The Trinity, A Million Points of Light, and Sunday in the Park with George

The Holy Gospel according to Matthew 28: 18-20

Now the eleven disciples went to Galilee, to the mountain to which Jesus had directed them. When they saw him, they worshiped him, but they doubted. And Jesus came and said to them, “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit and teaching them to obey everything that I have commanded you. And remember, I am with you always, to the end of the age.”

—

A sermon for Fanwood Presbyterian Church in Fanwood, NJ. The final installment in their summer Broadway preaching series, delivered Sunday, August 30, 2026.

Good morning! I’m so grateful to be here with all of you today! Your Pastor is one of my dearest friends and I’m deeply thankful that y’all were amenable to lending her out today to my congregation on Long Island, St. Andrew’s Lutheran Church. We’ve been friends for more than 15 years. We first met where so many friendships begin: at an academic conference on funeral planning. We realized rather quickly that we had crossed paths years before - when she was a seminarian at Union Seminary and I was a recent NYU grad working in an art gallery in Queens. 

My brother, Tommy, and I both attended the Tisch School of the Arts at NYU. He graduated two years after me in 2008 and the whole Button family came for the festivities. Buttons from across south Louisiana descended on Manhattan. I wanted us to experience things together that would bond us and what better than going as a family to a Broadway show. The hot ticket at the time was to the revival of  “Sunday in the Park with George.” And because it was 2008 - I, at the tender age of 22, had been offered an extraordinary line of credit by American Express, so I bought tickets for the entire Button family.

It was an incredible production. With music and lyrics by Stephen Sondheim, the musical tells the story of George Seurat’s pointillist masterpiece, A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte. It is Seurat’s most famous artwork and is on permanent display at the Art Institute of Chicago (and has a stunning cameo in the 1986 classic Ferris Bueller’s Day Off). Seurat used tiny, distinct points of color, applied in patterns to form an image. This style, which came to be known as pointillism, relies on the viewer’s eye and mind to blend these tiny points of color into a fuller range of tones, bringing whole figures and landscapes into view.

The painting is enormous - I beg you, if you ever get the chance to visit it in Chicago, do it! It’s huge - more than l0 feet across and almost 7 feet tall - the subject matter is somehow both magisterial and mundane. A view of Parisians reclining, relaxing, and altogether enjoying themselves on the banks of the River Seine. Inspired by optical effects and perception, color theory and scientific research, Seurat used small, contrasting dots of oil paint - of almost uniform size to compose the painting which took more than two years to complete. 

The 2008 revival, which I remind you I paid a small fortune that I was not in possession of to bring 10 Cajuns to, used 3D animations projected across the stage which moved in harmony with the music, vividly bringing the painting to life.  George Seurat takes the stage and begins by speaking the refrain that repeats throughout the show:

White

A blank page or canvas

The challenge: bring order to the whole

Through design

Composition

Tension

Balance

Light

And harmony

As these words are spoken - words that compose a mental image - projections of thousands of points of light and color compose a rich visual image. It was breath-taking, Seurat’s work combines thousands of points of color bringing into relief a staggering masterpiece and the projections did the same, animating the process Seurat sings about as the artwork comes in and out of focus around him. I was utterly transported, it was one of those rare experiences where - as you are experiencing it, you know that it will stay with you. I was practically dizzy at intermission, I was so transported. As the whole Button family shuffled into the lobby, my grandfather and brother took me aside urgently and begged me to never make them see another Broadway show ever again.

Hey, the Buttons had an experience - just not the same one. What was an amazingly transcendent experience for me, was a stultifying one for the other Buttons. And I think we can all agree bad experiences are often more memorable than good ones!   

As an artist and theologian, I am deeply interested in the many ways that tiny points of astounding beauty reveal swirling masterpieces. After all, God is an artist - bringing together mystery upon mystery, unveiling God’s love in a million ways in a million places. A great mystery of our faith is evoked in our Gospel reading today. Jesus commissions the disciples: sending them out into the world to spread the Good News and baptize in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. It’s here that we hear one of the few instances, alongside Jesus’s own baptism, where this Trinitarian “formula” appears in the Gospels. A shared belief in the Trinity is just one of the things that binds Lutherans and Presbyterians together. Not that I’ve ever managed to explain it very well. But, when I do venture to try and explain it, I talk about color and light. 

The more we grasp at the beautiful mysteries of our faith, the Trinity among them, the more we seek God’s love in all of its many expressions, the deeper we grow in relationship with God and one another. Color has a story and it’s the story of how we experience the world. And I think it has a lot to teach us about how we can better understand our faith. Since the beginning of time, artists and philosophers have argued about color, the animating light force behind what we can and can’t see. It was Sir Isaac Newton who first discovered that color is the shadow of what we can’t see. He did it playing with two prisms. First, he created a rainbow by pulling apart the wavelengths in light. That is something many had done before, but what Newton did next changed forever our understanding of not just light and color, but also the holy and sacred. With his other prism, he put the wavelengths of color back together again, creating one single beam of light. This likely doesn’t sound too terribly radical to us given that I’m basically describing the album art for Pink Floyd’s “Dark Side of the Moon,” but trust me when I tell you this was a really big deal in the 1660s.

For centuries to that point, people believed that the rainbows that come pouring out of prisms are the result of imperfections in the glass, not that color comes from light. Entire theologies were built around this understanding: “Pure white sunlight was considered a gift from God; it was unthinkable that it could be broken down or, worse still, created by mixing colored lights together.” (From The Secret Lives of Color.) Then, Newton proved that the colors that we see are merely reflections of the type of light they absorb. Take, for example, a juicy tomato. Its red skin soaks up all the short and medium wavelengths of light -- all the blue, purple, green, yellow and orange. The remaining wavelengths -- the reds! --hit our eyes and are processed in the brain. The colors that we perceive are, in actuality, precisely what they aren’t: the part of the light spectrum being reflected away.

Now, I’m guessing most of you can tell me what happens when you mix the colors red and yellow. You make orange, right. If you’re not familiar with what colors combined make what - I commend to you one of the many cast recordings of Sunday in the Park with George. But, in the world of color printing,  three colors create a whole spectrum of color. You’ve maybe seen a color wheel, where every color in the rainbow is revealed in three overlapping circles. The colors of the three circles are cyan, magenta, and yellow. When they overlap they create the primary colors of red, green, and blue with black at the center.

Three colors coming together to create an entire rainbow is one way to explain the great mystery of our faith, our Triune God who is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. The Holy Trinity reveals God in three persons and three ways that God works in our lives, but God contains multitudes and is not confined to any one of them. God is not limited by the Trinity; the Trinity is an expression of the manifold nature of God. In Matthew 28:19 Jesus instructs his disciples, “Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything that I have commanded you.”  When we baptize people in the name of the Holy Trinity we claim them in their entirety, in the myriad ways that their identity finds expression. 

As three overlapping colors create a whole spectrum, the Trinity reveals the multitude of God in each of us. The Holy Trinity is an expression of the many ways that God holds us in their heart and loves us without condition, loves every part of us, loves every color we come in, loves every language we speak, loves every part of us that makes us who we are.  We are surrounded by a million points of light, reflecting and absorbing millions of shades of color - even in the darkest night, there are stars swirling above us. And we are surrounded by the love of God. Light hits our eyes and turns into an infinite combination of colors, of tones, of shades. Yet, we rarely stop to think about its mechanics, about how there are rods in our eyes that are reflecting back the colors that aren’t absorbed by an object. Instead, we bask in it. We revel in sunrises and sunsets. We gasp when we come upon deep blue seas and purple fields of lavender. We are humbled by it and in awe of it. 

