This week’s Parashah (Parashat Pekudei: Exodus 38:21-40:38), as last week’s reading did, opens a door to us to consider how it is to have heart to create and craft beauty. Last week, just as the Holy is described at the beginning of Genesis creating, in the descriptions of the people gladly and open-heartedly bringing their contributions and the artists crafting those into wonderful being we have a chance to pause and reflect on our own creativity and connection to freedom, wholeness and well-being. The work is completed in this week’s reading and blessed by sacred residence. In other words: how do we creatively make room for the Holy in our lives?
I love to knit. I generally enjoy the whole process from selecting yarn to finishing. I enjoy adding to beauty in the world. But you know, when I am angry, frustrated, and hurting, my knitting isn’t the same. Then my yarn snarls, my stitches drop, my gladness in the process evaporates. When that’s happening, I know I need to stop and attend to my heart enough to be able to pick up knitting and let the craft finish the work of balancing and healing. While knitting is wonderful — and so too for every other craft I’ve ever put my hands to - there’s a space of vulnerability and loving expectation needed for me to make anything beautiful (and that includes the things that are not beautiful to me but are to other people, like the eyeball scarf I knit for one of my brothers). My knitting may be mechanically skillful, but unless I can bring my whole heart to it, there’s no room for spirit. When I’m holding back because of distraction, fear, worry, grief, anger or pain, then my knitting is less than it can be because I am less than whole. When I’m wholly present, then there is also room for sacred presence, for love, compassion, kindness, mercy, imperfection, failure, learning, repair, and renewal. As in my craft, so too in the rest of my life.
Some of my life I have not felt free to be my whole self. I’ve been told directly and indirectly my whole self is too big, too loud, too intense, not enough, and even bad and wrong. Now I expect to fail, to be insufficient at times, to be bad and wrong at times, but those are never synonymous with my whole self. To be more fully and freely myself has at times been an act of resistance, of claiming and naming and honoring the wholeness and weirdness that I am. I am imperfect. I fail. I make mistakes. I need to forgive and to ask for forgiveness, just like every other person I’ve ever met. But in the larger culture where I live, there is so much shame to any of these realities, to the truth of being human, needing one another, needing this earth, needing love and dignity and respect, needing….anything. The beauty of creating with our whole selves, imperfect as we are, vulnerable as we are, is that those needs are also spaces for others to show up in, spaces for the sacred, spaces to lean into and learn into, a spaciousness we need for continual personal and spiritual growth as individuals, friends, families, communities, and our world. When I’m knitting, I’m making little loops. Knitted fabric is full of spaciousness and sometimes I will breathe a little welcome to the sacred, a little blessing for the one receiving the knitted item, a little prayer of well-being for all of us connected made visible with a few yards of yarn what is already true.
In a brutal culture, where vulnerabilities are used to exploit and gain power over others, our creativity tends to be channeled into basic survival. We may have moments of offering up skillful beauty, but they’re fleeting and hidden or they’re for someone else’s pleasure so we can survive. Creating beauty for ourselves freely as much as we might wish with the materials and tools and skills available to us is creating space for us to be most fully ourselves. We can’t be our whole selves most of the time without our vulnerabilities, because none of us are perfect or invulnerable, or don’t have doubts, or don’t have stuff to learn, or never make mistakes. Making mistakes and learning from them is vital to art and craft. Failing and trying again, failing and making amends, failing and seeking and offering forgiveness are all vital to being wholehearted people. But that means creating with our vulnerabilities.
We have vulnerabilities whether or not we wish to admit them. Human beings are what primatologists call obligatorily gregarious. We need one another because alone and apart we are insufficient. We need society, community, family, and friends. We need relationships of love and compassion as much as we need good food and clean water and clean air and a safe space to sleep. Any need creates a vulnerability. Slaving and other exploitive societies use our need for one another against our own best interests to serve the interests of another. When we’re socialized to exploit others or be exploited, which can happen whether we are the exploiters or the exploited, it takes time to learn to lean into our vulnerabilities and to hold one another more graciously. It takes time to heal the wounded heart. But that wounded heart won’t heal in isolation. We need one another.
As Moses finishes anointing the beautiful, freely, whole-heartedly created items the people lovingly created, gladly gave, and dare to risk hoping the Holy will find pleasing, we might take a collective breath with all those gathered. Will these creative, whole-hearted offerings be acceptable? Are we and the fruits of what we bring worthy? And then collectively we can sigh with delight and relief when the cloud covers the tent of meeting and the glory of the Holy fills the tabernacle. Because the answer is: yes. The people risked faithfully to create wholeheartedly and offer those gifts. May we do the same with our lives: risking faithfully, setting down the shame, and picking up the creative process for goodness’ sake, for wholeness, for healing, for adding to this world’s astounding beauty moment by moment and breath by breath.