My Photo Response to Palm Sunday becoming Passion Sunday

Yesterday's Passion Sunday wasn't too bad, although I had to sit through the horrible rendition of "Worthy is the Lamb," one of my least favorite songs that the choir sings. We also had a baptism, which I never mind, although our services are already well over one hour in any given Sunday.

When we got the Palm crosses, I got an idea for photo. I took them home, played with a vase of lilies, and below is the result.





So, it's a bit late for my Lenten art project (or early!), but I thought I'd post anyway.

Art Project Update

As I recall (and I looked up to be sure), my art project was going to be non-word projects each week. And two weeks ago, I started sliding, as I posted my animated/videopoem. And last week, I posted a poem. And then I was away. I did create an Easter card for missionaries last week, but I'd hardly call it art. My mom and I created a retreat, but I don't think I should count that.

No, I wanted to do more to get back to some of the art forms I've moved away from throughout the years. And in some ways, I have. A week from now will be Good Friday, and since I have an idea in mind, I'll post a picture of the "sculpture" I plan to make out of fabric and beads.

A week from now will be Good Friday. How this Lenten season has zipped by.

For now, here's a poem that I finished in the past week, to get you thinking about Good Friday:

Strange Nourishment


In the shadow of the cross, new sprouts
thrust exuberant blooms out through blackness,
out of the blood soaked
soil. They yearn for light,
where life begins.
They root themselves in tears and nails.
They suck up their strange
nourishment in the shelter
Of God’s grace.

The sprouts understand the mystery
of God’s plan, potential hidden
in the smallness of seeds,
the nourishing qualities of decay and dirt,
an imperial instrument of torture
transformed into salvation.

Day Long Create in Me Retreat

Those of you who read this blog faithfully have read my enthusiastic writing about the Lutheridge retreat, Create in Me. Last year, when my parents attended, my mom was so inspired that she proposed that we create a 1 day version for her women's group at her home church. So that's what we did.

We were supposed to do the retreat on Feb. 7, the day of historic snowstorms in the northeast. So we rescheduled for March 20. It went fantastically well, so I thought I'd post about it, in case it serves as inspiration for your own church. It's amazing what one can do in one day. And this plan would work well for half a day, since we designed it to be a day where people who could only come for half the time could still participate.

We sang a few songs and then did the getting to know you exercise that had people compare themselves to art supplies (see this post for more details).

Then we moved to a Bible study of parables, led by me. I talked about how parables are like poems, making strange connections, making us see the world in a brand new way. I agree with Eugene Peterson: "A parable is not ordinarily used to tell us something new but to get us to notice something that we have overlooked although it has been right there before us for years. Or it is used to get us to take seriously something we have dismissed as unimportant because we have never seen the point of it. Before we know it, we are involved" (Tell It Slant: a Conversation on the Language of Jesus in His Stories and Prayers, page 19). We had a rollicking discussion of what we know about God and the Kingdom of God (not necessarily the heavenly kingdom, but the one we're creating right here and right now) through the parables. We talked about what the parables teach us about what kind of people we're supposed to be.

The Bible study lasted about an hour. After that, we moved to art stations. Here's where we needed the help of a few others. The quilting group brought quilts for us to tie. They also make fabric pillow hearts to send to the troops, and those hearts needed stuffing, something a beginner can do. We had a table on spiritual journaling led by me. We have a church expert on flower arranging who could join us in the morning, and in the afternoon, we decorated cupcakes. We had a table to make Easter cards to send to missionaries (go here if you'd like to participate--it's easy!).

After about 75 minutes at the art stations, we broke for lunch. We had sandwiches, a fruit platter, and a veggie platter from a local grocery store. We had fairly gourmet sandwiches (meats and cheeses on gourmet flatbread with an olive spread), which was a pleasant surprise. But why should it have been? All the food was delightful. One of the congregational bakers brought cinnamon rolls for the morning--which she baked in the church kitchen, which was right off of the fellowship hall where we met, which meant that we were greeted with delicious cinnamon smells as we arrived.

Then, in the afternoon, we did it all again, plus a closing worship service where we anointed participants' hands with oil.