If there’s anything I’ve learned over the years it’s that, when it comes to the Trinity, you can definitely overthink it. Instead, we must bask and revel in it. Be humbled by it and overwhelmed at the wonders of all the ways that God’s love finds us. Every day, every hour, every minute, every second, we are surrounded by a million points of light, bringing into relief God’s masterpiece. A vast and enormous canvas populated by a swirling creation. The Trinity is for us. God is for us. The Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit are for us. For all time, “always, to the end of the age.” And it is revealed to us everyday in an always shifting, always being unveiled, always being made new, masterpiece composed of infinite points of light. Thanks be to God. 

o beautiful for spacious skies: a sermon for america’s 250th

The Holy Gospel According to Matthew 11:16-19, 25-30

“But to what will I compare this generation? It is like children sitting in the marketplaces and calling to one another, ‘We played the flute for you, and you did not dance; we wailed, and you did not mourn.’ “For John came neither eating nor drinking, and they say, ‘He has a demon’; the Son of Man came eating and drinking, and they say, ‘Look, a glutton and a drunkard, a friend of tax collectors and sinners!’ Yet wisdom is vindicated by her deeds.” At that time Jesus said, “I thank[a] you, Father, Lord of heaven and earth, because you have hidden these things from the wise and the intelligent and have revealed them to infants; yes, Father, for such was your gracious will.[b] All things have been handed over to me by my Father, and no one knows the Son except the Father, and no one knows the Father except the Son and anyone to whom the Son chooses to reveal him.

“Come to me, all you who are weary and are carrying heavy burdens, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.”

—

In 1831, two French diplomats were sent by their government to the United States to study the American prison system. One of them was Alexis de Tocqueville who used the trip to begin his exhaustive study of American society called Democracy in America. It was published in two volumes, the first in 1835 and the second in 1840.  The books are still considered a classic work of political and social science, in large part because many of the predictions made by Alexis de Tocqueville  came to bear. 

He predicted that the conflict over slavery would fracture our young republic. And he predicted a future in which the United States and Russia would be competing military superpowers. Pretty bold for a Frenchman in 1831. But, what I love most are his observations about American civil society. He wrote, “Wherever, at the head of some new undertaking, you see the government in France, or a man of rank in England, in the United States you will be sure to find an association.” It’s a resonant observation two centuries later because American civil society has been profoundly shaped by groups of people joining together to pursue a common good. 250 years of history have been made by American civic groups like the League of Women voters fighting for suffrage, and Rotarians working to eradicate polio, and Lutherans organizing to support refugees. 

There is a real and vital thing that Christianity and democracy have in common: in both, the most essential relationship one person can have to another is neighbor. And, in both democracy and Christianity, “neighbor” is not defined or limited by borders or creed or race. Instead, to be another’s neighbor means to be in solidarity with them and to seek a common good together. Democratic societies and Christian communities are meant to expand what it means to be one another’s neighbor, not to shrink it. 

All of Christian ethics and morality revolve around one question that a lawyer asks Jesus in the 10th chapter of the Gospel of Luke: And who is my neighbor? Jesus answers with the story of the Good Samaritan, the only one of three passersby who stops to help a man left for dead by the side of the road. And answering with a parable means that Jesus gets to ask the lawyer his own question in return: Which of these three, do you think, was a neighbor to the man who fell into the hands of the robbers?” He said, “The one who showed him mercy.” Jesus said to him, “Go and do likewise.”

 As we celebrate 250 years since the signing of the Declaration of Independence, we must also reflect on how we continue to seek a common good together. And in so doing, show each other mercy and compassion, two qualities that are quickly disappearing from our civic life. Today, I invite us to pray together for our country by joining our voices in song. Because something miraculous happens when we sing together, we breathe together and our hearts synchronize. The hymn “O beautiful for spacious skies” contains prayer after prayer for our country. And so we will sing it verse by verse as I expand on each of these prayers.

We’ll begin by singing verse one, then I’ll preach, then we’ll sing another, and so on. At the conclusion of the sermon, we’ll sing the hymn all the way through together. Open your hymnal to page #888. Let us begin with the first verse:

O beautiful for spacious skies, for amber waves of grain, for purple mountain majesties above the fruited plain: America! America! God shed his grace on thee, and crown thy good with brotherhood from sea to shining sea.

If there is one single prayer that I have for this country it’s in this first verse: May God shine their grace on our country, and glorify goodness in love for one another from coast to coast. God’s grace closes the distance between who we are and who God has made us to be. It’s through God’s grace working in the lives of abolitionists and activists, civil rights leaders and ordinary citizens that this country has been able to make itself anew, over and over. 

In his sermon, The Drum Major Instinct, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. preached about the great democratizing power of the call to a life of service: Everybody can be great, because everybody can serve… You only need a heart full of grace, a soul generated by love, and you can be that servant.  In a democracy, the future is always being made new. Made new by prophets like Dr. King whose vision for beloved community still calls us to a life of service to one another and forward into the future. 

We are not yet a country where all people are judged by the content of their character rather than the color of their skin, but in a democracy, the promise of a better life is always in front of us. Just as the kingdom of God is always in front of us. And it is grace that propels us forward. It is Grace that has allowed this country to remake itself with every generation and grace that calls us ever forward into this endlessly joyful work.  

Now we turn again to our hymnals, and sing the second verse which is a prayer that we might honor those who came before us, who have loved mercy more than life, by replacing greed with moral integrity. Let us sing together the second verse:

O beautiful for heroes proved in liberating strife, who more than self their country loved, and mercy more than life: America! America! May God thy gold refine, till all success be nobleness, and ev'ry gain divine.

The founders of our country could never have anticipated the wealth we have now. And, yet, Americans live shorter, sicker lives than citizens of other high-income countries like Germany and Canada. And so I pray again: America, may God thy gold refine, till all success be nobleness, and ev’ry gain divine. 

Of all of Jesus’s teachings, one of the most challenging is that there is enough for everyone, that God’s abundance is here for everyone, if only we are good stewards of it. And we’re not good stewards of it. If we were, then 11 million American children wouldn’t be living in poverty. In our Scripture today, Jesus says, “Come to me, all you who are weary and are carrying heavy burdens, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.” Too often, it’s the most vulnerable in our society, like children, who bear the heaviest burdens of our country’s shortcomings. 

And so our task as Christians living in a democracy is to cherish our neighbor, to seek good for them, to protect them, and to share in God’s abundance with them. I’m reminded of the second verse of the hymn “They’ll Know We Are Christians by Our Love” which says that our faith is made known when we guard each other’s dignity and save each other’s pride. We are not a burden to God and our neighbors are not a burden to us. We are a gift from God to one another. All of our neighbors are - regardless of when they arrived here or how much money they make or what language they speak. 

We move now to the third and final verse and prayer for America, let us join hearts and voices:

O beautiful for patriot dream that sees beyond the years thine alabaster cities gleam, undimmed by human tears: America! America! God mend thine ev'ry flaw, confirm thy soul in self-control, thy liberty in law.

And what are the flaws in us we pray for God to mend? The answer grows clearer every day: it’s our relationships in need of mending. One of the great promises of the United States is equality in citizenship - no person can be more or less American than another, we are neighbors bound together in pursuit of the common good. In the same way, no Christian can be more or less Christian than another. It is a promise that we must reclaim, a promise worth defending, a promise to pass down to another generation. Because above all else, we are each other’s neighbors called to always making and remaking our country anew together. Amen.

Finding the foolishness of the cross in Minneapolis

The Holy Gospel according to St. Matthew 5: 3-12

When Jesus saw the crowds, he went up the mountain, and after he sat down, his disciples came to him.  And he began to speak and taught them, saying:

“Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

“Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted.

 “Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth.

 “Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled.

“Blessed are the merciful, for they will receive mercy.

 “Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God.

 “Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called children of God.

 “Blessed are those who are persecuted for the sake of righteousness, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

 “Blessed are you when people revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely on my account. Rejoice and be glad, for your reward is great in heaven, for in the same way they persecuted the prophets who were before you.”

—

There’s this cartoon that I really love, that I’ve been thinking about this last week. There’s two aliens with a spaceship behind them. In front of them is Jesus, crucified on the cross. And one alien says to the other, “What do you think this means?” And the other replies, “It means we need to get out of here, is what it means!”

