I love creating things. At a noticeably early age, I greatly enjoyed sculpting figures out of plasticine modeling clay. I also spent hours building medieval castles with Lego bricks. Sometimes, my three older brothers and I would borrow my dad’s colossal, shoulder-mount VHS camcorder to record slipshod stop-motion videos of GI Joe figures battling it out for the love of a red, lady ninja. And when I found stack upon stack of unused inventory sheets from my PawPaw's Italian deli, I felt like I had struck gold. Each one of these thousands of sheets of paper had a wonderfully blank, white expanse on the back that invited me to an untapped world of drawings, games and more. I illustrated superheroes and goofy-faced cartoon characters. My brothers and I thought up and sketched out elaborate labyrinths filled with spikes, spiders, treasures, bottomless pits, and dragons' fire. Those years were a magical time of unbridled creativity.  

As much as I loved being creative, I wouldn’t have been able to tell you why I loved creating; I suppose I merely would have said it was fun. However, it was not until much later in my life that I was exposed to the true goodness and beauty of creative acts and to whom they are meant to lead us. With God as the Creator, it is natural that we, as beings made in His image and likeness, are imbued with the innate desire to participate in His creation. It is natural, also, that these gifts and desires for creativity we are given in this temporal life for conveying truth and beauty are merely shadows of the Truth and Beauty we are to encounter for eternity in Heaven.  

This brings to mind a wonderful passage from my favorite author, C.S. Lewis:   

“Let us construct a fable. Let us picture a woman thrown into a dungeon. There she bears and rears a son. He grows up seeing nothing but the dungeon walls, the straw on the floor, and a little patch of the sky seen through the grating, which is too high up to show anything except sky. This unfortunate woman was an artist, and when they imprisoned her she managed to bring with her a drawing pad and a box of pencils. As she never loses the hope of deliverance she is constantly teaching her son about that outer world which he has never seen. She does it very largely by drawing him pictures. With her pencil she attempts to show him what fields, rivers, mountains, cities and waves on a beach are like. He is a dutiful boy and he does his best to believe her when she tells him that that outer world is far more interesting and glorious than anything in the dungeon. At times he succeeds. On the whole he gets on tolerably well until, one day, he says something that gives his mother pause. For a minute or two they are at cross-purposes. Finally it dawns on her that he has, all these years, lived under a misconception. ‘But’, she gasps, ‘you didn’t think that the real world was full of lines drawn in lead pencil?’ ‘What?’ says the boy. ‘No pencil-marks there?’ And instantly his whole notion of the outer world becomes a blank. For the lines, by which alone he was imagining it, have now been denied of it. He has no idea of that which will exclude and dispense with the lines, that of which the lines were merely a transposition — the waving tree-tops, the light dancing on the weir, the coloured three-dimensional realities which are not enclosed in lines but define their own shapes at every moment with a delicacy and multiplicity which no drawing could ever achieve. The child will get the idea that the real world is somehow less visible than his mother’s pictures. In reality it lacks lines because it is incomparably more visible.”  (C.S. Lewis, They Asked for a Paper, 'Transposition,' 204–205)

The eternal life that awaits us is not a ghastly shell of this life, floating among the clouds, devoid of the reality, solidity, and creativity we experience now. On the contrary, life in the Beatific Vision will be infinitely more creative, solid, and real than we can imagine. Just as the boy in Lewis’s fable struggled to conceive the fullness of the world beyond the lines, so too we often struggle to comprehend the fullness of life beyond this world. Grasping this concept has the potential to change the way we view everything we see, hear, make, and do in this life.

So let us continue being creative in our own ways: both trivial and grandiose. Let us draw superheroes, make mud pies in the garden, edify young minds with the history of the Greek city-state, logically defend geometric proofs, and belt out arias on the stage (or in the shower). Let us participate in the act of creation by bringing new souls into the world and teaching them where they are going and to whom they belong. And let us not do any of these for its own sake. Rather, let us see every creative act as a transposition of a greater reality, a beautiful but insufficient image of that great final stage that is to come — where we have slogged our way through the labyrinthine corridors across pits and dragons' fire to reach the great Treasure, where we are the skillfully shaped masterpieces in the hands of the Sculptor, and where we are the Beloved over whose love the Warrior has battled and won.