It all worked so much better than we expected. The participants were eager to have conversation during Bible study (as a seasoned teacher, I was prepared either way--I could talk nonstop or lead a conversation or both). Everyone seemed enthusiastic about the art stations--it's always hard to know in advance what will interest people. Everyone circulated, and no one sat alone at lunch (always a good sign to me). It was a delight.

Would it work at your church? I suspect that it would. I noticed a real hunger for the retreat experience on Saturday. So many of us can't get away to church camps for several days, but we can take a Saturday (or just a Saturday morning) away from our other responsibilities.

Likewise, I noticed a hunger for permission to be creative. Again, so many of us have so many obligations that creative time gets crowded out. It's easier to say, "I have a retreat at church," than it is to say, "Don't bother me for 4 hours while I work on my art."

So many churches focus on the worship service and forget about the need to nourish people in other ways and the need to give people more tools for their daily and weekly spiritual writing. A quarterly retreat held in the fellowship hall, led by lay people, could be just the thing for which congregations have been searching.

Lenten Art Project--A Poem Based on the Prodigal Son

This week I had hoped to add audio to one of my animated/video poems, but time got away from me. However, I did write a poem. During my pastor's sermon, the ideas just started to flow.

I feel like I should give him partial writing credit. I wouldn't have had the ideas for the second stanza without his sermon ringing in my ears.

Prodigal


And so it comes to this: we stink
of swine, and we fight
them for food, and we wonder
why we ever worried
about our extra weight.

We set up camp among the Christmas
decorations and the old choir
music and several generations
of hymn books. We sleep on cold
concrete while the worship
service swirls above us.
And soon, we know it’s time to surrender.

Our parents, people of cool composure,
refuse to bury us without a body
to prove our demise. They scan
the hospital blotters, tune
to police radios. They keep one eye
trained towards the horizon, always hoping.

We have never seen our fathers
cry. Our mothers have never hugged
us so fiercely. We wish
we had thought to take
a run through the garden hose.

We feel fluid return to our dried
up bones, as cool linen drapes
our bodies, as the bread breaks,
and the wine flows. We unclench
our fists and hold our empty
hands out to our simmering siblings.

Lenten Art Project--A Video Poem

At my creativity blog, I've been thinking and writing about video/animated poems and book trailers (go here, here, and here for more). I decided to create one for my Lenten art project. Because of the length of the poem, and my novice status with Microsoft Movie Maker, I kept my project to one stanza.

Here's how the poem stanza looks on the page/screen in traditional format:

If God is an old woman,
She saves all our old clothes. She alone
has a vision of a collage of cloth.
She cuts new shapes out of our discards
and pieces them into an intricate quilt,
even though she knows we will fail
to appreciate her demonstrated skill.


Here's my video/animated poem. There's no sound because I haven't experimented with that yet.

Here's the whole poem, which originally appeared in Interdisciplinary Humanities (and yes, I posted it two weeks ago, so you're not going crazy):

The Precious Nature of Junk



If God is an old woman,
She uses no recipe.
Long ago she learned
what she needed to know:
how to make do with scarce
resources, how to create successful
substitutions, how to create
magic from simple kitchen chemistry.

If God is an old woman,
She saves all our old clothes. She alone
has a vision of a collage of cloth.
She cuts new shapes out of our discards
and pieces them into an intricate quilt,
even though she knows we will fail
to appreciate her demonstrated skill.

If God is an old woman,
She longs for closer connection.
She sends cards for every occasion
and fills the answering machine with cryptic
messages. She has such important
information to pass on and such little
time left. We listen
and wonder at her mental state.

If God is an old woman,
She knows that everything could have a larger
purpose. She hoards items we’d have discarded
long ago. She understands the precious
nature of junk.

Lenten Art Project--a photo shoot!

Last year, my husband and I added an element to the cross for each week in Lent: the first week it was a swag of burlap, the second we tied the burlap with rope, the third we added huge nails, and finally, we added a crown of thorns.




