Have you seen it for yourself? Have your eyes seen at least the clips of those claiming utopian dreams — yet themselves dazed, stoned, and de-constructing? The darkness is being revealed, and it will soon have its fullest hour.
Righteousness came and was rejected long ago. He was hung up, and they thought they’d extinguished Him. This is the most important thing to know: there is no other trustworthy name by which any soul can be secured out of this present and growing delusion.
The prophets all spoke of what is coming, very specific words. But Jesus added two watchwords for the years, the months, and the days before it all comes down: “Don’t be deceived”, and “don’t be afraid”.
How is that possible, especially as things get freaky? There is only one Way. He is that Way and He voiced it clearly, urgently, graciously Himself. This is your only reliable lifeline. He is the only door into real utopia.
But to get there, you must die. Die to your own ways, your own strategies, your own long-term assumptions. Go down with Him, and He will bring you up.
This beautiful photo came to our door in a magazine. This is an individual counterpoint, to what your eyes are seeing from all other media. This is more real, unfiltered though shrouded. And it’s happening all over the planet, but under the radar of the power-players. Baptism is a sign of relinquishment, however it is symbolized, wherever done, whenever a person realizes his true need — and gives in to the One who said He can provide that need. Trust His words, backed up by His perfect life. Re-vision means setting your sights (again and again) to what is real.
image used with requested permission: Voice of the Martyrs
I “came to Jesus” because I was repulsed by religion.
I saw “revival” signs outside churches as a youngster and pondered: “ if they have truth why do they need reviving?” As a teen I saw a man talking about “being saved” but his manner was harsh. As a young college student, our team bus passed a sign on a hill saying “Jesus is the answer”. One of my friends said: “if Jesus is the answer, somebody please tell me, what is the question?” We all laughed. I was happy on my own and had no questions, thank-you very much.
Later that frosh year militant students stormed our campus student union…with machine guns. I joined a committee to better understand the disruption since the Newsweek Magazine reporter obviously didn’t. We were true eyewitnesses. We cared about the student’s grievances. We pooled our heads and hearts to better explain what had happened so the whole wide world would understand. We were going to “restructure the University”. Seriously.
There was one big problem: we couldn’t agree. Ten or so of us spent hours debating. We were a select group, and we were motivated. But it soon became clear that each persuasion to “tell the story correctly” had certain bias, even if slight. And like a one-degree difference on a line to the target it impacted the result. It dawned on me that it must be a truth that every journalist aiming to tell any story has bias. The confusion amongst my cohort was eye opening, disappointing; it sunk in deeply. And that lesson was worth the price of my entire undergraduate education. At the same time, it did not escape my notice that the presumptions of the student activists were starting to smell like religion of a different sort: certain behavior was expected, certain ways to think were required. I stepped out.
Just a couple months after that, a friend of mine was killed in a tragic accident. That was when my easy idealism completely halted and real questions deepened. The subsequent sorting out of what mattered and what was ultimately reliable was the pivot point of my entire life. I can sense so clearly that we in America are in a similar consequential time now. For this reason, even midst the confusion and the smoke, the uncertainty and the biases — that bigger more important questions are forming and being quietly decided. If every action has an equal and opposite reaction, then repulsion can be an important awakening.
I post today a detail of a painting I am delivering to a Gallery this week. The larger piece this is excerpted from is titled “Marking Magma”. The fire born volcanic rocks that inspired some recent work is, in this painting, all marked up on its surface with graphite. The markings are like historical notations on something birthed eons earlier by a great disruption. There’s contrast and random angles visible today, there’s beauty midst fear. There’s light and dark together. My bias is obvious. My fingerprints are all over this. But my hope has been forged by things long ago and things current. All that is visible here.
In a New York magazine I recently read this statement: “We remain human beings… and we orient ourselves in time, looking forward to the future. When that future has been suspended, humans come undone.”
I will say here what the writer of the first article said, and what the Doctor in the 2nd article surely felt: “I began to loose it this week”. I echo his words; my heart grieves. The time is getting long and longer. You know it also; it weighs on all our hearts.