If ever there were a symbol of why God ought to abandon humanity entirely, it’s Christ, His son, on the cross. Except, as followers of that man condemned to die on the cross, we know that the cross is not a symbol of God’s abandonment or condemnation, but instead a tangible promise of God’s salvation. In Christ’s agony on the cross, God did not turn away from us, but grasped us even closer. We find wisdom in the weakness of the cross. We’re working our way through the first chapter of Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians right now, in this season of Epiphanytide. And this deep dive into this letter could not come at a better time. As Paul writes: The message about the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God. 

According to this world’s standards of power and might - standards that look like violence, occupation, and brutality - according to those standards, the message of the cross does seem stupid, offensive even. Yet, Paul’s words reveal the paradoxical way, the surprising and contradictory way, that God has chosen to work power and salvation through weakness and suffering. What Paul is doing in this part of his letter to the church in Corinth is describing the two worlds that they inhabit. They are a diverse community of Christians living together, sharing possessions in common, struggling to understand each other, but bound to one another in Christ.

That is one world, the sacred world of their Christian community, and then there is the world with very different values than the ones that they’re trying to live by, but that they must interact with, right? In the marketplace. At the well. In the village square. The Corinthians are navigating two worlds at once. Sound familiar? The last two weeks have felt unbearable at times. We see terribly distressing things - children separated from their parents, civilians killed in the streets - and, yet, we all also shoveled snow and went to work. We inhabit two worlds. A German-Jewish lawyer and political scientist, Ernst Fraenkel wrote a book about this phenomenon. He was a criminal defense lawyer who defended Jewish people targeted by the Nazi regime. Because he had served heroically in the first World War, he was allowed to practice law in Germany even after the Nazis banned Jewish lawyers from appearing in court.

In 1939, he emigrated to the United States and began work on his book The Dual State which is about the legal structure of the Nazi regime. And by examining how the Nazi legal system operated, he was able to paint a picture of how all authoritarian regimes function. Whether it’s Hitler’s regime or King Herod’s. To begin with, one thing that struck Fraenkel was just how normal life in Germany felt as the Nazis came to power. Perfectly normal. Wake up, read the newspaper, go to work, come home, have dinner, tuck the kids in, rinse and repeat. But, what Fraenkel realized is that “this first state, the business-as-usual one, actually exists to lull you into a sense of complacency such that you don’t realize that another state is also operating in parallel with it. He called the business as usual state, ‘the normative state.’” The second state, he called “the prerogative state.” And that state, well, that state only becomes visible when you do something that those with power don’t approve of. Then, suddenly, the rule of law no longer exists for people who upset the state. 

The thesis of the book is also its most quoted line: “The dual state lives by veiling its true nature.” But, sometimes something happens that rips a tear in that veil. Too often, that something is an act of unspeakable violence. Something like the extrajudicial murder of a protest leader. A murder that the powers-that-be treat as nothing more than a joke, because what did he expect anyway? Going where he was going, saying the things he was saying, and doing the things he was doing?  I’m talking, of course, about the murder of John the Baptist. Decapitated, his head served to King Herod on a platter.

Our Gospel lesson last week began with John’s arrest. The veil starts to tear. There must have been a heaviness in Jesus’s heart. John’s arrest is bad news. And Jesus does withdraw from that pain, he does take time to steady himself, he goes to Galilee. Where he meets Simon Peter, Andrew, James and John and calls them to new life, to become fishers of men. He invites them into a life of abundance that looks pretty foolish to the rest of the world. John the Baptist has been arrested, the threat to Jesus’s life is growing, and Jesus goes to the lakeshore, calls out to the first disciples, and asks them to quit their jobs, to leave the security of hearth and home, and join him.      

And so begins the journey of the disciples, a journey that has them navigating two worlds, two realities, two societies. Just as the Corinthians would have to do and we still do today. One reality where power and might are used to terrify the most vulnerable among us into submission and one where true power comes from submission to the will of God and service to the most vulnerable. Like Paul, Luther talked about this division of worlds. He called them the “Two Kingdoms” - the earthly kingdom, that’s our kingdom, broken and hurting, here on earth, right now. Then, there is the heavenly kingdom, the life after this one, life eternal. All of it is God’s, all of it sacred. 

As Lutherans, we believe in civil engagement, in living like Christ in our communities. We believe that we have power that we are called on to exercise for the common good. The power of the cross, power that finds wisdom in weakness. We are called to constant discernment, to an examination of our values as Christians, and to seek the common good for all people, not just people like us. As Lutherans we believe we are called to participate in our common life. And so, what exactly do those values - finding wisdom in weakness and power in humility - look like in Minneapolis right now?

No doubt many of you know that Minneapolis-St. Paul is like Valhalla to American Lutherans. German and Scandinavian migration to the Midwest in the nineteenth century is the reason for that, those immigrants dotted the Minnesota landscape with Lutheran churches. I’m blessed to be friends and colleagues with pastors in Minneapolis who are doing incredible work and who have been sharing what exactly things look like for our siblings there right now. There are an estimated 3,000 federal agents in Minneapolis. There are more ICE agents than police officers in the city. In fact, there are more federal agents than the 10 largest police departments in the metropolitan area combined. My colleagues there tell me it feels like a military occupation. 

Black and brown people are being stopped on the street or pulled out of their cars and forced to show their papers, proving that they are citizens. And some of those people, including small children, are being arrested, flown out of the state, and jailed in detention centers in spite of the fact that they’re in legal asylum processes. Lutheran pastors serving their congregations in the midst of this are clear: the actions of federal agents in Minneapolis are far outside the norms of policing and law enforcement. Judges say the same. And recent polls suggest that the majority of Americans believe that the federal government has gone too far in Minnesota.  

The veil has been torn. And, so what are Lutheran churches doing in Minneapolis right now to be peacemakers? The world is watching, how are our siblings showing what it means to find wisdom in weakness? Well, for one, the nights are still long, so they’re lighting candles. Lots of them. They’re keeping vigil on street corners. They’re gathering with their neighbors to sing songs about freedom. And because so many of our black and brown siblings are terrified to leave their homes right now, they’re delivering groceries and meeting the needs of those living in fear. 

It’s so often the case that it is in times of crisis that the true beauty of life in Christ is revealed. Paul certainly knew this. The Corinthian church is in trouble, there’s a power struggle with some loyal to Paul and others to the so-called “Super Apostles.” There’s an implicit criticism of Paul’s abilities in this. Paul himself describes some “thorn” in his flesh, some weakness of his. When he writes about call and ability to the Corinthians, he’s writing as much about himself as his congregants: Consider your own call, brothers and sisters: not many of you were wise by human standards, not many were powerful, not many were of noble birth. But God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise; God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong; God chose what is low and despised in the world, things that are not, to abolish things that are, so that no one might boast in the presence of God. In contrast, God is why you are in Christ Jesus, who became for us wisdom from God, and righteousness and sanctification and redemption, in order that, as it is written, “Let the one who boasts, boast in the Lord.”

We’re living in a time of unprecedented division and disconnection. The powers of this world want us to turn away from one another, but the cross demands us to turn toward one another in humility. In a world of darkness, we light candles. In a world of fear, we offer safety. In a world that hungers and thirsts for righteousness, we bring Christ’s redeeming love, sustenance for all people. In a world that amplifies the voices of the most powerful, we uplift the voices of the most vulnerable. And certainly the children living in Minneapolis are the most vulnerable, living in the midst of an escalating conflict that they had no part in creating. 

On January 20th, a preschooler from Valley View Elementary School, Liam Conejo Ramos, was detained by ICE alongside his father. Photos of Liam made national news, he was wearing a blue bunny hat. A nod to his middle name “Conejo” which means rabbit. The neighborhood around Valley View is being heavily patrolled by ICE. 25 parents at the school have been detained and 20% of the students now attend virtually because they are too afraid to leave home. Students at the school wrote letters to the agents working in their neighborhood and this weekend, The New York Times released a video of some of the kids reading theirs. One young student concluded her letter very simply: “I think you should make friends with the world. Love, a Valley View student.”

