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?
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.]
Daily Readings:Psalm 146:5-10; 2 Peter 3:11-18; Luke 3:1-18
The winnowing fork cleans out the threshing floor and gathers the wheat into the barn; but the chaff will be burned up with unquenchable fire. Luke 3:17, paraphrased
…we are looking for new heavens and a new earth. 2 Peter 3:12
Offered by Jill Fredrickson, in whom God delights.
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).
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.
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.
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…
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.
It’s a mystery, why life finds us; why do atoms, molecules, cells, membranes come together to form our physical bodies? Why the mind, heart, and spirit that only we can bring to this time and this place – or any time and place, for that matter.
Rejoice in the life given to you, because you are the only one who will ever have it. Find the joy in the dreary days, the pain, the struggle – and especially in the days that seem to hold nothing of consequence.
There are any number of reasons to feel angry, hurt, or bored.
When was the last time you pulled a sled up a snowy hill, jumped on it, and whooshed all the way back to the bottom? Do you remember what it feels like – wind whipping, snow spraying, the sound of the sled against the snow? How many times did you tromp up and fly down the white hill before it was time to go home? Can you remember the sheer joy of it all, or do you remember only the cold feet and hands, the chapped lips? If given the chance, would you grab a sled and do it again?
Of course, it doesn’t have to be a sled on a hill. It could be a tire swing in the back yard, a pile of crisp leaves, waves on the beach, a polished bannister. Floating sticks a la Winnie the Pooh works, or any number of other things. They offer us wonder and drop us into the mystery of this world and our own lives. And that is no small thing.
I suspect that it might be the most direct way most of us come to what is most sacred – the sheer joy that there is this creation, and the wonder that you and I are part of it.
