Granby Drummer Spotlight article
published April, 2023, Granby, CT
written by Carolyn Dittes

My passion is pottery making, specifically wheel throwing.  Having recently relocated to Granby, I was thrilled to discover the Granby Artists Association and honored to become an exhibiting member in May, 2022. 

For 49 years, wheel throwing has provided me with the opportunity to be present in a way that is different from most daily life activities in at least two significant ways.

First, I don’t have to, and don’t want to, exert control over the clay, but rather the clay and I communicate back and forth in a mutually expressive process.  I make a move and the clay responds; then I respond and the clay makes a move.  This means focusing on each interaction in each particular moment.   I am asked to be open to whatever happens and to respond playfully each step of the way, to be surprised by each result and to react accordingly.

Secondly, wheel throwing requires that I be present, but not in an intellectual way.  This interactive process does not happen in my head; it is very much about tuning in to the clay on a tactile, feeling level.  My hands and heart resonate with what the clay is doing and respond on a level that is intuitive and beyond left brain thought. In the process, I get a welcome pause from my active mind’s chatter, and peacefully co-create with the clay from a deeper, more meaningful level of experience. 

There are so many things in life that we feel we need to control:  schedules, plans, traffic, emails, appointments, health issues, machines, what we eat, if or how we exercise, with whom we meet, our dog’s behavior, our children’s behavior.  Wheel throwing continuously gives me a respite from this constant pull to control.  It teaches me the pleasure, the wonder, of collaborating rather than controlling, the freedom to respond intuitively to whatever happens in the present moment.  It involves trusting the process of the unfolding, rather than trying to control the outcome. 

Because it’s the right brain, creative, often subconscious part of me that is participating in the give-and-take process with the clay, I often feel that making pottery helps me manifest parts of myself that had been hidden.  I feel I have a lot to learn from the pots that are results of this subconscious process.  I love observing freshly thrown pieces to see how I react emotionally to them and what the new-born forms have to teach me.  After I unload a kiln, I live with the novel pieces displayed in my living room, so I can reflect on what they show me, about themselves and about me.  The final pieces talk to me and tell me what is working well and they also suggest what adjustments might help make future pieces even livelier, more expressive, and satisfying.  It is a gift to receive what they have to offer. 

As I make Granby my new home, and work in my new studio here, I look forward to continuing to engage in a reciprocal process with all that Granby presents, trusting in the unfolding.

God the Potter
by Carolyn Dittes

I love the metaphor of God as potter; and I think that it offers us great possibilities to glimpse God as Creator, and to understand how God and we might be in relationship.  The way that I experience God is consistent with the way I experience being a potter.  The only problem is… the way the authors of Isaiah and Romans seem to describe being a potter actually does not resonate with my experience.  So I would like to “talk back” to these texts from my 49 years of pottery-making experience, affirming the metaphor, God as Potter; and let’s see what we can uncover about the creative possibilities of understanding our relationship with God….

Some passages from Isaiah and Romans all seem to be describing a God who is absolutely controlling.  This Creator God is depicted as all-powerful and in complete control of everything that is made, including human beings.  One commentator I read, talked about the image of God as potter and said, “The figure was intended to depict God as Creator and Governor of the universe.  The ancient potter used a wheel set in rapid motion by the foot while the potter’s deft fingers quickly drew from the shapeless lump of clay, slender and exquisite vessels.”  This last phrase is one that makes me chuckle, “…while the potter’s deft fingers quickly drew from the shapeless lump of clay, slender and exquisite vessels.”

         It sounds great, doesn’t it?  And, if you have ever watched a potter throw a pot on a wheel, it does LOOK controlled!  Powerful.  Effortless.  Magical, right?

However, I do not know a single artist or craftsperson who creates his or her work through magic and effortless control over the medium.  I’m guessing that the authors of these scriptural passages and the authors of the Jerome Biblical Commentary never actually made a pot!  I know wheel-throwing LOOKS like magic to someone who is observing.  Perhaps it appears to the observer that a potter is effortlessly transforming chaotic lumps of clay into lively finished products with personality.  But, this effortless, all-powerful, magical scenario surely is not descriptive of what it really feels like from the inside.  Most of the time, anyway!

         When the clay is off-center on the wheel, it often feels like it has me in its control.  Anyone who has ever tried throwing a pot knows that helpless feeling of chasing the runaway clay around the wheel as it indignantly ignores all of your most determined and most frustrated commands.  When the clay and I do get more in sync, it is the clay that actually shows me the center on the wheel.  My job is to help guide it along without getting in its way.  I have to stay tuned in to, and assist, the clay’s process of finding its own center on the wheel.

         As I work with the clay to begin to form a pot with an inside and an outside, again, I have to synchronize my rhythms of throwing with the emerging pot’s rhythms of growing.  If my motions are out of synch with the clay’s rhythms, then I am hindering, rather than helping, its process of becoming.  Even when the clay and I are in synch, I am not telling it what to do.  It is much more of a fluid give-and-take encounter than that.  I take my cues from the clay.  I respond to the clay and it responds to me.  If we are adequately in tune with each other, an actual pot, and sometimes a really cool one, emerges. 

Not only don’t I control the outcome, I don’t even know ahead of time what the result will be.  Because the clay has so much to say about the process and the end result, my pots never turn out exactly as I may plan.  And to me, that is the essence, the beauty, and the joy of the creative process.

         Perhaps God wants to be in relationship with us this way–in dynamic, mutually creative, respectful, responsive encounters.

         That same commentator who talked about the potter’s deft fingers quickly drawing exquisite vessels goes on to say “From such a feat was derived the notion of God as potter fashioning the world and human beings as God pleased.  It emphasized God’s power, dominion and freedom.”  But I disagree with him.