A message of love and friendship no doubt sounds foolish in light of the rhetoric of our politicians, but we know that we are called to be fools for Christ. Because, in the words of Paul: The message about the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God. Even as others jockey for power and authority, we know that Jesus reverses the powers of this world. We know that the weakness of the cross is the truest source of wisdom, wisdom that begs us to listen to the voices of children. We know the last will be first and it is peacemakers who receive the blessing of God. Whatever happens in the coming weeks and months. We know that we are called to reverse the powers of this hurting world. And we know how we do it: by praying and singing and lighting candles; by feeding people the world would let starve and by protecting strangers that the world tells us to fear. Amen.

Introducing Stations of the Cross: Mental Illness

Day 20

As I have with previous projects that I’ve discussed here, I’m going to start my exploration of Stations of the Cross: Mental Illness by sharing the artist statement that I crafted to go along with it. This series included the publication of a devotional book by the Church Health Center in Memphis, TN and I will be sharing a few updated chapters in the coming posts.

Pilate Condemns Jesus to Death: The beginnings of mania, the beginnings of depression

The hallucinogenic mania that the poet Robert Lowell described once as “a magical orange grove in a nightmare” is where we find Jesus at the beginning of this story. Mania, in its beginning, can feel like a special invitation into a brighter, blazing alternate reality. Always, though, there is a darkness lurking, a toll that must eventually be paid for the sleepless nights and grandiose mornings.

Stations of the Cross: Mental Illness is a deeply personal project. After years of misdiagnoses, medication side effects worse than the symptoms they were meant to treat, and the patronizing disdain of health care providers, I was diagnosed with bipolar disorder. It has been more than a decade since my diagnosis. and most days I'm overwhelmed by the sheer force of color in my life. Friends often comment on the bold colors present in my work, even in seemingly gloomy subject material. Because at the age of 25, with the help of talk therapy and mood stabilizers, it was like the color was switched back on. I began to experience the world in a profoundly new way. 

Jesus Accepts His Cross: The Seasons and the Symptoms of Mental Illness

The birds were as a transformation of trunk and branch and twig into

the elation which is the energy’s celebration and consummation! -Delmore Schwartz, May’s Truth and May’s Falsehood

Hospitalizations for mania occur most frequently in the summer, while hospitalizations for depression happen most often in the winter months.

I speak from my own experience and truth. My story is mine alone, and it is not the purpose of this series of work to project onto anyone else this story. I have experienced wide ranging degrees of mania and depression. and infinite feelings in between. So have, I imagine, most of you. The needs of Americans struggling to find quality behavioral health care are difficult to meet because our health care system operates from a "one size fits all" mentality. Holistic wellness does not fit into one standardized cookie cutter shape system or treatment. 

The artwork in this series begins in an attempt to express some of the experiential quality of mania. As the colors darken, l hope to illuminate the darkness of depression as well as some of the implications for social justice presented by American society's mistreatment of those with mental illnesses. The narrative shape of the series comes from Kay Redfield Jamison’s magisterial book Touched With Fire: Manic Depressive Illness and the Artistic Temperament. It's this book that shepherded me through the first year after my diagnosis. It helped me to understand the central point of this new series of work: people with mental illness experience the world in ways that illuminate great truths about the very nature of the human experience. 

Jesus Falls for the First Time: The Creativity of Mania

"The kingfisher, he claimed, had evolved the brightly colored, scale-like feathers on its neck and wings by spending many hours sitting and staring down into the water at its prey – the fishes. The mackerel’s moire back reflected wave motions in the water, to the extent that one could copy and present them as waves on a canvas." - Olof Lagencrantz on the mind of August Strindberg

The stations illustrate the words of the artists profiled in Jamison's study of creativity and bipolarity, as well as some mentioned in an­other of her excellent books, Night Falls Fast: Understanding Suicide. Robert Lowell, Delmore Schwartz, August Strindberg, A. Alvarez, and Virginia Woolf are just a few of the artists included in this series. Many of their life stories have sad endings; they lived lives on the tightrope between the electric genius of just a little madness and the shattering horror of too much. The legacy left to us by these immortal empaths is their writing. We have their words, their stories of great joy and deep sadness. It's from these words that we know that the experiences of those with mental illness are deeply human and, in that way, a part of all human experience. 

Jesus Meets His Mother: Depression

"A suicidal depression is a kind of spiritual winter, frozen, sterile, unmoving." - A. Alvarez

Nearly 3% of Americans -- 19 million people – suffer from some form of chronic depression. Of those, some 2 million are children. Bipolar disorder affects more than 2.3 million Americans and is the second leading cause of death of young women, the third of young men. As many as 10% of Americans can expect to experience a major depressive episode, that is, a period of depression lasting several months, within their lifetime.

As a Christian, the story of Jesus Christ is at the heart of my understanding of what it means to be human, so it makes sense to put his story into conversation with mine, with Virginia Woolf's and with the one million people who commit suicide every year. The church has a special moral obligation to educate itself on the social realities of people living with mental illness. I say "special obligation" because I believe that, too often, it is the church that most contributes to a society that devalues the Uves, experiences, and wisdom of people with mental illness. For me, the most terrifying aspect of my depression is the feeling of separation from Christ that it leaves in its wake. When l feel this way, going to church only makes the feeling of separation that much more painful. I worry that my depression is an offense to God, that my inability to pull myself out of my pity means that God hates me. I open my mouth to sing hymns of praise and the words turn to ash in my mouth. This isn't to say that churches should never sing praise hymns, that caring for those of us who live with chronic mental illness means to dwell in the darkness. Rather, we should live out the Scriptural understanding that there is time enough under heaven to tear and to mend. 

Drawing on personal experience...

Day 19

It was during the creation of the mass incarceration series that I first began to think of these series as being in conversation with each other. The projects that preceded it, responded to particular events - the 2010 earthquake in Haiti, the beginning of the Syrian uprising, the hearings on the constitutionality of DOMA and Prop 8. The mass incarceration series was the first that was directly inspired by my experiences teaching in the American prison system. It was also an opportunity to reflect on the beginning of my life as an activist. As a young person growing up in Texas and developing a moral compass of my own, the death penalty was the first ethical issue that I remember really engaging with intellectually. Texas led and still leads the country in the number of executions since the death penalty was reinstated in 1976. By the time I was in high school, I was adamantly against the death penalty.

When I was a sophomore in high school a shocking tragedy unfolded over the week of Thanksgiving. A fellow student, a young man on the football team and in my trigonometry class, was involved in an armed robbery in which a police officer was shot though not fatally. The young man simply never came back from our fall break. It was much talked about among students, but not at all acknowledged by any of the adults at the high school. The one conversation with an adult about the shocking crime that I remember was with my Dad. I had overheard people around town saying that they wished that the death penalty was an option in the case. And so I asked my Dad, “Can you get the death penalty even when you didn’t kill anyone?”

Without looking at me, he replied simply, “Yes, it’s called life in prison without the possibility of parole.” Which is, of course, what happened to the young man who once sat next to me in Mrs. Prather’s class and now sits in prison as he will for the rest of his life.

Crucifixion

In spite of Supreme Court rulings in 2010 and 2012 accepting the argument that children, even those who are convicted of murder, are less culpable than adults and usually deserve a chance at redemption, there are more than 2,000 inmates serving life sentences without the possibility of parole who were sentenced when under the age of 18.

These drawings are of youth who were sentenced to life in prison without parole. Each drawing is based on a photo that was taken within one year of the time of their crime.

The last stations in the mass incarceration series came out of both my teaching experiences as well as the formative years that I spent in Texas, trying to create my own moral code.

Jesus is removed from the cross

The Department of Justice Office of Inspector General found that 13% of terminally ill inmates whose compassionate release was approved by the warden died before the Bureau of Prisons made final decisions. (The images in this station are based on scenes from a prison hospice.)

