This one gestated inside her for months, and that might have been necessary for Catherine Cameron to really capture something essential about creativity. When she looked up (see the image of the heavens here, as it was seen by NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope, released for us to see on 11 July 2022) and thought about “God Who Stretched the Spangled (Heavens)”, and evaluated herself and the others around her, Catherine marveled and bid God to instruct us mortals even more about what it means to mimic Him in creativity. Do we appreciate that finding Him in the world of science can be both a terrifying and a thrilling exercise in discovery? ‘Be real, real, careful out there!’, as someone has said. Approaching and actually contacting Him is an awesome thing, and to see and comprehend what He’s made – including each of us – should make you and me behave with great care, for we are in His image (Genesis 1:26-27; Exodus 9:6). Catherine Cameron makes us think about that.
Catherine shared that she was experiencing a creative renaissance in the mid-1960s – in a way she was growing in her likeness with God – when she wrote about Him who created, and found an urge to stretch human ingenuity ever closer toward Him. That’s a laudable goal. It was the space-race years, as one group of humans tried to reach the Moon before another group of humans might try to do the same. Catherine was nearing or right at 40 years of age (depending on which year she actually wrote ‘God, Who Stretched…’), and she responded, when asked about her creation, that she was hearkening back to her teenage years and the poetry she found herself contemplating then. The incongruity sometimes between the words and the music that believers were prompted to offer to Him just bothered Catherine. Should not both the lyrics and the melodious sounds flow in the same direction? She determined that that was her objective as a creative being. But her response would not be like an eruption, an explosion of innovation. Instead, it was more like a small flame that was kept alive for several months that caused her poetry to emerge in four verses, matching a tune that was ready and waiting for her words. (The tune she chose initially was the 1797 Austrian Hymn by Joseph Haydn; Holy Manna was another tune, written in 1825 by the Columbian Harmony, that is often paired today with Catherine’s words.) Catherine’s poetry in two of her verses (one and three) exalt God for the universe and the basic building block of life – the atom – and proclaim our aspirations to be like Him, even as we risk ‘life’s destruction’ (v.3) spurred by our own curiosity. Catherine seemed to accept that risk, while deploring some of our inventions, our ‘modern cities’ (v.2) that leave us empty as a people ‘lost to purpose and to meaning’. Self-indulgence is a trap, and perhaps that is what Catherine saw in so much of the everyday hubbub of modernity, a blur of people wrapped up in themselves and what they do to approach self-actualization. What about God-actualization? That seemed to be Catherine’s aim for our race in verse four – ‘honoring You’, so that ‘our goals and Yours are one’. If we see a ‘horizon beckon’, we should acknowledge that we’re seeing Him in the majesty of His handiwork. His symphony is abiding every day for us to see and hear.
There are some 85 verses in the bible that speak about image, so consider them when you think about His creativity. Read them closely, and you can see without much effort that He’s the only one we should acknowledge with respect; no other images are acceptable (Exodus 20:4; Leviticus 26:1; Deuteronomy 5:8), and note how many times God says, as if through clenched teeth, ‘vile images’ (especially in Ezekiel). That is such a crucial part in knowing and relating to Him -- that each of us is His image-bearer (Romans 8:29), a responsibility with lots of gravity. It can also mean celebration, as Paul reminds us in that letter to the Romans. He’s the only one, and each of us is like Him in that image-ness, made to follow Him in renewal (see also 1 Corinthians 15:49, 2 Corinthians 3:8, and Colossians 1:15; 3:10). It’s admittedly hard to fathom, isn’t it? What a gift! Though I cannot completely grasp His creativity, it is like encountering a new discovery in science, something wondrous but also potentially pretty dangerous. Catherine included the ‘secrets of the atom…unimagined power’ in her 3rd verse, hitting upon something very true. How dangerous is the atom today, or for those who probed it a century ago before they really understood radioactivity? Humans can get twisted sideways into various contortions, even without the radioactivity of an atom. Today is 9/11, the anniversary of a day 25 years ago when humans destroyed rather than created. It’s been something like 60 years since Catherine created her ode to God about us creating and trying to be more like Him who put this gene inside us. How do you think we’re doing? Go create. Watch out for the Destroyer, but know the Creator is greater.
Read the story of the hymn here: https://www.umcdiscipleship.org/resources/history-of-hymns-god-who-stretched-the-spangled-heavens and here: https://hymninfo.com/songs/god-who-stretched-the-spangled-heavens
See information on the image here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Webb%27s_First_Deep_Field.jpg …This file is in the public domain because it was created by NASA, ESA and CSA. Material from NASA's James Webb Space Telescope is copyright-free and may be freely used as in the public domain without fee, on the condition that only NASA, STScI, and/or ESA/CSA is credited as the source of the material. This license does not apply if source material from other organizations is in use. …found inside this document -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outer_space
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