God The Potter

I love the metaphor of God as potter; and I think that it offers us great possibilities in glimpsing God as Creator, and understanding how God and we can be in relationship.  The way that I experience God is consistent with the way I experience being a potter.  The only problem is... the way the authors of Isaiah and Romans seem to describe being a potter actually does not resonate with my experience.  So I would like to “talk back” to these texts from my 38 years of pottery-making experience, affirming the metaphor, God as Potter, and see what we can uncover about the creative possibilities of understanding our relationship with God....

These passages from Isaiah and Romans all seem to be describing a God who is absolutely controlling.  This Creator God is depicted as all-powerful and in complete control of everything that is made, including human beings.  One commentator I read, talked about the image of God as potter and said, "The figure was intended to depict God as Creator and Governor of the universe.  The ancient potter used a wheel set in rapid motion by the foot while the potter's deft fingers quickly drew from the shapeless lump of clay, slender and exquisite vessels."  This last phrase is one that makes me chuckle, “...while the potter’s deft fingers quickly drew from the shapeless lump of clay, slender and exquisite vessels.”

            It sounds great, doesn’t it?  And, if you have ever watched a potter throw a pot on a wheel, it does LOOK controlled!  Powerful.  Effortless.  Magical, right?

However, I do not know a single artist or craftsperson who creates their work through magic and effortless control over the medium.  I’m guessing that the authors of these scriptural passages and the authors of the Jerome Biblical Commentary never actually made a pot!  I know wheel-throwing LOOKS like magic to someone who is observing.  Perhaps it appears to the observer that a potter is effortlessly transforming chaotic lumps of clay into lively finished products with personality.  But, this effortless, all-powerful, magical scenario surely is not descriptive of what it feels like from the inside.  Most of the time, anyway!

            When the clay is off-center on the wheel, it often feels like it has me in its control.  Anyone who has ever tried throwing a pot knows that helpless feeling of chasing the runaway clay around the wheel as it indignantly ignores all of your most determined and most frustrated commands.  When the clay and I do get more in sync, it is the clay that actually shows me the center on the wheel.  My job is to help guide it along without getting in its way.  I have to stay tuned in to, and assist, the clay's process of finding its own center on the wheel.

            As I work with the clay to begin to form a pot with an inside and an outside, again, I have to synchronize my rhythms of throwing with the emerging pot's rhythms of growing.  If my motions are out of synch with the clay’s rhythms, then I am hindering, rather than helping, its process of becoming.  Even when the clay and I are in synch, I am not telling it what to do.  It is much more of a fluid give-and-take encounter than that.  I take my cues from the clay.  I respond to the clay and it responds to me.  If we are adequately in tune with each other, an actual pot, and sometimes a really cool one, emerges. 

Not only don't I control the outcome, I don't even know ahead of time what the result will be.  Because the clay has so much to say about the process and the end result, my pots never turn out exactly as I may plan.  And to me, that is the essence, the beauty, and the joy of the creative process.

            Perhaps God wants to be in relationship with us this way--in dynamic, mutually creative, respectful, responsive encounters.

            That same commentator who talked about the potter's deft fingers quickly drawing exquisite vessels goes on to say "From such a feat was derived the notion of God as potter fashioning the world and human beings as God pleased.  It emphasized God's power, dominion and freedom."  But I disagree with him.

            If my experience of pot-making is so much about mutuality and not about control, then I wonder:  What is God's experience of the creative process?  As a potter, I do not fashion anything as I please.  Does God really create and control the world and human beings only as God pleases?   Does God really experience creativity as "power, dominion and freedom?"

            To me, the metaphor of God as Potter suggests that God genuinely wants to be in synch with our creative rhythms.  God wants to harmonize with our activity in ways that are mutually enhancing and sustaining, in ways that are in rhythm with our growth, and the world’s evolution.  If we attribute complete control to God, we lose the crucial dimension of mutuality in the creative process.  Precisely because pottery-making is an encounter based on mutual interaction, the potter metaphor is fitting for a Creator God.

            Another thing that makes me smile are the passages in the scriptures that portray the pots talking back to the potters.  Somehow this seems incredulous to the authors.  Apparently these authors do not believe that this actually happens.  They compare the unreasonableness of humans talking back to God to the absurdity of pots talking back to their maker.  One commentator (Peakes) says that in the Romans passage, Paul is denying "the right of the objector to make any objections:  there is no argument with God."  REALLY??

            "But who are you, a person, to answer back to God?  Will what is molded say to its molder, why have you made me thus?"

            Or, as in Isaiah, "Woe to the one who strives with the Maker, an earthen vessel with the potter.  Does the clay say to the one who fashions it, 'What are you making?' or 'Your work has no handles?'"

