Category Archives: art

art, Meditation

Pencil or Pen?

Leave a comment
Writing Implements

Something written in pencil can be erased, making it easier to correct mistakes or remove a foundational sketch once it’s been inked. Something written in pen shows up more clearly on the page and cannot easily be removed. There are advantages to both. I used pencils a lot more than pens from kindergarten through high school. In college, it was 50-50. In graduate school, I favored pens – not because I liked them better, but because there were very few pencil sharpeners on campus.

These days, I’m back to the 50-50 ratio. Pens are for cards, official signatures, and crosswords; pencils are for grocery lists, brainstorming, and daily math. If I’m drawing Celtic knots, I use both. Pencils are for letters and figures that are transitory, that I might need to change and adapt; ink is for the more permanent words and images.

It’s rare that I cannot quickly and easily choose between pencils and pens for a given task. I can’t say the same in the larger, existential sense. There are times when I mistake what is transitory – what needs to be flexible and changeable – for what is permanent. There are times when I mistake the permanent – what is foundational – for what is short-term. Both are necessary and life-giving. Wisdom is knowing which one is which. Wisdom is knowing they are not interchangeable.

art, Meditation, observation, Signs

To Whom?

2 Comments

We yield to those in bigger vehicles when we merge into traffic. We yield to the opinions of the higher-ups at the workplace. We even yield the floor to the person running the meeting, allowing someone else to put limits on our time. The ones with more power and influence are the ones to whom we yield. There’s no big surprise here.

To the Pedestrians

But here is a different story. Here the drivers who own the road yield to the ones on foot, giving way for the smaller and more vulnerable. On this green strip between one side of the street and the other, the powerful pause to let the pedestrians pass.

There’s a deeper truth in this, this mandate to stop in our trajectories and defer to the lower and slower, the strangers we will never truly meet and may never set eyes on again. This is yielding not because someone else is more powerful and can make us do it, but because someone is more vulnerable and cannot make us do a damn thing. If we cannot let go of our own machinations long enough to stop and let someone cross the road, we have lost some precious part of humanity. But if we can, if we realize there’s a whole big world full of God’s beloved well beyond our own plans and desires, then every time we stop to let someone cross, if we look, we’ll catch a glimpse of heaven on earth. Perhaps the person we yield to is Jesus the stranger among us; perhaps angels wait on the side of the road to offer us a blessed chance to yield.

Perhaps it’s not only a stairway that goes to heaven, but a green crosswalk as well.

art, Meditation, Nature

Birds

Leave a comment

4am. They are gathering on the azaleas outside my bedroom window, greeting the coming day the best way they know how: chirping, tweeting, whistling, and with an occasional caw. They are loud enough to wake me, even with a fan running and the windows closed. Whether or not I want to greet the coming day at the first glimmer of light in the East, they serenade me into the predawn world.

Most days, I note the birds and find my way back to sleep for a couple of hours. Some days, I don’t. The avian crowd pulls me fully awake to give me a choice: greet the early beginning as a punishment or as a gift.

There’s something wonderful about looking out the window to watch the stars fade into dawn. Even better, taking a cup of tea into the back yard to be a participant in the dawning, not just an observer. I keep company with the birds, squirrels, and bunnies – the only human on the street who answered the invitation.

I’m going to lose sleep either way. Why not be amazed at what morning brings to my back yard?

After the sun is up
art, Meditation, Prayer, Theology

Faith in Hand

2 Comments
St. John the Baptizer

It was a Christmas gift: a one day retreat workshop on creating icons with transfers – workshop because it was hands-on, retreat because creating icons is a profoundly theological prayer practice. The other participants all had some background in art, from college minors to art school grads to experienced iconographers. For them, picking up the brush was easy – it was the praying part that was challenging. For me, the praying part was easy – it was picking up the brush that was challenging.

Finding the Lines

Our teacher, Marek Czarnecki, told us that creating icons (writing/painting – he wasn’t fussed about the term) is a process of making our prayers something physical and beautiful through our hands. Through those brushes, a personal prayer becomes a beautiful means of prayer for others. The prayer for creating icons: Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner. The Jesus Prayer.

Marek said more than once that creating an icon was a matter of self-confidence and justification. We needed to trust in our ability to do the work and accept that the time and energy devoted to this prayer practice is justified (not selfish or merely a hobby).

I didn’t doubt that a spiritual practice was justified – I’ve set aside the time for decades. I very much doubted, and still do, that an icon will come from my brush. The others struggled with the exact opposite issue – no doubt about the ability to create but doubtful that taking the time to do so was justified.

At the end of the workshop, all of us had created a transfer pattern of the icon of Saint John the Baptizer as a spiritual practice. Here’s mine:

Transfer

It’s not clean enough to be the basis for an icon, and I didn’t finish half of his mustache, but it’s the first time I’ve tried to pray with a paint brush (creating Celtic knots with gel pens is as close as I’ve gotten). I haven’t figured out how to turn what I see and what I pray into ink on acetate. But I can see the underlying structure, the lines that form the basis of an icon, in a way I never did before. I got the chance to learn from someone whose prayers and talent come together to create icons – beauty that draws us into God’s embrace. I doubt there could be a better way to spend a Saturday in June…

[The workshop was on Ender’s Island, in Mystic, Connecticut – home of St. Edmund’s Retreat. www.endersisland.org. Marek Czarnecki leads many workshops here.]

