This week Psalms brought with it a flare of creativity, soul searching, and fun! Our professor gave us all two creative assignments this past week, the first of which was to write our own psalm using the conventions we had been studying, and the second was to create an artistic representation of Psalm 8. Below you will find the second of the two projects, my artistic rendering of Psalm 8.
The eighth psalm is one of thanksgiving and praise for God's acts of creation. In reading the psalm you can really get a sense of awe the author is experiencing through the description of the many aspects of creation, "how majestic is your name in all the earth!" For me, this psalm speaks of God's creative acts as they have happened, and as they continue to happen "what are human beings that you are mindful of them, mortals that you care for them?" God did not just create the world, set it spinning on its rotational axis, and then walk away. God continues to walk with creation, caring for it through the work of his hand and the hands of his created children.
In my previous class on Pentateuch one of the points of emphasis for my professor was that in the creation God chooses to make humanity in his image. This act has divinely distinguished humanity from the rest of creation as we bear the image of God. We are living breathing icons of the Creator of the Heavens and the Earth and as such we have been created with dignity and respect woven within the depths of our soul. As such humanity became the only element of creation to bear Gods image to the natural world, intrinsically being created with dignity in that same moment. A dignity that was affirmed when God enters into the creative process with Adam allowing him to name all the creatures of the land and the air in Genesis. Psalm eight touches on this point when it states "Yet you have made them a little lower than God, and crowned them with glory and honour. You have given them dominion over the works of your hands; you have put all things under their feet."
For me the love of creation and the emphasis on the stewardship of creation has never been stronger felt then when I was in Mexico. As such I decided to depict this psalm in the style of the Mexican Iconography I saw when I was there. While the Son of man is not mentioned in the psalm I felt that Jesus did have a place in God's continued act of caring and sustaining creation (and symbolically it was the best thing I could come up with at the time). The tree is the tree of life from the garden of Eden which contains not leaves but the entire universe as depicted within the psalm. The waves of colours depict the creative power and energy of God within the world, and the yellow section in the middle contains the words of this psalm, paying homage to the word of God spoken at the dawn of creation calling everything into being.
It was a lot of fun to make and really gave me a new perspective on the Psalm. I think I will be doing more of these in the future as it was a great practice. below you will see the work in steps! hope you enjoy it!
I will be posting the psalm I wrote and a short explanation of it in the near future! So stay tuned for that.
Shalom,
Skakes
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