Several years ago, August 2011 to be exact, I was sitting in this very same house when a rolling quake went up the entire Appalachian chain. And, with incredibly no loss of life, it yet put a visible crack into the pinnacle of the Washington monument, 400 miles away. A few weeks later after that quake, in a remarkable set of unplanned circumstances, I was to stand in front of that monument, observing with my own two eyes the crack on its top. For me: the quake experience and that subsequent sight was a serious sign. When my house jolted, when my ceiling fan started to wildly wobble, these words of Jesus came fast into my head: “But all these things are merely the beginning of birth pangs”
Birth pangs. I remember when I was in my own first labor, when a nurse on the next shift came in and pronounced something about her expectation as to the length of my transition. My body hadn’t done this before; we did not know. But this nurse’s glib assumption, turned out to be incorrect. The signs were obvious, but the timing was not. And here’s the substance: the birth did happen; and in the end, that was what mattered. A couple years later, when labor commenced with our second child, the early signs were now familiar. Previous experience had prepared me, but it was no less ominous — for once that progression started, I knew I would not be able to stop it, no matter how long it took. That recognition was the worst part of the entire birthing — more than the physical pain, was that sense of control loss. The process was hard; the result was sure. We’re in a time like that now and I recognize it.
Labor is a sign, and signs are only that: they point to something else, which is much more substantive. Signs signify, but they are not the true event: only the preparation for it. A red hexagonal metal stand with the letters STOP is not the intersection but rather the warning before that place. Small earthquakes are not “the big one” but rather an indicator of others coming. Labor pains are not the birth, but the necessary movement toward that event. Are my eyes on the prize or on the pain toward getting there?
We’re all in a certain labor, and many feel it worse than I do. But I had a sense of the weight of it this week; it put me under for some hours. It reminded me of the glib words of the nurse who did not know my time and made a false prediction. When it comes to whatever is ahead, best be sure, and that’s why Jesus’ words catch my attention. I feel we’re on a moving train, like a progressing labor, and we simply can’t get off. Something is coming ahead, and being prepared is only wise.
JRR Tolkein said “It does not do to leave a live dragon out of your calculations, if you live near one.” But hold this in your heart: the dragon is not the Signifier. That Signifier we await has authority over the dragon, over any virus, over my sinking heart.
What is settling out as newly evident to you as you hold this tension, as lesser things hold less value? What is it you are trusting?
For me, it does not end here. My future may be somewhat certainly suspended, but temporal expectations are not my end; I am loathe to make something tangible here my end. I am going to hang on until the promised birth, if God gives me the grace to do so.
I image an older piece here entitled “The Valley of Achor” taken from Hosea’s words for holding on and for looking ahead. The prophets all spoke of the Signifier.
Most our lives we’ve moved right along to “the next thing”: school assignments, testing dates, graduations, interviews and invitations. Labor pains have led to births, births to nursing, to raising, to cheering and teaching, then finally to letting them go. Then doing that again alongside others. Both my husband and I are “to do list” people, and so this stay at home order has been good for getting simpler things done which have long missed our lists. We’ve taken walks on the empty campus near our home and marveled at the sprouting of spring. He has taught himself how to tie his own flys between zoom calls, and I have created an online story time with two of our grands as part of their homeschool. The attic has been cleaned out, and now my studio. Never in 70 years have we had to consider what to do with paused time. How has it been for you? We are mindfully grateful that we are not stuck in an apartment in some dense city, nor in the Congo where our friend tells us people are much more scared: where hunger at home is challenged by danger outside. Being older, we’ve been urged by our daughter who works in a hospital emergency department to “stay home!” But all of us, around the globe, no matter circumstance, have been given poignant pause to weigh “what do I do now?”
Pauses have a way of reaching us where the pace of normality never did, and never could.
I recently taught a Bible study on Revelation, and it is startlingly noteworthy that midst the horrors that sequence through that prophecy, there are valuable pauses. All heaven seems to wait while those on earth decide what it is they are going to do. In that I find a great sign of mercy. The time we have now is mercy. We’re all quite good at numbing ourselves through things just to get to “the next thing”; maybe that’s a mercy too, but easily we miss a lot that’s important when we do.
