, but you have no idea what to do. You love the idea of painting but have never sketched or held a brush.

So the task of Katharsis is to make room, to prepare us to move in a new direction. It is the work of discernment: what creative good is moving me in this season? What helps me move toward that good, and what hinders me from moving toward that good?

On an anthropology of wretchedness, “purging” is about identifying what you are doing wrong and stopping it. We are convicted of sin, and so we work to cut out ungodly behaviors.

But on an anthropology of creativity, our question is: what enables and what hinders your response to move toward creative good? This may involve setting aside things that are harmful; but usually we also must make room for creativity by setting aside things that are also good, different goods, goods that don’t lead where we want to go. We can only do so much, after all.

The other thing about Katharsis is that it will always be a personal response to a particular calling, and to your individual situation.

Here’s what I mean. On an anthropology of wretchedness, where the big problem is stopping sinning, we can universalize very easily: holiness is doing X, Y, and Z and it is not doing A, B and C. So, are you doing A, B or C? Then stop it.

But if I am moved with a vision of learning to play the piano and creating beautiful music, that inspiration will require me to ask particular questions about my life and reorder my priorities toward that goal—priorities that would make no sense if your calling is to baking, or to architecture, or to computer science, or to ballroom dancing. All these many goods will require us to ask questions of discernment which have to be answered afresh by each of us, for our situation:

• What in my life is sparking desire, capturing interest, beckoning me to contribute my energy toward creating something good?

• What in my life already presents opportunities for growing toward that goodness?

• What in my life might be hindering me from moving toward that goodness?

If I, responding to a longing to be a writer, make the decision to clear out time each day to read, to jot notes, to sit at my desk and write, and not to get on the internet before I’ve written so that I can hear myself think—well, those commitments may or may not have anything to do with your movement toward creativity.

My point here is that, if Katharsis is a move of cutting out brambles and thorns and clearing space, that is less because we are terrible wretches caught up in sin, and more because responding to God’s invitation toward creative goodness will always mean discerning how to order our lives to make room for our vocation.

Fotosis

In our metaphor, once we’ve cleared away the brambles and thorns and opened a space to see the horizon, we can then put in a bench and, each morning, day after day, go sit and wait for the sun to rise. Some days may be cloudy and fog-bound, others clear and promising, but we make it part of our habit to go and sit each day.

This is the movement of Fotosis—making habits that allow us to bask in the light of the good that moves us, so we can become intimately familiar with our craft. Fotosis is the stage where, having made room, we now become apprentices, responding to the the realities of the good we are pursuing.

In his book The Contemplative Pastor, Eugene Peterson shares about helping as a young man in his father’s butcher shop, where he learned to submit himself to the authority of the cut of meat before him:

Carving a quarter of beef into roasts and steaks was not a matter of imposing my knife-fortified will on dumb matter, but respectfully and reverently entering into the reality of the material. “Hackers” was my father’s contemptuous label for butchers who ignorantly imposed their wills on the meat… The results were unattractive and uneconomical… Real work always includes a respect for the material at hand.

Just as a quarter of beef has grains and sinews—realities which must be understood in order to carve a perfect steak—so all the various kinds of good things that move us also demand apprenticeship to learn their ways. Carpenters learn to respect the wood and their tools; the mathematician learns the nature of logic and numbers and expressions; the parent watches closely to understand and respond to the unfolding personality of their child.

This is what spiritual practices, routines, habits are all about: positioning us squarely to observe, take in, learn the realities before us so we can respond appropriately, so we can grow our capacity to get in on the craft.

On a wretchedness anthropology, practices are either (a) things we must do to curb our inclination toward sin, or (b) practices are useless since all human endeavor is wretched anyway.

But on a creativity anthropology, practices are apprenticeship. They are not impressive, not meritorious—they are simply the way we pick up on the material at hand for doing good.

In his letter to the Philippian church, Paul counseled:

Finally, brothers and sisters, whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable—if anything is excellent or praiseworthy—think about such things. Whatever you have learned or received or heard from me, or seen in me—put it into practice. And the God of peace will be with you.

This is Fotosis: That lovely, true, admirable goodness which captures your interest? Think about it. Think about it deeply. Make habits and routines and practices which have you interacting with that goodness, learning its ways.

Listen to favorite music pieces. Read books and articles, listen to podcasts about the topic. Find masters in the art and learn from them. Watch YouTube videos. These are all practices of attending.