Jesus is laid in the tomb

Since 1971, the War on Drugs has cost over $1 trillion dollars and resulted in 45 million arrests.

While the US is home to only 5% of the world's population, it is home to 25% of the world's prison population.

According to an ACLU study, there are more than 3,200 people serving life sentences without the possibility of parole for non-violent offenses. 80% of these inmates are in prison for drug-related offenses. Of these inmates serving life sentences without parole, 65% are African American, 18% are white, and 16% Latino.

The per capita number of life without parole sentences in the US is 51 times that of Australia and 173 times that of the United Kingdom.

The personal engagement I did with this series set the stage for the series that follows: Stations of the Cross Mental Illness.

Red journal ramblings...

Day 18

Hi there friends, I was under the weather for part of last week, so I’m just now starting to play catch-up after not posting for several days. I’m continuing to share little bits of writing from the various projects. I created the first stations series in 2010 and ever since then I’ve tried to take on some kind of writing practice, almost always related to the Passion, during the Lenten season. Very rarely do I actually end up using any of this writing. What I’m sharing in this post comes from a large Leuchtturm journal that I’ve kept for many years. The ideas for four series are in it. (And notes on a romance novel that I really will write one day.) I’m struck over and over by the polemical tone of so much of this writing that I never did anything with. It feels strange and vulnerable to share this writing, but my hope always is to use the Lenten season to stretch myself artistically.

This journal contains notes and sketches for four different Stations of the Cross projects.

Stations of the Cross and Lutheran Witness (2021)

Public witness is fundamental to a Lutheran understanding of both evangelism and mission. After all, Martin Luther didn’t hide his 95 Theses under his pillow at night. He sent them to the Archbishop of Mainz. And when called upon to defend his theology at the Diet of Worms he declared, “Here I stand, I can do no other.”

Making these paintings is an outpouring of myself as a Lutheran. I believe in the power of art to catalyze transformation. But, more than that, I believe there is a peculiar, powerful grace at work when we put our hearts to work and create. The Apostle Paul reminds us that while we are yet to see each other face to face, the promise of the resurrection is a visionary one. The coming kin-dom of God means a fullness of sight. Art, though, will always be bound in some way by the limitations of vision. In the case of this series of artworks, I cannot divorce it from my place of privilege I, a white, cis woman, inhabit. Yet, art-making will always remain at the heart of my life because it is an expression of who I am as a Lutheran. I can do no other.

The miraculous grace that finds us when we create is that art builds bridges between the limitations of our vision and the kin-dom of God.

There is always this tension in these projects - knowing that my vision is inherently limited, I create work about complex social issues anyway. Tomorrow, I’ll be sharing the final images in Stations of the Cross: Mass Incarceration and the first ones in Stations of the Cross: Mental Illness.

It's a point worth making

Day 12

I spent part of this evening going through some of my old journals. I’ve always been a prolific note taker, list-maker, and journaler. There are hundreds of pages in these journals dedicated to my stations projects over the years. Lots of half-written blog posts that we’re never actually posted. Lots of to-do lists related to their yearly release: website updates, email blasts, invoices, orders, the lists truly go on and on. Some of the notes from years past are practically nonsensical. And some make hilariously practical note about the Gospels. Here’s one note-to-self I found this evening:

Limitations of the narrative are illuminating - no single narrative can tell a whole truth. We need lots of stories. It’s worth mentioning that there are FOUR canonical accounts of Jesus’s death.

It is a point worth making, but probably just in a notebook that no one ever sees. These little bits of writing tell the story of how I’ve processed this ongoing work. What my preoccupations have been and how I engaged with the subject matter in my own life. I was reminded that one year while I was a mission developer at Evergreen Presbyterian Church we built Lenten programming around the Stations of the Cross: Mass Incarceration.

Evergreen had just purchased a new storefront space and I painted our windows to correspond to themes in our worship.

Throughout the season we held space in worship for people to write letters of encouragement to imprisoned people living in solitary confinement. During this time in the service we listened to the Civil Rights anthem Keep Your Eyes on the Prize (sometimes called Gospel Plow). Lyrics to the song were incorporated into the window designs. The idea was to set aside time in worship to ritualize solidarity with our incarcerated siblings. It was a powerful spiritual discipline to practice each week during worship. 

Jesus is Stripped of His Clothes

Inmates serving life sentences without parole reported to the ACLU being held in solitary confinement for periods ranging anywhere from a few days to 13-14 years at a time.

In 2013, Herman Wallace, a member of the Angola Three, was released from 40 years in solitary confinement, dying three days later from advanced liver cancer.

The tenth station depicts protestors at the Louisiana State Capitol advocating for Herman Wallace’s release from solitary confinement at Angola State Prison. I was deeply impacted by the reporting around Wallace’s release and subsequent death. It was several years after the creation of the artwork that we used it at Evergreen and incorporated letter writing into worship. My hope always is that the art has a real world impact, that it doesn’t simply hang on a wall, but infiltrates worship and ritual.

52 years later

Day 11

I didn’t set out to keep a Lenten blog about the Stations of the Cross. My plan was to write a 40 day devotional waaaaaaay in advance of the start of Lent. But, life got in the way of my plans and I decided that I would make blogging about the stations my Lenten practice. With every one of my projects, I’ve tried to create new ways for people to engage with the material. When I released Stations of the Cross: Mass Incarceration, I included a free PDF download of a study guide. I paired each station with an essay about the issue that the artwork addressed. It’s been interesting to re-visit these early projects.

An overarching theme of this series is the War on Drugs. The short essay below is from the opening essay in the study guide - it went along with the first station. I have included in the post a side-by-side of the first two stations in this series - both feature moments from the history of the War on Drugs. Like the LGBTQ+ series that precedes it, this series incorporates historical events into its narrative. The essay below was my attempt at trying to provide a historical framework to the series.

From The Stations of the Cross: Mass Incarceration Study Guide, 2013

This series begins with the pairing of an image of Pontius Pilate washing his hands after ordering the crucifixion of Jesus with one of Richard Nixon signing the Comprehensive Drug Abuse Prevention and Control Act. In 1970, Richard Nixon declared illegal drugs “public enemy number one” and out of this calculated attempt to appeal to law and order conservatives came the Comprehensive Drug Abuse Prevention and Control Act (CDAPCA), a piece of legislation that put into motion the war on drugs as we now know it. As Michelle Alexander explains in The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, “the Act included a civil forfeiture provision authorizing the government to seize and forfeit drugs, drug manufacturing and storage equipment, and conveyances used to transport drugs.” This provision allowed for police departments to increase their budgets through the possession of property or cash seized based on the suspicion of illegal drug activity. The sudden influx of money into police budgets is directly responsible for the explosive proliferation of paramilitary units in narcotics departments in cities across the United States. While SWAT (Special Weapons and Tactics) teams were in use before the CDAPCA, they were used sparingly and in extraordinary circumstances. According to Alexander, in 1972 there were only a few hundred drug raids by SWAT teams. By the 1980s, there were thousands; in the 90s tens of thousands, and in 2001 more than 40,000.

The exponential increase in the deployment of SWAT teams is emblematic of the extent to which the war on drugs has destroyed Fourth Amendment protections against “unreasonable search and seizures.” Michelle Alexander concludes that: “The absence of significant constraints on the exercise of police discretion is a key feature of the drug war’s design. It has made the roundup of millions of Americans for nonviolent drug offenses relatively easy.”

Not all of the Stations address the War on Drugs directly, but the series begins with the signing of the CDAPCA because it marks the moment at which political rhetoric around drug use became a militarized force. In the years since the start of the War on Drugs, the penal population in the United States went from roughly 300,000 to over 2 million. Of the more than 3,200 inmates in American prisons serving life sentences without the possibility of parole, more than 80% of them are incarcerated for non-violent drug offenses. Of these inmates serving life sentences without parole, 65% are African American, 18% white, and 16% Latino.