I highlight a famous Baroque painting by the Italian dramatist Caravaggio. We studied this up close at the National Gallery in London in 2012. I had always wanted to see it, for it portrays in theatrical fashion the moment when Jesus (yet unrecognized by his fellow travelers) breaks bread at the table. They’ve been clueless as to who it is they have been traveling with in their distracted sorrow. Try to get past the early 17th century garb and the insipid looking Jesus and place yourself at that table as Caravaggio intended. There is a place for you there. And it was only in that pause — in the tearing apart of what was common and basic, that the strangers finally understood who was sitting right there next to them. The real Jesus is still looking to join you where you sit too. Will you take the pause you have and allow Him?
“The black sky was underpinned with long silver streaks that
looked like scaffolding; and depth on depth behind it were thousands of stars
that all seemed to be moving very slowly, as if they were about some vast
construction work that involved the whole order of the universe and would take
all time to complete. No one was paying any attention to the sky.”
Quoted here is a section from Flannery O’Connor’s 1st
novel “Wise Blood”, in which the writer uses her weird characters as darkish foils
to prod the reader into considering timeless things. O’Connor was a brilliant
and lonely critic of secularism’s vacuity; she considered modernism naïve. And
like Jesus, her harshest stories called out religious emptiness. How would she
be illustrating the bigger story for us now? O’Connor would be a good one to
read if fiction is a way into your heart, for our world is changing and we need
to get a grip on what it is that is truly mooring us.
You wont find what anchor’s your soul in the material world. How can I make such an assertion? I’ve lived enough life; I’ve read the best “good book”; and I know how it ends. If non-fiction is a better way in for you, this is time tested. Meanwhile the National Geographic arrived this week. It is expensively produced, in a ying/yang edition titled “How We Saved the World”, or from back to front “How We Lost the Planet”. Take your pick; they’re giving us only two options. One would think such an organization committed to the earth would offer a few words of acknowledgement to earth’s Maker. But no. And, they admit: they don’t know the future. Only the One who hears prayer does.
The image I post today fits right along with O’Connor’s
description, as she teases the imagination higher. Here’s another look-up for
you. I’ve had the texture and the hues on this oil panel for some months, but I
could not resolve the whole satisfactorily. Then suddenly I realized I needed
to give it a window beyond the morass of the now. Voila!
The cries are reverberating out the windows of tall apartment buildings in Wuhan. And video is filtering out worldwide. Their pleadings are meant to be encouragement to fellow Chinese in this quarantined city of 11 million people. “Add more oil!” is a figure of speech, immediately understood in a culture that excels in creative stir-fry. One always adds oil to enhance the dish and to keep the vegetables from burning. “Add oil” is similar to what we would mean when saying in English “hang tough”, or “you can do it”. Can we? Can they? Is a shouted pep talk into the air enough?
What does one do when locked in at home, when supplies
including oil and everything else are dwindling, when the hospitals are filled
and dangerous? I am not frightened. I am rightly concerned. And I have been
thinking for a while now about how to help newbies learn how to pray. For we
need to know.
Here’s one true statement: Everyone prays. At least once in
each life there is a desperate instinctual cry that goes up into thin air.
Don’t tell me it’s not true. You already know it is. And if you don’t know
this, you will.
Here’s another true statement: Not every prayer is
effectively ‘talking to somebody’. Some cries are hopeless castings to the wind.
Would you know the difference?
Still reading? If prayer is what we do, even if last resort, would it not be important to take time now to learn to do it effectively? Are random shouts out a window accomplishing much besides some attempt to hearten other citizens? Is there such a thing as really talking into God’s ear? And if there is, how does one do that even with just a whisper?
There is warning that Jesus told about this very thing. It
has to do with adding oil.
After a concerned listing of signs, detailing what the end will be like before His return, Jesus eases the gravity of the situation by switching to a couple stories to emphasize their need to “be alert”. In one he paints with words a familiar Judean scene of maidens awaiting the bridegroom. The time gets long into the dark night of Jesus’ story, and when the groom finally arrives the maidens arise from sleep and trim their lamps. But the critical point of the story gets revealed at this point. Only some of the maidens were prepared with oil. In the immediacy of their need, certain ones cry out to others: “give us some of your oil!” But the prepared maidens give answer: they cannot share; they must not. Instead they instruct the unprepared maidens to go to the source for oil themselves.
