The Joy of Creating 

Every Thursday afternoon in high school I would spend an hour with Mr. Guzzi, my piano teacher. Mr. Guzzi was a well-respected local jazz pianist, and I was interested in learning that style of music. During those lessons, he taught me things like music theory and chord progressions. He gave me drills to develop basic improvisational techniques. I remember one day he had me play with him. I was to play chords and improvise a melody while he played a base line lower down on the keyboard. I’ll never forget how it felt to play music with him. It was euphoric, a feeling of intense joy as we created music together. Mr. Guzzi was a great teacher. I learned a lot from him. Unfortunately, after college I didn’t have regular access to a piano anymore and so I didn’t keep up with my playing.  

But years later, I was out with some friends at a bar where they had hooked up a PlayStation console to a big television screen on which you could play a video game called Guitar Hero. The joystick was in the shape of a guitar, and the player was to follow the pattern on the screen to “play” a particular song. Intrigued, I signed up to play the heavy metal song “Mother” by Glenn Danzig. I didn’t expect it to be so much fun! To my surprise, it felt much like playing the piano with Mr. Guzzi. But playing the video game Guitar Hero is not the same as playing an instrument. Sure, if you spend a lot of time playing the game you can get better at it – but you still won’t know how to play music. You will only learn how to respond to the game by hitting buttons in a certain sequence. The video game can’t teach you how to make an instrument sound good, or how to play with “feeling.” The best gamers can only play in such a way to make the song sound the same every time.  

There is a deep spiritual pleasure in playing a musical instrument that a video game can only approximate and mimic. But does it matter? If Guitar Hero can provide you with the sensation of playing a real musical instrument, why take music lessons? Perhaps it’s because the work required in learning to play music is about more than achieving a particular sensation. There is a creative element in the playing of an instrument that is absent from the experience of playing Guitar Hero. Being able to create is one of God’s great gifts to us. Whereas God creates all things out of nothing, He gives us the capacity to create using the stuff of His Creation. When we create, we imbue something of ourselves in the things we make. And thus, our creations reveal something of us to the world. That’s true for artists, and for craftsmen; for the professional, and the amateur. It’s true for parents, whose features are revealed in the faces of their children. And we all know that grandma’s tomato sauce is special not only for its taste, but also because it reveals her love for her family and those who are her guests at table. We can even know something of God’s goodness, His beauty, and His truth through our contemplation of Creation, for He imbues something of Himself in all He has made. And God takes delight in the things He creates, which is something He allows us to experience too. 

posted 10/19/24