purpose

SUMMER OF LOVE

art, Attitudes, Creativity, exercise, Habits, Health, Love, Meditation, purpose, purpose, Uncategorized, vision, vision, Work

Fifty years ago, it was “Love is all you need!” Sending some love ❤️ to some folks who must think they’re on a psychedelic mushroom 🍄 trip at the present moment, or suffering from heat hallucinations, or tied up with sticky tar babies of their own creations.

There is a basic principle in the real world: A B C–Attitude Behavior Consequences–negative Attitude leads to negative Behavior, and this leads to negative Consequences or Results. Likewise a Positive Attitude leads to Positive Behavior and Positive Consequences. If we expect the worst, we’ll get the worst because we won’t work for it. We’ll do other things instead, like watch too much TV, dither about on social media, move a piece of paper twelve times before doing something constructive with it, or make lists without acting on them!

I’m guilty of this deferring behavior at times, so I have to set limits on unproductive behaviors. Making short lists of necessary action expectations is better than itemizing everything I want to do ever! If I get overwhelmed, I won’t do any of it at all! Guaranteed I’ll have a negative attitude: “Why bother?” Then I won’t work: negative behavior, and that gives me a negative result: zippola done. You get my drift. I’ve had to put myself on a schedule again to get things done. It feels like I’m punching a clock, except I’m the boss of myself!

How can we change our stinking thinking that makes our life always seem go south, so we can have a life of joy and more than a Summer of Love? Maybe even have a Life of Love? If we recognize our attitudes get us into trouble, we have hope for change. If we persist in our same old ways, as if we’re entitled to be the same and get a different outcome, then we’re delusional at least, and maybe a little crazy also. We need to change to get a different outcome, or things will always be the same. We can do this!

Wet Crepe Myrtle Bark

Let’s hope others will hear the call also. There’s art to be made out in our studios!

Rule of Life

art, Creativity, generosity, Habits, Health, Imagination, New Year, Painting, Philosophy, purpose, purpose, Retirement, Strength, United Methodist Church, vision, vision

First painting of the New Year: 
Sometimes you have to remember who you are and whose you are. Starting the year off right by setting my theme. Everyone needs a rule of life, even the nonbeliever, for we need a measure to test our lives against. 

Are we living up to our expectations for a moral life, such as “are we doing all the good we can, to all we can, by every means we can, as long as we can?” While this was John Wesley’s admonition to the people called Methodists, the same principle applies to all people of good nature. Or do we live for the good of numero uno only? 

Self care is an important part of my rule of life, but this doesn’t make me a selfish person. It gives me the strength and stamina to be generous with my time and energy for others. While I no longer am actively engaged in person to person ministry, my facebook pages regularly reach over 800 people each week and my WordPress blogs reach about another 200. 

People on other continents are reading my posts, so the word is spreading. This is a power and a privilege I do not treat lightly. I’m thankful for a simple lifestyle which allows me the time to pursue my creative endeavors in my studio. For those of you who do buy my art, remember I donate 40% of the purchase price to the following causes: 

  • First UMC Hot Springs tithe
  • First UMC Hot Springs Community Outreach fund
  • REV. Paul Atkins, urban missionary @canvascommunity
  • UMC Missionary Elizabeth Soward, Tanzania 

Happy New Year, Cornelia  

Check my work on Facebook at Artandicon 

GENERATION TO GENERATION: Unresolved Loss

Ancestry, art, Civil War, Faith, Family, grief, Healing, Imagination, Lost Cause, Ministry, ministry, purpose, purpose, Racism, Spirituality, Stress, Uncategorized, Work

Civil War doctors treating a wounded soldier.


The danger of unresolved grief or loss in one generation is the inheritance of the following generations. More people were killed in our Civil War than in all our other wars before or after. This loss, as well as the slow economic recovery in the south, has contributed to today’s bifurcated nation. Today we call it urban/rural or blue/red, but the ancient “us vs. them” metaphor still holds true. 

This past year I’ve been journaling about the LOST CAUSE, that “late unpleasantness” of over 150 years ago. Over seven generations have passed, but many of these phrases and words are still in Southern mouths. I think unfinished grief for the loss and disruption of that way of life has carried over into many of the troubles we have today: continued racism, rise of white supremacists and nationalists, economic inequalities, and ecological destruction of our environment.