In this is the first secret of prayer: Go to the Source for
the oil, and start out now.
In both the Hebrew and the Greek Scriptures, oil is a reference for the protecting, softening and sustaining spirit of the living God. He is the oil. He is the source.
The image in my post is of the Ophthalmologist who first warned of the virus which now ravages his city. He has already succumbed, but according to his own testimony, he had oil for his own lamp.
“We’re living thru a period in which we’re de-facing things…”
said Oxford Philosopher Sir Roger Scruton, “we no longer see the light of the
soul shining in things”. In many of his writings, Scruton argued that as cultural
materialists, we’re no longer valuing ourselves (and therefore others) at the
core because we don’t look face to face. “What core?” says the careless
atheist. Scruton, recently deceased this month, would have countered that the immaterial
part of each of us is the real lasting story. What is entirely unique in each face
is a reflection of a deeper substance: the soul–which is self-conscious, multi
faceted, freely distinct and making decisions even to the end of physical life.
Scruton also posited that we never become real with ourselves, or known until
we face another right in front of us. And further, he surmised that when one
comes before the face of God, without a barrier between, that we become finally
‘in touch’ in the deepest of ways. The face is the front forward of the being,
and to hide from another’s face is to devalue that one.
His words made me think of this painting. This was
accomplished by an artist friend using various dilutions of coffee and crayon. The
fugitive media she selected to describe her mother is itself a poignant counterpoint
to the lasting depth she expresses! This was a real woman, caught in the
heaviness of later life, before she passed away. Every line and wrinkle is only
a marking of the deeper whole behind the skin. And because the artist faced her
mom, honestly and directly, it is easy to imagine how she loved her.
This drawing may be one of the more beautiful things I have
ever seen. The faces of my babies were certainly most beautiful in their purity,
but this face shows the struggle of time. There is something accomplished here
in the drawing that stops me. Scruton described it as: “The arrest of the self
by the confrontation of beauty, the significance of tragedy…we’re taken up by
it”
My work, and my skill sets are entirely different than what this artist accomplished. But Scruton’s words challenge me about elucidating some way into beauty, combined with the truth of tragedy in a way that takes others up also. It’s a matter of facing the Face.
I’m noticing the direction and the repeated rhythms in line work. Because, where my arm wants to go with marking tools reveals where my heart has been simmering. Years back, when studying instinctive 1st marks on a surface, I realized I was chopping with vertical slashes. I was angry then, and impatient. I’d had it with waiting. I was trying to bring the action down. (Woe to anyone who got in my way, aren’t you relieved I’m not God?). And interestingly, at the very same time I was finding how important, how necessary the horizontals were also: for rest, for balance, for compositional completion. You can see one example of a horizontal which remains in the background of my entire website.
The direction of line work is the skeleton of a piece; it informs. The line work tells something about the aim or the mood of the work. Lately, for me, 1st marks are often diagonals. Now if I make this into a formula, or a pre-planned aspect the work will suffer but there is something really interesting in the tension that diagonals bring. In any work diagonals suggest potential or possible instability. Such marks seem fitting for the time we’re in. I insert here a segment of a recent work called “Boone Lake Down” so you can see one example.
Especially when considering non-objective, non-literal work, the direction of the lines give clues as to the artist’s intention. When literal words can’t express, the lines offer calligraphic hints. Someone named Ali I encountered on Instagram says on his bio clip that “As the world becomes more scary, art becomes more abstract.” Indeed. We reach for the mystical when what is around us cant be named. In fact, the birth of Abstraction in the Western art world came out of the publicly revealed horrors after World War 2. There is a direct tie. We could no longer remain naïve. Pretty pictures were now trite. Os Guinness says in his book Unspeakable, that Auschwitz put an end to enlightenment assumptions that the world on it’s own was becoming something better.
So, given that, how are we to live in any time that we have? How to yet make meaningful work that can still hold hope? How to rest and play with those we love? It is at least by not denying, or skipping past the hard and excruciating things. But, for me hope comes when getting in sync with the rhythms heard still in our darkness. If cicadas can sing in the dark, we should be listening to what it is they are responding to, for “night unto night reveals knowledge”.
