On Being Human (6 May 2004)

Imagine this: you wake up one Sunday morning, and you are in a world without art.

When you go to church, the building you enter is an ordinary building. Nothing distinguishes it from the buildings around it. Inside, people are clad in uniforms. There are no suits, no hats, no dresses or gloves. The pastor looks like everyone else. Everyone has the same hairstyle, male and female alike.

There are no Bibles, for this is a world without literature.

There are no hymns or anthems, for this is a world without music.

The offerings that are given are plain pieces of metal or paper; coins have no designs on them, nor do dollar bills, for this is a world without art.

There's an attitude that's prevalent in the Bahamas — and, for that matter, in the world — that tends to regard art in all its forms as a luxury, something that we can live without. We believe, more or less, that human beings are machines, programmable to live without beauty, without creativity, without imagination. We believe that being employed and fed and housed are the most fundamental things we need in life, and we make it our business to amass enough money to continue to employ and feed and house ourselves.

Art is a frill. Or so we believe. And the real world is a no-frills world.

We couldn't be more wrong.

The thing is, I believe that art — which I'm going to define really loosely as the need to make beautiful, the need to create, the need to express oneself — is as fundamental to the human spirit as food or water or shelter.

You see, human beings are far more than simply mouths to feed and bodies to house. It's not enough to simply be alive; we need a reason for living. As a friend and colleague of mine would say: when you've finished spending all your money on house and food, what are you living for?

The answer, I'll argue, is art. Art and music and dance and creativity. For those people who might disagree with me, who might classify that answer as humanist (and therefore dismiss it as not being God-centred), bear with me for one minute. I regard the exercise of our creativity as the hallmark of our humanity. After all, every animal eats and drinks and finds shelter. Only we humans make art.

And the exercise of our creativity is also one of the most godly things we humans can do, we who were fashioned in the image of our Creator. To create, I believe, is the highest form of worship; it was God who made us creative beings in the first place. As a result, I believe that the desire to make things beautiful, to express ourselves emotionally, is one of the most fully human and most fully godly things we can do.

It's no accident, I'm sure, that when we worship, in whatever form we worship, whether we're Christian or Mormon or Rastafarian or Muslim, we worship by drawing on the arts. It's no accident that we sing hymns to the Almighty, that we seek to make our temples beautiful, that we prettify ourselves when we go to worship, that we read some of the most wonderful literature there is, written for all posterity in sacred books that are more complex than anything our children study in school.

We humans need to create as much as we need to eat. And so when we worship, we exercise every facet of our creativity. And, I will argue, when we exercise our creativity, we are also worshipping.

If you doubt me, consider this. The ancient Greeks regarded the act of creating a holy act. They believed in seven spirit-beings who moved human beings to create different kinds of art: they called these spirits the Muses, and it is from that idea that we get the word music. The Greeks recognized that every human truly engaged in a creative act loses himself or herself in the creative process, becomes possessed for a time by the art itself. I believe that it is through that process that we humans can touch our God.

So why, I wonder, have we Bahamians made our creative urges so peripheral to our existence? We alone of all our neighbours have invested appreciably little in the development of the arts. We marvel at the extent of our talent, but don't see the need for investing in it, regarding the exercise of those talents as frivolous or futile. In fact, we are almost hostile to the idea of their development, labelling those who are committed to that process as "soft", or "elitist", or "critical". Rather, we expect to be able to produce wonderful art on demand, without training or standards, because we appear to believe that gifts from God need no honing at all.

But our reasoning is flawed. If we have gifts, we are given them raw; it is up to us to sharpen them, to use them, to get to know everything we can about them, to exercise them to the fullest extent of our ability. The truest expression of our gifts does not come when we use them blindly, in their naked form. To ignore them, to let them remain as they always were, is akin to the burying of the talents by the faithless servant. To avoid investing in them for whatever reason (because our Master is a hard man? Because we believe the arts to be "soft" or for people who are not like us?) is to disrespect the gifts that we have been given, and ultimately, to disrespect our God.

The truest expression of our gifts is to exercise them, as an athlete does her body, to understand them as well as a professor knows his subject, and to develop them through theory and training and practice. And it's in that expression, in that development, it is in the desire to perfect our creativity, that we reflect most nearly the image of our Creator.

Thus the Bibles and the beautiful churches and the hymns. Our talents provide us with the most perfect worship. It's in the expressing of them that we are most fully human. And the exercise of them is one of the greatest gifts we humans can give to God.