The Miracle of Creation

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. (John 1:1). A famous physicist once said, “Perhaps, at the beginning, there was only an idea.” And the writer writes the word on a white page. And there, before your inner eyes, Jane Eyre, Jo March, Madame Bovary begin their lives, there is Atticus Finch, Mr. Rochester, Prince Hamlet, Dr. Jekyll. Have they not been our friends or foes for as long as we can read? And have we not cried and laughed with our friends that fell into us from paper pages, have we not hesitated to read on filled with horror and dread? We carry worlds within us, never to be erased, we have travelled through space and held our breath with Tenar in the Tombs of Atuan.

And, just as in the world we feel we know as ‘real’, we give of us to the story told in a secondary moment of creation, bringing to life a reality born from each one of us. It’s not what we see, it’s what we believe we see, our perception, that is the creator of ‘reality’. However much you are united, you love each other, you feel you are ‘swinging from the same beam’, you stand in front of the ‘Nightwatch’ and both of you will see your own. The painting itself is a world created by Rembrandt and his imagination, his perception.

You travel with close friends, and every one of them will bring a slightly different story to the table when you talk about your adventures afterwards over a glass of wine that for each one will have a taste that is uniquely theirs.

Objectivity can’t exist. Everything we do, experience, is coloured by who we are, our DNA, our past nurturing, by what life has given us, and by how we dealt with the gift.

The deceptive ‘reality’ continues: you see the film of the book, say, ‘Zorba the Greek’ after the novel by Kazantzakis. For argument’s sake let’s say the novel found 500,000 readers. That makes 500,000 different worlds created by those readers, while the writer might possibly violently disagree with some of those readers' interpretations. No director, no casting director, no set designer, no actor can do justice to the world you created in your room breathlessly following the story and seeing Zorba dance in your mind. The film can only be the creation of one man, the director’s vision. No wonder you hear so often, “But the film was nothing like the book.” Of course, it wasn’t. It was the director’s book. And even as you all see the film, when you leave the cinema, each one of you has seen a different film.

Can we all agree that we are the creators of our worlds, using the clay given to us every day new? And that we have to make a decision about what kind of world we want to create?