. 

Confederate soldier with forty pounds of gear

We also are at war with our better selves, for too many of us have addictions to work, busyness, achievement, substances, relationships, or fixing things that can’t be fixed. If we all worked on our own problems, as much as we worked on everyone else’s, the world would be a better place. 

Dr. Mary Walker, Syracuse Medical College, Surgeon


After all, if we read our scripture correctly, and by this I mean “without the belief I alone am the savior of the world” preconception, we’d see the very people who walked with Jesus Christ, ate the bread he blessed and broke, and saw him heal the sick and raise the dead weren’t able to make a perfect church or a perfect world in their lifetimes. 

No one in over 2,000 years since then has done this either. What makes us think we are so special? This isn’t to say our calling is a LOST CAUSE, but to remind us God’s timing is at work (kairos), not our hurried, human timing (chronos). 

If this relieves you of some small burden at the closing of this year, God bless us every one!

If you wonder where some of the common phrases you hear people use without batting an eyelid, check out the PDF below. 

SOUTHERN SLANG AND THE CIVIL WAR LINK: 13 pages!

Click to access Slang%20of%20the%20American%20Civil%20War.pdf

CULTURAL CHRISTIANITY & THE PROVIDENCE OF GOD

art, generosity, home, Love, photography, purpose, purpose, renewal, Spirituality, Strength, Uncategorized, vision, vision

Some folks say Merica, like they can’t stand to say the whole of our country’s name or bear the taste of it in their mouth. Others bleed red, white and blue, but they only see the America they know and love. Once they have their piece of the pie, they are afraid to let others come to the table. 
First we maligned the Irish, then we found other newcomers to scapegoat. We kept a whole race enslaved, and then found ways to keep them second class citizens. Women didn’t get the right to vote until 1920! Yet none of these oppressed groups ever gave up their dream of the America we can become if we all work together for the best of the lofty goals our forefathers desired. 
The providence of God is a faith belief and a trust that the pie is always large enough for all to share. God will provide for us our needs every day. Our human need to control our own destiny and define our own life is marked by our fear of God not being there for us. While humans may abandon us in our hour of need, God’s steadfast love endures forever. This is a promise repeated over and over again in scripture. 

Human love tends to be conditional, or a quid pro quo type of love. “You scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours” is how we explain this. God’s love is unconditional because God loves God’s creation and provides for what he created. The pie for people of faith is limitless, for God keeps increasing it. How does this happen? God opens our hearts to the needs of others and we share God’s blessings with them. 

This is why Americans are the most generous people of the whole world. We know the source of our strength and our power is magnified when we share it with others who are weak and under attack. If Christianity is going to be co-opted by our culture, let it be the best parts of our faith! The care for the poor, the weak, the hungry, the sick, the ones who need a miracle in their lives. Let’s not have Christ be used as a one armed bandit to deliver riches, health and wealth to individuals for the rice of prayers or deeds. 

Look at the photo again: a true patriot…

“This woman explained to me that the flagpole over her door was broken but ‘on such a day as this, one keeps one’s flag on one’s heart.'” I felt in her a touch of the strength and robustness of the early American pioneers’.

Photo by the great photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson USA. Massachusetts. Cape Cod. July 4th, 1947. Independence Day.

Hope and Transformation 

art, Creativity, Evangelism, exercise, Faith, Healing, Icons, Imagination, Ministry, poverty, purpose, renewal, salvation, Spirituality, Stations of the Cross, Uncategorized, vision

Happy to report this altar has found a home! It’s a one of a kind piece, made from found objects and items no longer found useful around my home. I found most of these items while walking around the local hospital, while others are from broken pieces of my jewelry and my mother’s old treasure hoard. The three matching pulls across the bottom are from the old kitchen cabinets of my 1965 era condo. For some reason, that huge block of wood called my name, as did the snuff pack and the bent radiator cap. Some one lost part of their hub cap, while I lost interest in a home improvement project for which those red acanthus supports were intended. 

While we often give up hope on the detritus of our life, only to throw it out the window or stuff it into a box, never to see it again, we still want something bright new and shiny. Many people today never speak of a struggle because they think it shows God isn’t with them or worse, God is punishing them. Yet the promise of Christ is for the hurting, the broken, the poor, the sick, and the oppressed. 