It is our own individual vulnerabilities, traumas, and failings that create within us wells of compassion. I care passionately about the issue of mass incarceration because of the relationships that I have had with students through my experiences teaching art within the American prison system. What I have found is that there is deep truth in these words of the Talmud: “Whoever destroys a soul, it is considered as if he destroyed an entire world. And whoever saves a life, it is considered as if he saved an entire world.” Around every human life revolves an entire world of relationships, of loves and intimacies, of heartbreaks and trauma, and when a person is incarcerated a whole world is shattered. For this reason, the decision to send a person to prison must be reached justly and our current legal system is incapable of doing that. My hope is that by telling the story of Jesus’ crucifixion with images and stories from inside the realities of the prison system, viewers can come into a fuller understanding of both.

Entertaining angels unawares (part deux)

Day 10

More from my sermon on Hebrews 13, a reflection on my time as a prison educator.

Simon Helps Carry the Cross

In November 2010, family members of juvenile inmates at Walnut Grove Youth Correctional Facility filed suit against the Geo Group alleging that the guards at the facility engaged in sexual violence against youth and drug smuggling. 50% of the juveniles incarcerated at Walnut Grove were serving sentences for non-violent offenses.

In February 2012, Warden and then 8 term mayor of Walnut Grove, MS William Grady Sims plead guilty to removing a female inmate to a motel for sex and pressuring her to lie about it. While he faced a sentence of up to 20 years, he served only 7 months in prison with 6 months of house arrest and two years supervised release for federal witness tampering.

Christian communities concerned with the growing number of Americans imprisoned in county jails, and state and federal prisons and detention centers live in a state of paradox: the fear of incarceration and detention is immediate in many of these communities, yet there is a clear and palpable disconnect with the realities of the day to day lives of the incarcerated. During my summer teaching at Lee Arrendale, I was allowed glimpses into what the daily realities of life in prison are for many women. To a person, each of my students experienced violence during their incarceration. For my students who are parents, separation from their children devastated them and their families on the outside, where their children are more likely to face incarceration and experience violence themselves. 

My classroom in the vocational building at Lee Arrendale was across the hall from where one of the parenting classes was taught. In the mornings as I prepared my lessons, laying out paints and brushes, markers and construction paper, I heard the chaplain lead classes for new moms. Women who had given birth in jail awaiting trial, or after arriving at Lee Arrendale. I taught Friday mornings and Saturdays were often visitation days at the prison. I’ll never forget one morning as I was carefully laying out my bright and colorful supplies, planning in my head what I hoped would be an afternoon of art-making that could take my students away -- for just a few hours -- from the grimness of life inside an American prison.

Jesus Falls the Second Time

There are 2.7 million minor children who have a parent in jail or prison.

As I did all of this, I could hear -- even as I willed my ears to stop listening -- the lesson being taught across the hall by the chaplain in the parenting class: “It’s difficult,” she said, “But, you must prepare yourself, those of you with babies. Prepare yourself for the chance that your baby won’t recognize you tomorrow. Your baby might not want to be held by you. They might cry for the person who holds them in your absence.”

Then there was a shuffle and an angry shout and a woman in her prison jumpsuit running out of the parenting class with hot tears pouring down her face. Those tears, of a frantic and scared young mother separated from her baby, humbled me that morning. They taught me something about the type of humility that Jesus preaches about in our story from Luke. It’s a humility that reminds us that we are, each and every one of us, beloved by God and that the love we have for each other, binds us to one another as much as it binds us to God, whose love follows us even behind prison bars.

It’s not a humility that says, “let me humble myself so that I can get what I want -- that place of honor at the banquet table,” but rather the humility that teaches us that the banquet table is big enough for all of us. It’s so big, in fact, that there’s room for each and every one of us in all of our trauma and our triumph. Room enough for our feelings, even the ones we want to run away from. Room enough for our resentments, room enough for our relationships, even the broken ones. God claims each and every one of us and invites us to a table where there is room for all people because the force of God’s abounding grace makes room for all people. Even you. Even me. For we have not been bidden to show mercy to the good, and to punish the wicked, but to show this kindness to all. Each and every one of us are claimed by God as beloved and there is for each and every one of us room at God’s table.

Entertaining angels unawares

Day 9

My fourth Stations of the Cross series explored the theme of mass incarceration. The series is inspired by my experience teaching in the American prison system. I have taught in a state prison and a county jail. I have written a lot of mass incarceration in the years since this project came out. Somewhere floating around my Google Drive is the original artist statement that I wrote for this series. But, instead of sharing any of that writing, I thought that I’d begin by sharing a sermon that I wrote on Hebrews 13:3. I’m interspersing the first three Stations of the Cross: Mass Incarceration with the sermon. I will share the entirety of the sermon over the course of the next two days. More tomorrow!

Jesus is Condemned to Death

On October, 27, 1970 President Richard Nixon signed the Comprehensive Drug Abuse Prevention and Control Act. The Act allowed police to conduct "no-knock" searches, established "schedules" for drugs, and created a sentencing structure in which multiple drug sales, if prosecuted in one proceeding, can result in a life sentence without the possibility of parole.

I had just finished a Master of Theological Studies and I was hired to be a member of the summer faculty in a prison theology program at Lee Arrendale State Prison for Women in Alto, Georgia -- a rural town about an hour-and-a-half from Atlanta. It’s an incredible program in which incarcerated students are able to take any number of courses designed and taught by graduate students and professors from a consortium of seminaries in Atlanta, including the Candler School of Theology at Emory University where I had just finished my studies. 

The prison theology program is a two year commitment for students, it’s still in existence almost a decade later. It has many of the same course requirements that seminaries have, students take a balance of coursework in systematics,  pastoral theology, Biblical studies, homiletics, and more. The class that I taught was on liturgical art, a particular area of interest for me, which meant that my class was less papers and systematics and more finger-painting and poetry.

In Georgia -- and many other states -- inmates can only take continuing education or vocational classes while in prison if they’re within a certain number of years before their release. This means that people facing life sentences without the possibility of parole are often unable to access the already limited opportunities for education while in prison. Because the prison theology program is part of the ministry of the chaplain’s office those rules didn’t apply to us. Which meant that many of my students were women serving life sentences, women who were considered the highest of security risks in a high security state prison that has a reputation as a place of incredible violence. 

Entering Lee Arrendale on that first day was a somewhat terrifying experience. The prison campus itself looks enough like a depressed, grey and aging, military school for wayward teenagers to not be all that menacing. Except for all of the razor wire. Everywhere. Before the prison dormitories are even in sight, there is razor wire. Razor wire and heavy chain-link fences around every building. Guards are everywhere and inmates are marched from one building to another with their heads down. Entering the prison for the first time was an anxiety-producing experience to say the least.

But whatever ideas I might have had about who my students were evaporated the second they walked into our shared classroom. In spite of the very rigid rules laid out by the Department of Corrections that stipulate that there must not be physical contact between teachers and inmates, one after another of my students hugged me by way of greeting and thanked me for teaching the class. With each embrace, I was forced to confront preconceived ideas about my students that I had been unwilling to admit to myself. In spite of the fact that I started my work at the prison, convinced of the structural injustices of the justice system, I had not yet fully accepted my students for who they are: my siblings, bound to me in the kinship of the family of Christ.

Jesus Accepts His Cross

On May 8, 1973 New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller signed the Rockefeller Drug Laws, which established mandatory minimums for the sale and possession of illegal narcotics with a minimum sentence of 15 years and a maximum of 25 years to life.