Often, I am on some kind of necessary lookout, like being a watchman.
When entering any new space, the first thing I need to see is the view through the windows and beyond the confining walls. Since I was young, the wonders in landscape have drawn my eyes outward, peering horizons. In later years, the perplexities in living have moved me to abstracting what I’m seeing and thinking. An artist I’ve encountered named Ali says on his Instagram bio that “as the world becomes more scary, art becomes more abstract”. You can see the same in the trajectory of Art History. What interests me is better expressed in simplified gesture than any ‘perfected’ semblance can communicate. This is true in all my work, no matter the media. Poetry gets closer than prose.
Just yesterday I got notice that a monotype I made in 2006 got accepted into a national juried show in Cincinnati. This museum quality gallery, called Manifest, allows earlier work submissions, saying “we do not believe great art has an expiration date. Furthermore we believe that older work gains new meaning when contextualized in a new space alongside different works by different artists. Why should an exceptional work of art cease being experienced by the public once it is just a few years old? In fact, why should it ever stop being experienced? While most work submitted to our exhibits has been made within the past five years or so, sometimes works are submitted (and accepted) that are older.”
And Sore Must Be the Storm
Fortunately for me, this older piece fit their current theme
nicely and got selected into a small grouping of 24 pieces out of 421 entries.
My monotype, from 2006, was made with ink and solvent painted on a sheet of Plexiglas. Rice paper was then carefully placed on top of the inked Plexi, blanketed and cranked through the pressure of a flat bed etching press. The result once the paper was peeled off the plate was a reverse image from what I had laid down. It’s a landscape, obviously, but it is also abstracted and constructed with mood even in a single color. The added element of surprise as to what the press would do to the ink, and how the composition would read in reverse was part of the risk. It was a look-out moment. The drama of the result reminded me of a favorite poem by Emily Dickinson:
Blasted rock face breaks off according to the composition of
the material being forcibly disrupted. Some rock just crumbles at impact, like so
much hardened sand. Other rock, having been deposited by volcanic flow or
metamorphic heat reveals these jagged architectural planes and lines when
blasted. The visible cuts un-bury the evidence of long-term history in the
making of the substrate.
I have a good number of wonderful (to me) photos of cut-faces
as we recently drove around Lake Superior. Since a little kid, these broken
faces have always drawn my eye. All I could say was “these are beautiful!” to
the casual glances of others. Now I am trying to understand why these have so
magnetized my attention.
From burst photos taken in the car, then on site: en plein
air, I have been drawing and begun painting — not to replicate, but to
discover. This posture takes the pressure off, and opens doors for freed up
investigation. For it’s not about the rock/lines/planes/color though that has
captivated first. I use those as jumping off points. It’s more about the
nakedness of the cuts and the beauty therein exposed. Oh to be able articulate
that! It’s like this solid rock thing with its cut contrasts is a signifier of
something else being expressed to me.
In his dreamy, harsh, philosophical novel “The Island of the
World”, Michael O’Brien says early on that “people always seem to fall in love
with the image first, never the substance…”. It’s pictures that draw us
originally, but if we get hooked and we want to know, organic things can lead
us so much further.
A good number of artists spend time endeavoring to go deeper,
like cave artists. And ‘going in’, underneath, behind the surface of things is
where so many spend dogged time. For example, the subject of “beauty” has long
been recognized by artist/thinkers as having a component of fear attached to
it. It’s strange but sure. It’s something really important to discover.
“Poets are dreamers, Josip. They scribble their subconscious
onto paper in order to connect with food sources.” O’Brien brings in characters
to help his protagonist Josip along in this search. And that’s exactly what I
am doing here: connecting to some food sources of a deeper hunger.
This beautiful photo came to our door in a magazine. This is an individual counterpoint, to what your eyes are seeing from all other media. This is more real, unfiltered though shrouded. And it’s happening all over the planet, but under the radar of the power-players. Baptism is a sign of relinquishment, however it is symbolized, wherever done, whenever a person realizes his true need — and gives in to the One who said He can provide that need. Trust His words, backed up by His perfect life. Re-vision means setting your sights (again and again) to what is real.