Advent, Advent 2025, art, Biblical Reflection

Freed

2 Comments

Daily Readings: Psalm 124; Isaiah 54:1-10; Matthew 24:23-35

If God hadn’t been for us – all together, now, Israel, sing out! –

If God hadn’t been for us when everyone else went against us, we would have been swallowed alive by their violent anger, swept away by the flood of rage, drowned in the torrent;

We would have lost our lives in the wild, raging water.

Oh, blessed be God! He didn’t go off and leave us. He didn’t abandon us defenseless, helpless as a rabbit in a pack of snarling dogs.

We’ve flown free from their fangs, free of their traps, free as a bird. Their grip is broken; we’re free as a bird in flight.

God’s strong name is our help, the same God who made heaven and earth. Psalm 124, The Message

Breaking Free by Riley Anderson

Have you ever felt this: pinned down, unable to move or free yourself? It’s awful to be tangled in a snare, unable to escape into safety.

Have you ever experienced this: someone freeing you so that you can fly again? It’s miraculous when freedom comes instead of pain and death.

Freeing the captives of their snares so that they can take flight. It’s as good an explanation of why God chose to enter human life as any I can think of…

Image by Riley Anderson, in whom God delights (reposted from 2016).

art, Education, Meditation, observation

A Pause, and a Second Look

Leave a comment

I didn’t pick up this book for myself; it was a Christmas gift for my then seventeen year old son, who has created art that fits well in the Modern Art category. Because he said it changed his whole understanding of Art, I read it.

What are you looking at? Add one of the most recognizable modern art images, and it’s hard not go beyond the cover.

The book itself is amazing. Gompertz walks readers through the history and expressions of modern art, making accessible a whole category of work that I’d never given any time or attention to. Now, instead of my eyes sliding over the modern art pieces in a museum as I scurry to the Impressionist gallery, I stop and spend time really looking at them. I give them more than a passing glance because the cover of this book led to the pages inside, led to a pause, and led to a second look. I move beyond my first, fleeting impression.

What are you looking at? What am I looking at? Dangerous, life-altering questions. Because if we stop and ask them, pause for a second look, we might just see what is right in front of us. We might look at that bush long enough to see it burning. We might hear the voice of God. And we might remove our sandals because we know that we walk on holy ground.

If we don’t pause, we’ll miss it. At least for the time being. I suspect that the Holy will continue planting burning bushes and sacred images on our paths until we finally stop and look.

art, Meditation

Struck

Leave a comment

Wonder, like lightning, strikes in a way that illuminates. It can destroy the suffocating numbness that can kill the spirit as it dulls the senses. It can even strike so deep that the old way of being in the world is incinerated, allowing a new person to rise from its ashes.

True wonder inspires a heart-thumping awe, not a warm fuzzy awww. Lest we forget the nature of who we are, the cosmos we inhabit, and by whose hand it came into being…

For the title, the image of lightning hitting New York City, and for the ghost of a building in the clouds, Brian Selznick’s Wonder Struck is well worth reading and beholding. The inside is every good as the cover.

[New York: Scholastic Press, 2011[)

art, Books, Meditation, observation

By The Cover

2 Comments

I see thousands of books every week, checked out or returned by hundreds of people. Most don’t grab my attention beyond the perfunctory amount required to get them where they need to be. But a few do. Either the artwork or the titles, occasionally even subtitles, extend an almost irresistible invitation to pause, to venture beyond the cover into the depths of whatever story it guards. All The Light We Cannot See, What Are You Looking At?, Fire & Blood – just to name three.

Why these covers and not others? I suspect it’s as much about my own way of seeing the world as it is the scant number of words on the book covers…

How about you? What titles and images snagged your attention? Let’s take a longer look together…

art, Meditation

A Worthy Life

Leave a comment

Some days, it’s easy to mistake the life I’ve been given for something of little value or consequence. In the grand scheme of things, I’m here for a very short period of time, I interact with an absurdly limited number of people and places, and I’m too easily distracted and stymied by life’s inconveniences. I’ll be forgotten soon after I’ve returned to the ashes and dust that formed me. There won’t be any statues of me, or any lasting work of art that I’ll leave behind, no permanent evidence of my existence at all beyond records of my birth, marriage, and death tucked into a file cabinet or digital storage.

But if that’s how I see life, I’ve missed the point. Its goal is not to leave behind a marker to prove I lived or proclaim my worth. The point is to live the sacred time I’ve been given, and to honor the sanctity of all life around me. I’m meant to be a light that illuminates the path for others as they live out their own precious time – and as others have done for me.

Isn’t that more than enough?

Thank you, Martin Luther King, Jr., for lighting the way. And grateful thanks for all the others who have done the same.