My experiences teaching at Lee Arrendale and, later, in the Shelby County jail system in Memphis, TN made our reading in Hebrews a mandate on my life: 

Let mutual love continue. Do not neglect to show hospitality to strangers, for by doing that some have entertained angels without knowing it. Remember those who are in prison, as though you were in prison with them; those who are being tortured, as though you yourselves were being tortured.  Heb 13:1-3

What Hebrews implore us to do -- to visit the incarcerated -- is something that transforms the life of our communities. It expands our understanding of God’s presence in the world because to visit the imprisoned is to be reminded that just as nothing can separate us as individuals from the love of God in Christ, nothing -- not even the highest razor wire -- can separate anyone else from the love of God in Christ. We are bound to one another by Christ’s love for us. We are loved by Christ and the people we find the least loveable are just as beloved.

At the time the Letter to the Hebrews was written, the realities and attendant fears of imprisonment were immediate in the community and great importance was placed on visiting the imprisoned. Prisoners of the Roman Empire often died of starvation, relying as they did on food being brought to them by outsiders. In his Baptismal Instructions, the early church father John Chrysostom characterized the Christian practice of visiting the imprisoned as one of the ‘sweetest tasks’ of Christian devotion. Chrystotom laid out his instructions for visiting the imprisoned in a text titled Baptismal Instructions because for him, and for the early church, caring for people in prison was a part of our baptismal covenant, a covenant that reminds us that in the waters of baptism we are each of us claimed by Christ just as we are, wherever we are.

 And Chrystotom is clear that Christians must not visit only fellow Christians, but also ‘murderers, and grave-robbers, and purse snatchers, and adulterers, and libertines, and men weighed down by many crimes.’ Expounding on this directive, he writes, “For we have not been bidden to show mercy to the good, and to punish the wicked, but to show this kindness to all.”

Jesus Falls the First Time

Prisoners serving life sentences as a result of mandatory minimums are unable to have their sentences retroactively reviewed and reduced under Supreme Court decisions ruling that the way in which they were sentenced is unconstitutional.

More tomorrow…

Divine dissatisfaction

Day 8

Is it better to risk saying the wrong thing than to say nothing in the face of injustice? I don’t know what the right answer to that question is for me, a white cis woman who reaps the benefits of white privilege and supremacy. I was a mess before the release of each and every one of these projects. As in sleepless nights, upset stomach, the usual anxiety culprits. Because with every series I have risked saying the exact wrong thing. 

In my first post I talked about how my thinking has evolved since my first Stations of the Cross for Haiti and the regrets I have about that initial attempt. It was an outpouring of my heart, made in a mad dash during Spring Break. When I created the two series that came after it, I had better insight into not just the artwork, but myself. Yet, when I look back now at The Stations of the Cross: The Struggle for  LGBTQ+ Equality I have many of the same uneasy feelings about the project as I do about the Haiti series. 

All of these projects capture a moment in time. A moment in my own personal time. I can’t neatly separate myself from the work as it reflects my own passions, interests, and scholarship. As I evolve, so too does my work. And they also capture a moment in historical time. As our societal discourse evolves so, too, does the language I use in the prayers I write and the artists statements that I craft. This is both a strength and weakness of the Stations of the Cross projects, but I mostly see it as a weakness. When the Stations of the Cross for LGBTQ+ Equality came out, I used only the acronym LGBT. As language around gender and sexual identity became more expansive, I updated the title. I think it probably ought to be updated again.

Station 5: Simon of Cyrene helps Jesus carry the cross

1950: 190 individuals in the U.S. are dismissed from government employment for their sexual orientation, commencing the Lavender Scare. The fear and persecution of homosexuals in the 1950s paralleled the anti-communist scare campaigns of McCarthyism.

There are a lot of layers to the LGBTQ+ series in particular. It is a chronological history, meaning that there is an evolution of language documented in the artworks that makes it all the more jarring.

It feels like a weakness to me - how time-bound these projects can be - because I am someone that always wants to be right the first time. Maybe you can relate. I want to be absolutely right about every little thing, down to the very nitty gritty, right off the bat. Even though I know that it’s only through the process of making and creating and getting it fantastically and spectacularly wrong that I’m able to be better. To be a more faithful interpreter of Scripture. This is where I see the strength of the time-bound nature of so much of my Stations of the Cross work - it gives me an opportunity over and over and over again to say I was wrong. To live with artwork for more than a decade (as I have with the Stations) and with each of those passing years, to see how outdated language and imagery becomes, it means that I have an opportunity as a pastor and as a liturgical artist to model what it means as a Christian and, yes, as a white cis person to say, “I’m sorry, I got this wrong. I’ll do better.” And that is something that I say and commit to with every one of these projects, knowing full well that there are things I’ll get wrong anyway.

I want to end this post with one of my very favorite reflections on art-making and the creative process. It’s something the legendary choreographer Martha Graham said in conversation with another legendary choreographer, Agnes de Mille. The conversation was recounted by de Mille in her memoirs where she said it was the most powerful thing ever said to her. She and Graham were in a diner, talking over sodas. Here is how she tells it:

I confessed that I had a burning desire to be excellent, but no faith that I could be.

Martha said to me, very quietly: “There is a vitality, a life force, an energy, a quickening that is translated through you into action, and because there is only one of you in all of time, this expression is unique. And if you block it, it will never exist through any other medium and it will be lost. The world will not have it. It is not your business to determine how good it is nor how valuable nor how it compares with other expressions. It is your business to keep it yours clearly and directly, to keep the channel open. You do not even have to believe in yourself or your work. You have to keep yourself open and aware to the urges that motivate you. Keep the channel open. As for you, Agnes, you have so far used about one-third of your talent.”

“But,” I said, “when I see my work I take for granted what other people value in it. I see only its ineptitude, inorganic flaws, and crudities. I am not pleased or satisfied.” 

“No artist is pleased.” 

“But then there is no satisfaction?”

“No satisfaction whatever at any time,” she cried out passionately. “There is only a queer divine dissatisfaction, a blessed unrest that keeps us marching and makes us more alive than the others.”

I’ve always loved that turn of phrase, those words - a queer divine dissatisfaction - they capture so much of what I feel about my own work and my own life. Let’s keep marching together, friends!

Borrowing from Buechner

Day 7

There is so much that I’ve struggled to say over the years about these various projects. There are two quotes from Frederick Buechner’s excellent book The Magnificent Defeat that perfectly encapsulate the two truths behind the Stations of the Cross. I’m going to include these two quotes alongside three more pieces from Stations of the Cross for LGBTQ+ Equality. Both stations depict the persecution of queer people during the Third Reich.

Every generation crucifies Christ anew. The Apostle Paul said it. So did C.S. Lewis and G.K. Chesterton. Buechner put it this way: Our father. We have killed him, and we will kill him again, and our world will kill him. And yet he is there. It is he who listens at the door. It is he who is coming. It is our father who is about to be born. Through Jesus Christ our Lord.

That idea is at the very heart of these ongoing projects. Jesus is always with us, always listening, always coming into our world. And everyday, every minute, we’re given an opportunity to welcome Christ by providing love and care for those pushed to the margins in our own society, those trapped in systems of injustice, right here and right now. As Jesus assures us in the Gospel of Matthew, whatever we do for the least of these, we do for him. The Stations of the Cross asks us to look at those times when we fail to live up to that invitation. And to pray about it.

Station 3: Jesus falls the first time

1933: The National Socialist German Workers Party bans homosexual groups under Paragraph 175. Homosexuals are sent to concentration camps.

Station 4: Jesus meets his mother

1945: Upon liberation of Nazi concentration camps by Allied forces, some interned for homosexuality are not freed, but required to serve out the full term of their sentences under Paragraph 175.

The other Frederick Buechner quote that inspires this ongoing work is this: Christ never promises peace in the sense of no more struggle and suffering. Instead, he helps us to struggle and suffer as he did, in love, for one another. Christ does not give us security in the sense of something in this world, some cause, some principle, some value, which is forever. Instead, he tells us that there is nothing in this world that is forever, all flesh is grass. He does not promise us unlonely lives. His own life speaks loud of how, in a world where there is little love, love is always lonely. Instead of all these, the answer that he gives, I think, is himself. If we go to him for anything else, he may send us away empty or he may not. But if we go to him for himself, I believe that we go away always with this deepest of all our hungers filled.