         If my experience of pot-making is so much about mutuality and not about control, then I wonder:  What is God’s experience of the creative process?  As a potter, I do not fashion anything as only I please.  Does God really create and control the world and human beings only as God pleases?   Does God really experience creativity as “power, dominion and freedom?”

         To me, the metaphor of God as Potter suggests that God genuinely wants to be in synch with our creative rhythms.  God wants to harmonize with our activity in ways that are mutually enhancing and sustaining, in ways that are in rhythm with our growth, and the world’s evolution.  If we attribute complete control to God, we lose the crucial dimension of mutuality in the creative process.  Precisely because pottery-making is an encounter based on mutual interaction, the potter metaphor is fitting for a Creator God.

         Another thing that makes me smile are the passages in the scriptures that portray the pots talking back to the potters.  Somehow this seems incredulous to the authors.  Apparently these authors do not believe that this actually happens.  They compare the unreasonableness of humans talking back to God to the absurdity of pots talking back to their maker.  One commentator (Peakes) says that in the Romans passage, Paul is denying “the right of the objector to make any objections:  there is no argument with God.”  REALLY??

         “But who are you, a person, to answer back to God?  Will what is molded say to its molder, why have you made me thus?”

         Or, as in Isaiah, “Woe to the one who strives with the Maker, an earthen vessel with the potter.  Does the clay say to the one who fashions it, ‘What are you making?’ or ‘Your work has no handles?'”

         Apparently our authors do not believe that pots actually do this.  Well, here I am, a potter, to say that my pots talk back to me all the time!  Indeed, my pots often argue with me.  Sometimes a pot asks me for a handle; but sometimes, too, it insists that it needs a handle.  (And, of course, that is usually when I am tired and I thought I was finished working for the day.)   As I am tucking the pots in for the night, one pot says, “Perhaps you thought I was a vase, but I am really a pitcher.  I need a handle and I need it right now, before my clay body dries out too much.”

         I count on my pots to talk to me, because I do not always know exactly what they need.  Indeed I feel that they have a responsibility to ask for what they need and when that fails, to insist upon it.  And I respect them for doing this!  Often they talk or argue with me about form, or glaze, and I appreciate that.  It helps me to grow.  I am always intrigued by what my pots have to say.  The pots and I each need to take responsibility for doing our parts of the creative process, or else we do not really move forward in creative growth.  Our process requires that we each have something to contribute and we each have flexibility and openness.  Then we can interact with integrity.

         So, here again, I embrace the biblical image of the pots talking back to their maker.  Based on my experience, I believe this image can be very inspiring.  I do, though, reject the interpretation that this denies “the right of the objector to make any objections.”  On the contrary, I think this image encourages creative dialogue with God.  And I dare say God counts on that; to make us even more US and to make God even more GOD!

         When one is engaged in mutual interaction, one is in risk territory.  Who knows what the clay will do?  Who knows what the potter will do (intentionally or inadvertently). All the way through the pot-making process there are risks.  There are specific rites of passages in a pot’s creation that pose particular threats to its future.  One of these dangerous moments of truth comes in the throwing process.  It is when I am almost done working with the wet clay and it is almost in its finished form.  The most beautiful and lively bowls end up being the ones whose clay is stretched just past the point that it goes willingly.  If it can stand this extra little push, then the form gains freshness and vitality that it would otherwise lack.  But at this stage, when the clay is still so wet, many bowls cannot tolerate this one final, risky stretch, and they collapse altogether.  With each bowl, I never know until I make the move whether this one, at this moment, will stand for me pushing its limits or not.  My final touch may facilitate the bowl’s rite of passage into exceptional beauty; or it may be the proverbial straw that breaks its back.  Without my touch, a pot is shapeless clay.  But with my touch, some pots thrive and some die, and I have to live with that precious difference being out of my control.

         Certainly another part of the process where I am not in control is in firing the pots.  The unpredictability of the glazes’ reactions to the firing turns the chore of unloading the kiln into suspenseful drama.  Sometimes a glaze comes out even more vibrant than I’ve ever seen it.  Sometimes the fire leaves a unique flashing on a pot that I never could have anticipated.

         Both creating and caring are risky because one cannot be genuinely involved in either activity without being changed oneself.  To be a caring creator is to be open to being changed by one’s creations.  It is to be open to being challenged and surprised, and sometimes hurt, by one’s creations.

         The reason pottery-making is both sustaining and risky for me, the potter, is that I love pottery.  I care very deeply about my creations and what they go through in their process of becoming.  I care about them because they are part of me and I care about them because they are separate from me.  Each one of my pots is surely an expression or a reflection of part of me.  And each pot is a separate entity with its own reality.  I, their creator, am invested in each one for both reasons; both because they are part of me and because each stands on its own and talks back to me.

         It is risky to be invested; it is risky to care.  If a pot of mine is broken or destroyed, part of me is broken or destroyed.  Likewise, if a pot of mine expresses a special charm, then I feel the sparkle too.  My connectedness with my pots means that I must feel the pain of their brokenness as well as the joy of their beauty.

God the Potter.

How wonderful to have a metaphor that implies a Creator God:

–who is eager to interact with us in mutual, non-controlling ways,

–who relies on our contributions to creative interactions,

–who likes to be challenged and surprised, and is willing to be hurt by us,

–who is involved intimately and passionately in our lives,

–who is deeply invested in our well-being and who cares deeply because of that loving investment,

–who takes the risk to care for us, as part of God and as separate creations,

–who is vulnerably connected to us and feels the pain of our brokennesses and the sparkle of our charms.