Clay, COVID, and the Call to Make Again

Making as meaning: what a basement pottery wheel taught me about creation, grace, and the sacredness of the everyday.

This post is the first in a series called Earth and Spirit, a serialized version of a research paper I’m writing under the same title for a conference and edited volume on ‘Spirituality and Sustainability.’

During the fall of 2021, my wife Julia and I set up a pottery wheel in a damp, unused basement room at the seminary and began to throw clay again. If you ask her why we got back into ceramics (after a nearly 25-year break since college), she’d say that it was because she needed to make something other than sourdough bread (I think she was rightly worried about my pandemic waistline!). Unsurprisingly, Julia picked up ceramics with ease—like muscle memory awakened. I, on the other hand, struggled. Julia grew up in a crafty household; her hands knew what to do. Mine? Not so much.

What I lacked in finesse, I made up for in persistence. A few years later, with a grant-funded kiln, a larger studio space, and a handful of classes behind us, our skills had grown—and so had our sense that we weren’t just making things. We were being remade in the process.

This post—and this series—is about that remaking. It’s about how a modest return to clay in the midst of a global crisis opened up a larger theological vision: one rooted in the doctrine of creation, in the Spirit’s work through human creativity, and in the sacredness of the everyday. Potter and the Priest—our studio—was born out of this experience. It began as a way to share the joy of working with clay, but it became something more: a laboratory for spiritual formation, ecological reflection, and communal making.

The Practice Before the Theology

When we first returned to pottery, we weren’t looking for meaning. We were looking for something to do with our hands—something that could quiet the noise of pandemic news cycles and the inertia of lockdown life. What we found, quite accidentally, was a form of prayer.

Clay slows you down. It resists multitasking. It demands presence, humility, and care. And it’s remarkably forgiving. Most mistakes aren’t permanent: clay from collapsed forms can be wedged up and used again, glaze experiments gone wrong can still hold flowers, and—as our family and friends know from those early days—even ugly pots make great gifts (!).

Spending hours in the studio certainly helped us develop our technique and gave us a creative outlet, but more than that, it became a surprisingly resonant spiritual practice. As a theologian, I’d spent years thinking about grace, incarnation, and formation. But in the studio, I wasn’t just thinking—I was experiencing those things in the flesh, through texture, tension, water, and time.

It wasn’t long before the theological questions caught up to the practice. Why had we, in so much of the Christian tradition, placed such a heavy emphasis on words—on reading, preaching, and doctrinal articulation—while giving relatively little attention to making? Why had we sidelined the material, the tactile, the ordinary?

Making as Participation, Not Expression

Much of our modern discourse around creativity assumes that making is expressive. The artist expresses their inner self in a work of art. But I’ve come to believe that this is only half the story. The deeper truth is that making is participatory. When we shape clay, we aren’t just expressing something internal; we are responding to something external. We are in conversation with the material world—listening, yielding, adapting. The clay pushes back. The wheel spins at its own speed. The form teaches the hand as much as the hand shapes the form.

This is not just a technical insight—it’s a theological one. The practice of making invites us into a different posture toward the world. One that is relational rather than controlling. One that mirrors the humility and mutuality of the Triune God. One that refuses to see the material world as inert stuff for human use, and instead recognizes it as a site of divine encounter.

Our first studio!

A Theology of the Everyday

Theologically, I’ve become increasingly committed to the idea that our most ordinary practices—making, repairing, reclaiming—are pregnant with grace. We live in a world obsessed with innovation, efficiency, and spectacle. But most of life is small, slow, and quiet. If theology is going to matter, it has to speak to that world—not only to sermons and sacraments, but to baking bread, composting, mending a shirt, or shaping something on the wheel. This is part of a larger thread in my work: exploring the theological significance of the quotidian. In other posts here on Substack, I’ll be writing about technology and theology, on the ethics of making, and on how embodied practices form our moral imagination.

In each case, the underlying conviction is the same: we encounter God not only through texts and traditions, but through our material lives—through our tools, our labor, and our touch.That conviction finds its deepest theological anchor in the doctrine of creation. The world is not a backdrop for spiritual life; it is the very site of God’s creative, sustaining, and redemptive work. Genesis begins in a garden. Revelation ends in a city. Somewhere between the soil and the skyline lies the human vocation: not to dominate, but to cultivate; not to escape the world, but to co-create within it.

Not Every Job Is Holy, But Making Can Be

I’m not saying that every kind of work is inherently sacred. The world is full of labor that demeans, exhausts, and dehumanizes. To claim that all work is holy is to ignore the very real conditions under which many people toil. But I do believe that there are forms of work—especially slow, deliberate, communal, creative work—that can open us up to God’s presence. Pottery, for me, has become one of those forms.It’s not about performance or productivity. It’s about posture. A spiritual practice that begins not with your head in a book but with your hands in the dirt. A practice that teaches you to listen, to fail, to start again. In a culture driven by outcomes and efficiency, making becomes a quiet form of resistance.

What to Expect From This Series

Over the coming weeks, I’ll be sharing reflections drawn from my theological essay Earth and Spirit, which I’m presenting this fall at a conference on Sustainability and Spirituality at Canterbury Christ Church University. These posts will explore themes like ecological theology, sacramentality, craft, play, and the studio as sacred space. They’ll engage thinkers like Teilhard, Rowan Williams, Cynthia Moe-Lobeda, and Makoto Fujimura—but they’ll stay grounded in the dirt and dust of real practice. My hope is that this series can be a space for theological reflection that doesn’t float above daily life, but sinks into it. A space to think about what it means to live as creatures among creatures, as makers shaped by the things we shape.

Shaped by Grace

Beyond the nascent cultural resonance, I think there’s a reason Scripture so often turns to pottery as a metaphor: Clay is humble. It yields to touch, but not without resistance. It can be centered, formed, adorned—and it can fall apart. But even then, it’s not wasted. It can be reclaimed, reused, redeemed. That, I think, is the deeper truth of this practice. Not just that we shape clay, but that we are being shaped by it. Slowly. Imperfectly. But with purpose. What began in a basement during the pandemic has become, for me, a way of seeing the world differently. A way of remembering that we are not just thinkers or believers—we are makers. And we are being made.

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Next week: Why the ecological crisis is also a crisis of imagination—and how making things might help us see the world differently.