All I have to give

One of the thoughts that has been recurring this week has been an overwhelming sense of gratitude for this blog and its readers. The reason I'm feeling that again this morning is that it's a place where I can post images like this one and they are actually deemed appropriate.

Last week I was invited to contribute an image to the Image and Spirit blog for Easter, and I remember wondering if there was any way I would be able to do that in advance, given the effect Holy Week usually has on me. So on Tuesday, when it became apparent that I would have to come up with something, I spent the entire day struggling to come up with some sort of resurrection image -- and failed miserably.

But it was an odd sort of failure -- not really her decision or mine, just a sense that nothing really captured Easter. Eventually she found another of my images by poking around on my website, but as we were discussing it later we realized that, for both of us, the problem with all the images was that they all included some artist's rendering of the resurrected Jesus. We have both spent some significant time NOT connected to church and Christianity, and though, for both of us, it was a renewed understanding of Jesus that brought us back, we are both still tiptoeing around the edges a bit, and, for me at least, images of Jesus bring with them an awful lot of negative baggage.

But today is Good Friday, and I came back from Italy last fall with numerous images of crucifixion scenes, so today is my chance to display them, and this is the perfect place -- unlike my local gallery, which invited me to participate in a show in November, the second annual "Women Behind the Lens" show, with specific instructions: no politics, no sex, and no religion! It reminds me a bit of my first visit to the Episcopal priest who counseled me through my divorce. "My friend Robbin says you're a great listener," I told him, "but I'm not into the religious shtick, so if you start throwing that at me I'm out of here."

"Hmm," he replied. "Religious shtick is really all I have to offer. But why don't you have a seat, and we'll talk and see what happens." I loved his honesty, and stayed; eventually I came to love him, as well as his honesty (we are still friends some 28 years later) and ended up being confirmed in his Episcopal church.

I feel like echoing his words to my gallery: in some sense, all my work is religious, even when it doesn't have subject matter that can be specifically designated as religious. Religious schtick is all I have to offer these days. But I am not as brave and bold as he, so I will not tell them that; I will just share images -- as he shared conversation -- that speak to who I am, and let them choose.

This will not, of course, be one of those images. And technically I can't really consider it one of my images anyway: it's my photograph of someone else's art. And because I know how it feels just working to get its colors right and its frame straight, I wonder how it must have felt to paint it, to paint the holes in Christ's hands and feet, to draw the gentle curves of his belly and knees, to apply the crown of thorns to that bowed head. Was the artist painting during Lent, I wonder? Who modeled for these figures? Was he, or were his models, a person or persons of deep faith? Did creating the painting express or enhance that faith? I feel like it must have, because I find it hard to believe that art this powerful could flow from anywhere other than a place of faith.

But of course that is the magic of God, who can work through anyone and anything -- no matter how faithless -- to awaken us to the Divine. The artist and models may have just been doing their jobs as assigned, working only to maximize the impact of the piece. It is God, moving through the image into our hearts, that awakens the faithful response within us. And that's the beauty of it. I may, as an artist, have days when I fail to do what I set out to do. But God can move through my work anyway, and for that I am profoundly grateful.