The message of this altar is Christ died to transform those without hope and for those we’ve given up hope they’ll ever change. As long as we breathe, we can hope. With our dying breath, Christ will complete us for glory if we believe in a redeeming God whose power is greater than our own struggle to rebel. 

You’d be surprised at the junk I find in the roadways and byways, but that’s where Christ did all his great miracles of healing, in the streets and fields of his world. Maybe this altar is calling us to bring Christ out into the world, instead of celebrating him safely within our sheltered walls. 

The Deisis Altar: The Handing Over

“Meanwhile, standing near the cross of Jesus were his mother, and his mother’s sister, Mary the wife of Clopas, and Mary Magdalene. When Jesus saw his mother and the disciple whom he loved standing beside her, he said to his mother, “Woman, here is your son.” Then he said to the disciple, “Here is your mother.” And from that hour the disciple took her into his own home.” ~~ John 19:25-27

What’s a measure of worth?

art, Creativity, Love, Painting, photography, purpose, Strength, Uncategorized, vision

 If an artwork doesn’t sell, it could mean any number of reasons.   
1. It’s not any good, but good is a relative term. Fauve was a pejorative term applied to the bright colors and bold forms of Matisse and Rouault, among others. 
2. It’s actually bad. Here bad means unskilled. Of course, naive painters like Grandma Moses can always break through with intuitive color and design sense. It’s the artists who aspire to realism or abstraction, but go through the motions by rote and never put enough practice into their art to rise beyond the mundane who fall into this category. 

3. The artist’s vision is beyond this world. Van Gogh sold only a few paintings in his lifetime, but museums and collectors vie for his works today. 

  
4. It could be overpriced. Sometimes we artists value our years of training, struggle, and history with our art product more than the art market values it. Either learn to let go and move on to greater art, and sell these for what you can, or paint over them, melt them down, or learn to love paying storage fees. 

5. Forget pricing your work at a “living wage.” Art is what gives you life. Most artists either have another job or have someone supporting them. Or they are privileged to have personal wealth. The average wage of all artists (including musicians, dancers, actors, photographers, and writers) is around $36,100 for art school grads and $30,000 for non grads. 

6. Nearly 50% of artists will sell under $5,000 of art yearly. Only 1% will sell $500,000 or more yearly. That’s the bottom and top. Most of us will be in the bottom. We may be the next Van Gogh. 

7. When I look at these sales numbers, I realize the costs of studio, materials, and commissions haven’t been deducted. The net result for the artist is less, maybe at a third for their profit. 

8. Should you get a degree in computer programming instead? Nursing? Only if your heart is truly there. If you have the artist’s soul, you’ll never be happy just making a living. You will need an outlet for the deep feelings of your heart and the thoughts percolating up from the deep places of the mind. 

Keep working, my friend. So what if the road seems long? The journey is always better than the destination. 

IRREPRESSIBLE SLEEPINESS 

art, Creativity, Faith, generosity, Healing, Health, Meditation, Ministry, purpose, renewal, sleep, Spirituality, Stress, texas, Uncategorized, United Methodist Church, vision

  
Irrepressible  sleepiness–it comes over one at times. 

My night class on World Religions at seminary with Ruben Habito began with silent breathing. Centering, he called it. Some of us called it falling asleep. A long day of work or classes, or both, with a short night of sleep before an early morning wake up alarm marked our days back then. We were fueled by liquid caffeine and too many carbs. We ran on the adrenaline of excitement and the necessity to cram two lives into one day. We were crazy people, but we didn’t know it.

We didn’t realize the gift of silence and quiet our zen master was offering to us. We were doers, not accustomed to being. To be silent, still, and to breathe in and out as we sought an unmoving center after the hubbub of our day was our bedtime ritual, not a preparation for learning. More than a few of us crossed over into LaLa Land. 

Some time during the class, we would return to this world, much refreshed from our power nap. We could get any notes we missed from a less sleep deprived classmate. Our zen master was also a priest, who knew our needs and offered this gift of ministry for his congregation. He wasn’t bothered by our sleeping through his lectures, for if we needed to rest, God would take care of our learning elsewhere. 

