It has been awhile since I posted anything about my sketching practice. I've continued sketching, at least 5 minutes a day; it's part of my morning spiritual discipline, the Morning Watch devotion time that I lead for my Florida church on Facebook. I've been doing that since late March of 2020.
I've also continued to sketch at other times, but it's often closer to doodling than anything that seems worthy of a blog post. However, last week I changed my approach and ended up with this sketch:
It began when I read this passage for my seminary Systematic Theology course, a passage from Jurgen Moltmann's The Way of Jesus Christ: Christology in Messianic Dimensions:
"The Holy Spirit, not Mary, is the source of life, the mother of believers, the divine Wisdom, and the indwelling of the divine essence in creation, from which the face of the earth will be renewed. . . . It is the Holy Spirit, not Mary herself, who is co-worker with the messianic son of God, and who together with him will redeem the world" (p. 86).
I felt a bit annoyed at the dismissal of Mary as a mere vessel, a womb for hire. Moltmann's language aligns the Holy Spirit with some feminine aspects, but it still irked me. I had a vision of the kind of Mary image that I had sketched somewhat obsessively back in December of 2020:
I had a vision of that figure but with trees and a big moon in the sky, a more autumnal Mary. As I sketched, I also added the star in the left corner, the star that is the Christmas Eve star in my iconography.
As I sketched, I was also thinking of Harriet Tubman and swampy landscapes. I wasn't surprised when the river emerged, but I didn't anticipate the basket when I was first thinking of the sketch. Unlike many sketches, I started work on it and completed it in the same sitting.
It's not quite done with me, this sketch. Earlier this week I started another sketch as part of my morning spiritual discipline.
No comments:
Post a Comment