Yesterday, I was taking pictures for my videopoetry project (go here and here for more information on that project), and I decided to also take some pictures for this Lenten art project. We had the elements of the cross by the door, and I did some arranging:

And then, as I was going through my fiber art projects, I made this arrangement:

If you look closely at the fabric art, you'll see a cross underneath. I made this piece while wondering if one could have a piece of artwork with a Christian theme that wouldn't be offensive to non-believers. My boss at the time had these huge pictures of a bleeding Christ, which many found disturbing or inappropriate (when I interviewed for the job, my friend who was already there gave me a heads-up, for which I was grateful, for it would have been hard to concentrate on the interview while wondering about that art).

I like the starkness of the nails with the softness of the fabric and carpet underneath. I don't feel that the photo captures the fiber art as fully as I'd like, but that's O.K.

I've really been enjoying having this art commitment. I'd have let it slide this week if I hadn't made this commitment on this blog. I'm glad that I didn't. My afternoon taking photos was surprisingly fulfilling.

Ash, Poetry, and Collage

I've been thinking a lot about collage lately (go here to my poetry and creativity blog for a longer reading on the subject), so maybe it makes sense that my art project for the week would involve collaging. I started thinking about how many of my poems involve Ash Wednesday themes, so I printed some of them, cut them up, cut up a calendar page, and arranged everything on a painted canvas board:




I wondered what the work would look like with some ash. Back to the fireplace! Here's that result:

Once I had everything in place, I had a dilemma: how to glue/affix? I took pictures, just so I'd have a record if things went wrong.

Then I made another startling discovery: I actually like the pictures of the art work better than the art work itself! In the end, I threw all the scraps and ash away.

In some ways, this whole exercise seemed to teach me some Buddhist lessons about attachment. But those are probably Christian lessons too. We get most upset when we have ideas about what success will look like. So we long to transform our small, cohesive churches into megachurches. We discount the healing work that we do, blooming where we are planted, because we're so convinced that true Christians would live simply in intentional communities in solidarity with the poor.

I've always liked art that used scraps of other things to create new things (hence my love of fiber arts and quilting). I wrote a poem years ago that I'll include here for your Lenten reading pleasure; it was published in Interdisciplinary Humanities. For those of you hungry for female faces of God, I'll be interested to hear what you think:

The Precious Nature of Junk

If God is an old woman,
She uses no recipe.
Long ago she learned
what she needed to know:
how to make do with scarce
resources, how to create successful
substitutions, how to create
magic from simple kitchen chemistry.

If God is an old woman,
She saves all our old clothes. She alone
has a vision of a collage of cloth.
She cuts new shapes out of our discards
and pieces them into an intricate quilt,
even though she knows we will fail
to appreciate her demonstrated skill.

If God is an old woman,
She longs for closer connection.
She sends cards for every occasion
and fills the answering machine with cryptic
messages. She has such important
information to pass on and such little
time left. We listen
and wonder at her mental state.

If God is an old woman,
She knows that everything could have a larger
purpose. She hoards items we’d have discarded
long ago. She understands the precious
nature of junk.

Embracing the Ash

When I was young, I hated this high, Holy day. I loved the whole Advent and Christmas season, and oddly, also Good Friday (astute observers will note my early tendency to drama in these liturgical choices). But I hated Ash Wednesday. I found it gloomy, and I didn't want to be reminded of how many ways I would fail to be a good person. In my young days, that was the take-away message for Ash Wednesday for me. I doubt the Lutheran pastors of my childhood and adolescent parishes really preached that message. But that's what I heard.

Now, I find myself inspired to make art. Here's the result of my Lenten discipline: week 1, visual art project #1:




I painted a canvas board with gray and black paint, and then I sprinkled real ash from the fireplace onto it. I particularly like the black wispy/flaky bits which sort of look like birds or black butterflies. I have no idea how I will preserve this painting--when I sprayed fixative across it, some of the wispys flaked off. Maybe I won't preserve it. Maybe I'll add to it each week.

For me, as an adult at midlife, this painting embodies the message of Ash Wednesday. We are here for such a short time. We try to hard to preserve what we have, thus ensuring that we will have to watch what we love flake away from us. We are dust, and we will return to dust sooner than we care to think about. As an adult, Ash Wednesday has become one of my favorite services. I need to be reminded of the importance of prioritizing, and that God's priorities may not match those that the world would tell me is important.