            Apparently our authors do not believe that pots actually do this.  Well, here I am, a potter, to say that my pots talk back to me all the time!  Indeed, my pots often argue with me.  Sometimes a pot asks me for a handle; but sometimes, too, it insists that it needs a handle.  (And, of course, that is usually when I am tired and I thought I was finished working for the day.)   As I am tucking the pots in for the night, one pot says, "Perhaps you thought I was a vase, but I am really a pitcher.  I need a handle and I need it right now, before my clay body dries out too much."

            I count on my pots to talk to me, because I do not always know exactly what they need.  Indeed I feel that they have a responsibility to ask for what they need and when that fails, to insist upon it.  And I respect them for doing this!  Often they talk or argue with me about form, or glaze, and I appreciate that.  It helps me to grow.  I am always intrigued by what my pots have to say.  The pots and I each need to take responsibility for doing our parts of the creative process, or else we do not really move forward in creative growth.  Our process requires that we each have something to contribute and we each have flexibility and openness.  Then we can interact with integrity.

            So, here again, I embrace the biblical image of the pots talking back to their maker.  Based on my experience, I believe this image can be very inspiring.  I do, though, reject the interpretation that this denies "the right of the objector to make any objections."  On the contrary, I think this image encourages creative dialogue with God.  And I dare say God counts on that; to make us more US and to make God more GOD!

            When one is engaged in mutual interaction, one is in risk territory.  Who knows what the clay will do?  Who knows what the potter will do (intentionally or inadvertently). All the way through the pot-making process there are risks.  There are specific rites of passages in a pot's creation that pose particular threats to its future.  One of these dangerous moments of truth comes in the throwing process.  It is when I am almost done working with the wet clay into the finished form.  The most beautiful and lively bowls end up being the ones whose clay is stretched just past the point that it goes willingly.  If it can stand this extra little push, then the form retains a freshness and a vitality that it would otherwise lack.  But at this stage, when the clay is still so wet, many bowls cannot tolerate this one final, risky stretch, and they collapse altogether.  With each bowl, I never know until I make the move whether this one, at this moment, will stand for me pushing its limits or not.  My final touch may facilitate the bowl's rite of passage into exceptional beauty; or it may be the proverbial straw that breaks its back.  Without my touch, a pot is shapeless clay.  But with my touch, some pots thrive and some die, and I have to live with that precious difference being out of my control.

            Another dangerous moment of truth that the potter has a hand in, but not control over, is the firing.  At any point in the firing, a pot might blow up or crack.  The clay has a memory that makes it very difficult to cover over mistakes.  Even if blemishes are not visible when the pot goes into the kiln, they reveal themselves in the firing.  Even if I can't see them, the clay remembers the particular stresses it has endured, and those areas are very vulnerable during the firing.  When the heat is on, either those stresses crack the pot, or else they simply return the pot to its original misshapen form.  Between the memory of the clay and the intensity of the firing, there is no hiding the truth.

            Aside from being a revealer of the truth, the fire is full of surprises.  The unpredictability of the glazes' reactions to the firing turns the chore of unloading the kiln into suspenseful drama.  Sometimes a glaze comes out even more vibrant than I've ever seen it.  Sometimes the fire leaves a unique flashing on a pot that I never could have anticipated.

            Both creating and caring are risky because on cannot be genuinely involved in either activity without being changed oneself.  To be a caring creator is to be open to being changed by one's creations.  It is to be open to being challenged and surprised, and sometimes hurt, by one's creations.

            The reason pottery-making is both sustaining and risky for me, the potter, is that I love pottery.  I care very deeply about my creations and what they go through in their process of becoming.  I care about them because they are part of me and I care about them because they are separate from me.  Each one of my pots is surely an expression or a reflection of part of me.  And each pot is a separate entity with its own reality.  I, their creator, am invested in each one for both reasons.  Both because they are part of me and because each stands on its own.

            It is risky to be invested; it is risky to care.  If a pot of mine is broken or destroyed, part of me is broken or destroyed.  Likewise, if a pot of mine expresses a special charm, then I feel the sparkle too.  My connectedness with my pots means that I must feel the pain of their brokenness as well as the joy of their beauty.

            God the Potter.

            How wonderful to have a metaphor that implies a Creator God:

who is eager to interact with us in mutual, non-controlling ways,

who relies on our contributions to creative interactions,

who likes to be challenged and surprised, and is willing to be hurt by us,

who is involved intimately and passionately in our lives,

who is deeply invested in our well-being and who cares deeply because of   

     that loving investment,

who takes the risk to care for us, as part of God and as separate creations,

who is vulnerably connected to us and feels the pain of our brokennesses

     and the sparkle of our charms.

Amen