Month: April 2017

MAGIC BULLETS

arkansas, Death penalty, Family, Forgiveness, grief, Healing, Love, Reflection, salvation, Stress

Time to remember my mother. Everyone wants a good death: free from pain, remorse, and regret. We want to meet death on our own terms, looking at it nobly and peacefully, but the executions of two murderers last night in Arkansas brought the question of this concept into the arena of “who deserves a good death?”

The survivors of brutal attacks justify their decades of waiting for justice to be served, no matter how much or how long the perpetrators suffer indignity or harm in the process. They believe they cannot be healed without this. I wonder they ever consider the ripples of harm which roll out beyond the executions of these death sentences. The multiple events scheduled back to back here in Arkansas have our people riveted to the TV, witnesses lined up to view the gory deeds, and stressed lawyers for both sides working overtime. The prison staff has the emotional burden of ending the condemned’s life.

If we feel sadness when someone dies by accident or intention on our streets, I wonder why we feel less emotional burden when the state carries out a judgment of death. Have we decided some people aren’t valued enough to live? Yet we feel deep distress when animals are put to death in shelters when no one will adopt them. Are we now at the point animals are more valued than the image of God, no matter how flawed and broken this image is? Have we decided we can stop the work of forgiveness and reconciliation in this life, for this perpetrator and for the survivors of the crime?

Maybe we use the death penalty as the short cut in dealing with our emotions. We say “This is our magic bullet,” and then we go on with our lives. We may kill the perpetrator, but we need to kill the hate in our hearts. Until we find the path to forgiveness, and the source of love, the magic bullet is only a poison pellet.

Weaving Images

art, Creativity, Healing, Icons, Imagination, incarnation, Painting, renewal, Spirituality, vision

“Aye, workman, make me a dream”

By Stephen Crane

Aye, workman, make me a dream,

A dream for my love.

Cunningly weave sunlight,

Breezes, and flowers.

Let it be of the cloth of meadows.

And—good workman—

And let there be a man walking thereon.

In 2013, I made a painting of flowers in a meadow. It wasn’t a bad painting, but it never called anyone’s name. Yes, it was part of my unsold inventory, as we artists call our orphan works, those which have yet to find another home. 

“What the heck! I’m cutting this up, weaving it into another form, and I’ll see if it speaks in a different voice to me.” This is artist speak for “I’ve had it with my life, my world, my existence, and my progress at the easel.” In truth, my hand has felt dead due to illness: my blood pressure was too low, so I lacked energy. It’s hard to paint without energy. Depression also robbed me of my creativity, since I lacked the will to pursue a challenge. Thankfully my doctors are healers and I’m on the right track now. I just had to find the key to unlock the door to the path ahead. 

I cut the old canvas up into mostly even strips and wove it in a simple basket weave. Once I rewove this 8″ x 10″ canvas, I sat meditating upon the colors and shapes. I began to see faces of Christ appearing and arms and bodies, as if he were hanging upon the cross, one image superimposed upon another. The checkerboard colors were a garden of flowers wildly blooming in a riotous exuberance of the joy that was set before him, even though he was enduring the shame of the cross (Hebrews 12:2). I took some cerulean blue and pyrrole red to make a dark violet to sketch in the outer shapes of the figures. These colors make up the ground, along with some white for highlights. I used Payne’s grey to darken other parts of the ground. The halos are cadmium yellow deep. 

Why are the faces of Christ not detailed? We often want to fixate on who the person of Jesus is physically, but this ties him to his human body only. We forget he is also the Son of God, a being who can’t be imagined or represented except in the form of Jesus, the incarnate one (the embodied one). Cultures across the world represent Christ as one of their own people as a result, rather than tie him to a first century middle eastern individual. 

Then too, if Christ takes the sins of all the world upon himself on the cross, one could say he also takes the pain of all the people of the world into himself. If this is so, we would no longer see the “face of Christ,” but we would see the “face of every person for whom Christ’s suffering was redemptive.” This is a mystical understanding, of course, but it gets to the heart of the meaning of ATONEMENT. This has always meant sacrifice in the past, but today some of us are understanding it to be AT ONE MENT. This is when we and Christ are at one in suffering and redemption, in death and in the hope of new life, and when the “cloth of meadows” is indeed where we walk in new ways. 
Joy and peace for the Easter season. Cornelia 

Triple Christ icon, $50, 2017, acrylic on canvas, 8″ x 10″