When I went out as a pastor in the church, I remembered this lesson of grace. When people fell asleep in church, I knew God would bring the message to them later from the ones who stayed awake. If their lives were so out of whack they needed to sleep in church, I needed to pray for them. After all, it’s not about me, it’s about God. 

“I have said this to you, so that in me you may have peace. In the world you face persecution. But take courage; I have conquered the world!     — John 16:33

Cornelia DeLee: Christ Overcoming the World, acrylic on canvas, 2015. (36″ X 36″)

Under Construction 

art, Creativity, Fear, Health, Imagination, Ministry, ministry, Painting, purpose, purpose, Reflection, renewal, Retirement, salvation, shame, Spirituality, Strength, Uncategorized, vision, vision, Work

  
I walk on Thursday evenings in the historic downtown district of Hot Springs, Arkansas. Most of our buildings are from our salad days of the Victorian period and early 20th century. We are building new construction, such as this new Regions Bank Tower, which will replace the one directly behind my back. I often leave my car under this overpass while I huff and hustle my way up to the cold spring at the entry to the mountain route to the observation tower. From there I walk past historic hotels, small and large, until I get to the site of the old Majestic Hotel, which burned to the ground in 2014. If I turn around for the start again, I can put in nearly 2 miles on a good evening. Even if I’m the last to finish, I’m still faster than the ones who never started. 

Our creative and spiritual lives are like my walking discipline in my downtown, which is both dying and being renewed. I notice some shops have closed, but new ones have taken their place. These aren’t all tourist shops, but some are tradesmen serving the needs of downtown dwellers. Each of us needs to take care of our long term needs, not just our whim wants. 

For our spirit, paying attention to our relationship with God through silence, contemplative study of scripture, and service with the poor will help ground our identity in God rather than in our own self. In our creative work, keeping the disciplines of our trade can be important. By this I mean, remembering to draw, to use color, value, to work a series, or to explore a subject fully. If we write, we pay attention to the skills of this craft, or if we are musicians, we never neglect our scales or any other skill sharpener in our toolbox. 

Sometimes we get to the place in our lives when everything burns down to the ground. Like the storied Majestic Hotel, once a home to professional baseball players during spring training and mobsters down for the gambling, our life as it is won’t stand up to the elements or to the vissitudes of fate. A stray cigarette or a frayed wire takes the whole building down, along with all its memories and its derbis inside. 

Sometimes we too have to start from scratch by making a fresh start. Yes, saving a historic treasure would be nice, but sometimes not very cost effective because the structure isn’t sound. Then it’s best to turn our back on that old life, grieve for it, and find a new hope and a new vision for the future. “If only we had done something with it 30 years ago!” Yet the will wasn’t there, was it? We can’t turn back the hands of time. 

In 1992, I answered God’s call to ministry. I spent twenty-two years away from my original calling, art. When my health took me out of parish ministry, I took up painting again in 2009. Five years in my studio relearning color, value, shape, composition, and emotion has felt like burning down a great old edifice and building a new one in its place. To date I’ve stayed close to the subject, except for the color. Lately I’ve felt constrained by those boundaries, and I’ve moved to s freer brushstroke. Will it stick? I’m enjoying it, but I feel emotionally exhausted afterward. I’m tearing down a boundary and am about to climb over a barricade. I’m excited about this adventure, even if it tastes of danger. 

MEDITATION ON RAIN AND REST

Family, Fear, Forgiveness, generosity, Healing, Health, Holy Spirit, Homosexuality, Love, Meditation, Mental Illness, Ministry, Prayer, purpose, Reflection, renewal, Secrets, shame, Spirituality, Stress, Uncategorized, United Methodist Church, vision, Work

Good morning! I’m back in my studio today. It’s a beautiful rainy day, just perfect for writing, but not for painting. Thanks to all who stopped by my booth at annual conference. We had our means of grace times! This gray day caused me to reflect that others might not have shared this experience:

Rain grows more flowers than thunder. While each of us might want to get back to work right away and catch up on our “missed opportunities” for ministry back home, a time of rest and contemplation might serve us better. First, we could process the events of the last few days during our time together. Did we find times to share means of grace with each other? Were we open to the call of the Spirit to stop and turn aside, or did we lurch from one agenda item to another to get things done? 
Did we take time to listen to one another or did we stand on the balls of our feet, poised to flee as soon as possible? Were our minds on the business of the meeting or on the person before us?

