Creativity is popularly understood as the power of ideas. Those who have more and better (more relevant?) ideas are often associated with being more or “truly” creative. Further, having an “original” idea is paramount in such a hierarchy of creativity. 

There is nothing inherently wrong with the notion of creativity as ideation. However, if the measure of creativity ultimately rests in the capacity to ideate then we are in a serious problem. After all, who decides what should or may not be counted as an idea worthy of being original, or not? 

I remember visiting my mother’s center for persons diagnosed with intellectual disability and their families. The team of doctors and healthcare workers had worked together for over 18 months after which a hydrocephalic child was able to sit up in bed and lift its head, with help from the team of specialists. Now, if creativity is primarily all about actively generating ideas and solutions to problems, then the question arises whether or not this child who is unable to contribute to creativity-as-we-would-like-to-define-it, is indeed and truly, creative? 

The point here is that ultimate or primary measures of creativity are more than the mere ability or capability to ideate or to generate solutions. 

On the one hand we affirm that there is more to creativity that the capacity or ability to express or experience creativity. On the other hand, however, creativity can only be known through the human body and its related parts; it is a bio-psychosocial reality. 

If we understand the created human physicality as a transcendent reality—something created in accord with imaging technologies and processes beyond our human capacities to understand and imagine— it may also be understood as a spiritual reality. 

The hydrocephalic child in the above example therefore is in reality an amazing realization of a phenomenal, and inherently spiritual, creative process, called and set apart to know and be creative as the Creator is creative. Whether or not the created existence of the child is a worthy idea or that the child is in some way original is not the point. Culture may stifle or condition our ability or capacities to create. However, all people are creative in the image of the Creator, and that is the point. 

Consider, 

What if creativity were more than the capacity to express or even, “experience”? Is there more to human knowing than that which can only be experienced in the human body? 

How are you experiencing and expressing your Creator-like creativity today? Remember, what if creative expression is foremost a matter of creative impression. Knowing creativity through the human experience is one thing; being known by the Creator somehow completes such knowledge.