How Do I Become a Disciple to This Clay?

“CENTER THE CLAY.” I had one task for class and three hours to complete it.

Take two pounds of raw potential. Place it on the potter’s wheel. Use the strength of your hands and forearms to force the clay into balance.

For the full three hours, I failed. Unable to find the calm point of pressure to rest my human musculature between the universe’s centrifugal and centripetal forces. The clay fought back. It bucked and shimmied, slid and skidded. I pushed and pulled.

The teacher said, finally, “This clay does not yet want to be a bowl. You have not shown it how.” A gentle correction that expertly undermined my fixation with “the primacy of the real,” as French philosopher Gaston Bachelard calls it. Really, shouldn’t I be able to subdue this clay?

The material I’m working with is not raw, native clay. It’s more refined. What I perceive as inert material is actually more refined thanIam. It’s older, wiser; closer to beginnings. Clay beds settle quietly over millions of years under the intimate weight of rivers, lakes, oceans. Clay prefers to dance in water rather than sink like silt or sand. Its particles delight in slowly sliding over one another, using oxygen molecules as lubricant.

How do I become a disciple to this clay? In Rabbi Sforno’s 16th-century commentary on Genesis 1, he emphasizes the time embedded in the raw material God uses to create heaven and earth: “When G’d began to create heaven and earth — the earth being unformed and void ...” (Genesis 1:1-2). The English translations of “unformed and void” or “wild and waste” (as some translators have it) can be misleading. Yes, earth is clay, but consider heaven its oxygen. In our noun-oriented Western culture, we rush to objects — and prefer them to be inert. The Hebrew is much more complex, nonbinary, packed with breath, fire, and seasons; it understands nouns as packed with all the energy of their past, present, and future — and all these relationships held in time.

Sforno says, “This very center which was created at that time was composed of a mixture of raw materials, known as tohu,and its original external appearance is what is described as bohu.” This primordial material is dynamic — neither this nor that. As tohu,it has unrealized potential; as bohu, a change agent has given it form. Sforno goes on to describe the delta factor needed for the transformation as “imagination.” The clay’s potential is only opened by dreaming.

But whose dreaming? (Stay with me here.) Is it the dream of the Creator God acting on an undreaming lump? Or does this dreaming only blossom within relationship — a kind of “relational theory” of influence at work?

I sit at the potter’s wheel, poetry from Czeslaw Milosz rising in fragments: “Three times must the wheel of blindness turn ...” I can’t remember the rest.

AT THE END of class, I grab a mop. The floor around my seat is splattered with slip, my clothes with splotches of clay. The muscles of my forearms are starting to ache from the straining.

Imagination, in the Catholic sense, is a dynamic worldview steeped in liturgy. Not flights of fancy into unreality. Liturgy arises like an artesian spring from those cyclical practices we do communally (in relationship) to keep fidelity with life.

I don’t yet know what this clay wants to be.

At home, I search for the Milosz quote. It’s from “Slow River,” written in Poland in 1936: “Three times must the wheel of blindness turn, before I look without fear at the power sleeping in my own hand.”

Next week, I’ll sit again at the wheel. Perhaps the clay is already centering me.