Second, we could ask ourselves, why do we not spend more time in Christian conversation with one another outside of annual conference? If sharing our lives together is a means of grace, why aren’t we offering that grace to one another more often? Perhaps we’re too busy working, or collecting our works righteousness points, for either the Lord or the Bishop, to enter into this self care and self love for one another. All we have to do is put this on our calendars as an appointment: prayer time, accountability time, study time, covenant group time, or support group time. 
  After all, Jesus had the disciples to go away with into the wilderness. Surely we could go to a parlor, parsonage or coffee shop somewhere with our preacher pals. Or are we afraid of risking intimacy? Do we fear that our human weaknesses will be rejected by those that are called to offer grace to all? Or is it because we have lost the Wesleyan understanding of “all can be saved by a God who is able to save all?”

Finally, we should sit and be quiet for a while, I believe, for with the rain comes either a nurturing and refreshing cleansing or a great flood with thunder and torrents that can’t be controlled. If we are to be the “non anxious presence” at the center, we need peace and quiet to hear God’s voice in our own heart and mind. 
Subjects for discussion starters: 
1. All are broken and fallen in this world. If Christ came to save the sick, that’s all of us. 

2. Historically scripture was used to advocate for slavery. We can’t imagine this now. We fought the “War of Northern Aggression” or the Civil War over this issue. 

3. If we are going to use one sin to get excited about, we should also pick up on those sins the Lord himself condemned. To name a few: divorce, adultery, greed, stinginess, swearing, judging others, and faithlessness. (Matthew’s gospel) 
We extend grace and forgiveness to constant practitioners of these activities, so we have a precedent for either deciding to include other “sinners” or excluding/purifying our pews of these additional sinners. We might all have to take up that “vile field preaching,” however. 
4. God gave each of us two eyes and two ears, but had the good sense to give us only one mouth. Maybe God means we should do more listening to others and looking at the world from their side of the street, and spend very little time speaking until we truly hear the heart of the other as our own heart. 
Then we can say with John Wesley ” If your heart be as my heart, then give me your hand.”

THOUGHTS ON ACEDIA

Creativity, Family, Food, generosity, Healing, Health, home, Mental Illness, Ministry, ministry, New Year, poverty, Prayer, purpose, purpose, renewal, Retirement, Spirituality, stewardship, Strength, Stress, Travel, Uncategorized, vision, Work

  
I’m in this mode or mood today. I have a form of malaise, the kind that comes after pouring out all you have until you are drained. Now my listless is my form of recovery. I have hit the wall and I’m not going on. Did I mention that my community has received 25 inches of rain since the first of the year? Our annual average is a whopping 56 inches! We can get rain in any month, so I have a giant umbrella in case I decide to get off the couch. Other cities thirst for our gift, I know, as the good Lord only spits some 37 annual inches their way. Y’all do get more than our paltry 3 inches of snow, however. Please don’t offer to share it. 

 I’ve been chunking away at my various projects, some of which are pure tedium (bookkeeping) and others which are fulfilling (the creative writing & painting). Then I thought about possibly listing my 1 bedroom condo and moving up to a 2 bedroom unit.  The sympathetic illness of moving day is pretty well Ingrained after all these years of itinerant ministry. This disease was quickly cured when I remembered my vow of voluntary simplicity. 
Living under one’s means frees us to give to the poor as well as lessening our need to worry about how our needs are going to be met. Living under our means gives us the opportunity to explore the world, rather than be house bound. We can eat better food and share our time with others rather than being on call for someone’s else’s time and having to eat some fast meal on the fly. 

If we are fortunate, our lives in “retirement” will be more like those of the Benedictine sisters and brothers. We will have an ordered life of work, worship, prayer, quiet, community, and study. We can enjoy a foretaste of that life to come in brief doses, either in 5 day or 2 year commitments at the Upper Room’s Academy for Spiritual Formation.

This mood, like all feelings, will no doubt pass in a day or two. Rest is good for the body. Taking the time to care for our precious selves is a gift we can give to God and to those who need us most. We will be better able to fulfill God’s call on our lives if we serve from a full heart, rather than an empty spirit. 

http://academy.upperroom.org/