Play scales. Practice carving wood and learning how it responds. Shoot hoops and run drills. Write drafts, one after another. These are practices of embodying.

Run a bit further. Stay with mystery. Rethink the situation. Sit in silence. Look again. These are all practices for increasing endurance.

Whatever good draws us, we clear room for it in our lives (Katharsis) and we bask in its light, become students of it, practicing and practicing to increase our capacity for that creative goodness (Fotosis).

Theosis

Finally, Theosis.

Having cut away the brambles, having set out a bench, having made our habit of going out each morning to watch for the sunrise—well, we still cannot make the sun rise. That’s not our part. And we can’t prevent a foggy morning or chilly rain, and we can’t help it if we get sick and can’t go out one morning or another.

But, sometimes—maybe even often—the sky will be clear and the water still and the birds chirruping and the sun will gently ease itself over the horizon and we will bask in its beauty and shiver with delight.

Theosis is what the Eastern church calls a state of union with God, where we have moved into creative partnership with God in what God is doing. God, creator—God hovering over the waters calling goodness out of chaos.

Another word for theosis, I think, is play. It is the moment when all the making room and practicing and habit and routine seems to drop away and you are left with the simple delight of creating, so that is is just play - play with God. Another Greek word: perichoresis, a turning dance, the Triune dance, into which you suddenly find yourself beckoned and the good you have sought flows out of you.

This is the biggest difference between our two anthropologies: an anthropology of wretchedness seems, at best, to aim for “not sinning” and worshipping God for his gift of grace—fine, those are not bad things. But the anthropology of creativity aims at play, the delightful freedom of capacity to bring about goodness.

After rehearsing and rehearsing, simply to release your body into dance or song. After scales and practicing, simply to allow your fingers to move and make beautiful music. After studying and memorizing and writing and passing accreditations, to practice law or psychology or medicine, to write code and create programs that are elegant and effective.

These states of productivity are sometimes called “flow”, but I would suggest they are Theosis, when we are caught up in a taste of God’s delighted joy in creative goodness.

The mystery of Theosis is that it is always gift and yet we always have actively participated in it. That “aha” moment, that effortless dance, that breakthrough in therapy, that sweet deep relationship: all these moments feel, to us, full to the brim of gift, beyond what we could have expected to manage on our own. And, all of them come about because we have slowly and over years invested our energy into becoming the sort of people who are present when the moment arrives.

It isn’t easy to capture Theosis in words. These moments of transcendence are so palpably good and yet hard to name. Perhaps one of my favorite descriptions comes from the novel Gilead by Marilynne Robinson:

There was a young couple strolling along half a block ahead of me. The sun had come up brilliantly after a heavy rain, and the trees were glistening and very wet. On some impulse, plain exuberance, I suppose, the fellow jumped up and caught hold of a branch, and a storm of luminous water came pouring down on the two of them, and they laughed and took off running, the girl sweeping water off her hair and her dress as if she were a little bit disgusted, but she wasn’t. It was a beautiful thing to see, like something from a myth. I don’t know why I thought of that now, except perhaps because it is easy to believe in such moments that water was made primarily for blessing, and only secondarily for growing vegetables or doing the wash. … This is an interesting planet. It deserves all the attention you can give it.

Theosis—the ability to join in on what God is doing—surely, if nothing else, includes the ability to stop and be struck with the beauty of laughter, the beauty of water cascading from a tree, the beauty of human playfulness.

This is an interesting planet. It deserves all the attention you can give it. And all the creativity we can give it.

As we individually are enraptured by goodness—which is, always, the creative goodness of God—we are invited to clear room, to become students and apprentices basking in the reality of that goodness, learning its ways, and then, over time, to grow our capacity to delight in doing good in all of our many, unique, personal ways.

An anthropology of creativity says that you are made for and capable of joining God in goodness, and that the aim of salvation is playful creativity. So you’re encouraged and invited to pay attention to what captures your imagination and interest, discern what moves you toward that good, enroll as an apprentice and dedicate practice to expanding the capacity, and above all to watch for moments of play.

This is most what what world needs from you: your delightful, creative, good playfulness. Whether you love to bake, to write, to solve equations, to increase the efficiency of workflows, to teach, to raise children, to sit and listen to those who are struggling, to paint, to run, to throw parties, to walk in nature and hunt for mushrooms—whatever goodness sparks your interest and curiosity—that is the place where, beholding the glory of the Lord we are being transformed, from one degree of glory to another, into a people who more and more delight in our creative partnership with God.