From Rabbi Rami Shapiro: "Cultivating grace is a bit of a paradox. You cannot get what you always and already have. There is noting you can or need do to merit grace. All you need do is accept grace. The reason this is so difficult for us is that our hands are full. We are burdened by carrying the past and future around with us wherever we go, and have no room for the grace of the present moment. Cultivating grace means putting down the burden of time, and opening our hands to the timeless now." (Rabbi Rami Shapiro, The Sacred Art of Lovingkindness:Preparing to Practice; forward by Marcia Ford, SkyLight Paths Publishing, 2006)
When I write and think about art, I often use the words acceptance, vocation, grace, and now. Thomas Merton and Rabbi Shapiro are my teachers. What they teach me about art is transmitted from heart to heart; soul to soul. Be here, be now. Listen. Accept grace. Give it all back. Start again each morning... each moment.
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Out where cascading hues and pigments
Streak across a distant
Palette
Out where evolving shapes and forms
Merge and sing in harmonic
Rhapsody
Out where Earth and sky
Breathe as one with each
Master stroke
Out on that phantom edge
God paints a demonstration of
Infinity
- Rejoice in God's infinite love! -
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At four o’clock on a rainy afternoon, the interior of the Rose Chapel was nearly dark. A few candles, and of course the sanctuary lamp, burned though and gave me all the light I needed to know that I was home. The moment was epiphanic, and I was filled with memory and love and confidence in a Ground of Being. The emotion and spirit of the moment caused me to raise my camera with some hope that I might bring a few images away with me. That would have been enough. To look at an image and remember the moment. But now I find that the image holds more than the memory of a moment.
It’s been two years since that trip to Rose Chapel. But in the way I choose one paint over another, one medium or tool over others, I chose this photograph tonight. With it, I chose another. Nothing complicated. Rather mundane really, the photograph of a rose; thus ensuing a fairly elementary play on words—Rose Chapel/rugosa rose.
As a photographer and as an artist, I worked with these two images to bring one more into life. Color and line and form were my guides—most visible guides. I had no theological agenda. Determined by some amount of time "looking," it was finished.
Then, I listened. I listened to the conversation between the work of my hands and the work of my heart. There I found a theological pause. A moment, when I saw my fragile understanding of the Ground of Being grow not because of searching, but because of working.
Working in the ordinary way of art.
Today we discover beauty. This time tomorrow we will remember that beauty, and ever after braid its truth with our own prayers and persistence.
Gregory Wolfe, editor and publisher of Image Journal writes in his Editorial Statement for Issue # 56: "Beauty allows us to penetrate reality through the imagination, through the capacity of the imagination to perceive the world intuitively." He continues: "Beauty also has the capacity to help us to value the good, especially the goodness of the most ordinary things. The greatest epics, the most terrible tragedies, all have one goal: to bring us back to the ordinary and help us to love and to cherish it. Odysseus encounters Circe, Cyclops, the sirens, Scylla and Charybdis, but his real destination is home and the marital bed that makes it his place in the world."
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there is still
that star in the sky
leading us
and still we carry
a dream of gifts
and arrival
while wrapped around
we are held with wings
made to uplift
then flying
we reach out
for you
The idea of the "Twelve Days of Christmas" is teaching me how to keep Christmas after the decorations are down, as I move into the reality of a new year. Holidays and calendars, opportunities to reflect, learn, and move forward.
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