In Search of Holy Time

Day 6

Each Stations of the Cross series that I’ve created is shaped by the series that came before it. The Stations of the Cross for Syria were shaped by the mistakes of the series that preceded it. The series that followed Stations of the Cross for Syria is called Stations of the Cross: The Struggle for LGBTQ+ Equality. The two series both explore the notion of time in similar ways. The Syria series depicted a recent history, drawing on news articles from the first year of the Syrian uprising and creating a chronology, matching news from Syria with moments in the Passion narrative. The Stations didn’t go on display until Holy Week at which time the events depicted in the artwork had just happened.

Jesus is laid in the tomb: March 30, 2012

Protesters took to the streets in mass in weekly Friday protests, with the largest occurring in Damascus and its suburbs, Hama, Homs, the Idlib province, Aleppo and the Daraa province. 55 protesters and civilians were killed by security forces across the country, primarily in Homs and Deir Ezzor

The following year I was approached by my good friend Alison Amyx about collaborating with Believe Out Loud on a Stations of the Cross project. Stations of the Cross for LGBTQ+ Equality is what came out of this collaboration. This project also creates a chronology matching moments in the Passion narrative with moments of lament and mourning in twentieth/twenty-first century queer history.

Station 2: Jesus carries his cross

1924: The first homosexual rights organization in America is founded by Henry Garber in Chicago – the Society for Human Rights. The group exists for a few months before disbanding under police pressure. The charter of the organization makes up the background of this station. [The series dealt primarily with U.S. history.]

Each station depicts moments in queer history and the end goal was for the work to go on display at The Church of the Resurrection in Washington, D.C. during Holy Week in 2013. The United States Supreme Court was hearing oral arguments that week on the constitutionality of the Defense of Marriage Act and faith-based activists gathered at the church in the morning before demonstrating outside the court. It was a strange and humbling experience to engage with the very painful historical event depicted in the series while preparing for the work itself to be a part of another historical moment. 

In some ways this project felt like a return to my college-self. I interned at Visual AIDS for the Arts while I was a student at New York University and wrote my senior thesis on the work of Gran Fury. I was deeply involved with AIDS activism in my early twenties and it was that work that first brought me into the ecumenical movement. 

Station 10: Jesus is stripped of his garments

1981: The first official documentation of GRID (Gay Related Infectious Disease, later renamed AIDS) was published by Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The images in this station are ones that illustrate the HIV virus.

I’ll be sharing some more from Stations of the Cross for LGBTQ+ Equality tomorrow along with some reflections on the way that this particular series has aged as our understanding of and language around gender, sexuality, and identity has evolved in the last decade.

All lent all the time

Day 4

Each of these projects have come with their own unique breakthrough. Each project has opened my eyes to some new potential for devotional artwork. I created Stations of the Cross for Syria during Lent then started posting artwork on Facebook as I finished it. I uploaded the artworks to Flickr with a creative commons license and encouraged people to download the project and use it in their personal devotions or in their churches.

I was shocked by the reception the series received - a couple dozen churches in the U.S. and U.K. displayed the artwork during Holy Week that year. It was exhilarating to think that I had created artwork that helped people pray for our siblings in Syria, all at once, together and during the  highest holy days of our faith. The idea of creating artwork that organized multiple congregations, all around the world, in prayer was very intriguing to me. And has inspired me to return to the Stations of the Cross again and again.

By the time I finished Stations of the Cross for Syria, I was starting to think about what the next year’s series would address. It was at this point that the Stations of the Cross became a year-round obsession rather than something that I just did during Lent.

Jesus Meets His Mother: May 6, 2011 

On May 6, after noon prayers, demonstrations took place across Syria to protest the Assad regime, especially in the suburbs of Damascus and the cities of Homs, Hama, Baniyas, and in Syrian Kurdistan. Within hours of the protest, video and audio of Syrian security forces responding with lethal force appeared on social networking sites. About 7,000 protestors wearing funeral shrouds and carrying olive branches and flowers gathered in Baniyas and met the army peacefully. Thousands of Syrians attempted to march to Deraa, but security forces maintained the siege of city and would not allow them to enter with supplies for the residents.

One thing that working on these projects over years and years has taught me is just how interconnected we all are. Which means that our suffering and our healing are interconnected. Stations of the Cross for Syria opened up my thinking about the devotional aspects of future projects. And the people of Syria have remained in my heart and in my prayers. 

Four years after I completed Stations of the Cross for Syria, I created two icons during the Battle of Aleppo. The piece on the right is titled Flight Out of Aleppo and was based on a photograph of a family fleeing the city.  The piece on the left is titled The Massacre of the Innocents of Aleppo and was completed on the Feast of the Massacre of the Innocents in December 2016 during an intense bombing campaign that saw the end of the Battle of Aleppo. This was a decisive turning point in the conflict.

As I mentioned at the end of yesterday’s post, there are stations in my 2020 series Stations of the Cross: Refugee Journeys that address the plight of Syrian civil war refugees.

The Sixth Station: Veronica Wipes the Face of Jesus

Almost 6 million Syrians have been forced to flee their country since 2011. Almost 7 millions Syrians have been forced to leave their homes, but remain displaced within their own country. The majority of Syrian refugees have fled to neighboring countries like Turkey and Lebanon. More than half of these refugees are under the age of 18. Source: The UN Refugee Agency.

At some point, I made an unconscious decision to live with the Stations of the Cross, to make it the center of my artistic practice, and that has meant that the themes of these series have impacted other projects as well - like, for example, my series of contemporary icons which saw me responding to the Battle of Aleppo. As I continue to share artwork here over this Lenten season, you’ll see how interconnected much of my work has become the longer that I’ve been making Stations of the Cross artworks.

Stations of the Cross for Syria

Day Three

I work in series. I think it’s a photography thing. Photography was my first love and my college major. And to get one really good photograph, you often have to take a couple hundred first. I rarely create one-off artworks except in the case of commissions. And in the case of the Stations of the Cross, I’ve often thought of them as series within series. Every year, every topic, a new approach to an ancient format and story. And, as fundamentally important as my first Stations of the Cross series was for me personally as an introduction into how to engage with the narrative, it is a mess. If creating these works is like cooking, that series is the misshapen pancake that you have to get out of the way before you have a real handle on the griddle.

It’s with my second attempt at the Stations of the Cross that I began to feel like I had a *little* bit of a handle on the format. I created my first series in 2010 while in graduate school, then was fully immersed in my thesis project in 2011. So there was a two year gap between the first two projects. I created my second series in the spring of 2012 while I was working as the Minister of Visual Art at First Congregational Church (UCC) in Memphis, TN. The work addressed the Syrian uprising at a time when the news media in the United States at that time was preoccupied with nonstop coverage of the 2012 election cycle. I began this series out of a sense of frustration that the voices of our Syrian siblings calling out for help were being drowned out by endless news coverage about the U.S. election.

These are the first two stations in the series Stations of the Cross for Syria. Each station depicts events of one day in the first year of the Syrian uprising. The series went on display during Holy Week with the last three stations depicting events of that week. It is the only one of my stations series that depicted events as they unfolded.

January 26, 2011: Jesus is condemned to death by Pilate 

Hasan Ali Akleh from Al-Hasakah poured gasoline on himself and set himself on fire. Witnesses to the self-immolation described the action as an act of rebellion against the Syrian regime. Two days later protesters gathered in Ar-Raqqah to protest the killing of two soldiers of Kurdish descent. On February 2, 2011 protesters called for a “Day of Rage” from the 3rd-4th, these protests used many social media sites, especially Facebook and Twitter. The demands of the protestors start to take shape. One of the main goals was ending Syria’s emergency law which effectively suspended most constitutional protections. The law designated the prime minister as the martial law governor of the country, giving him almost absolute power. Other demands include: resignation of Bashar al-Assad, recognition of Kurdish rights, and abolition of the Supreme State Security Court. The poster being held by the little girl reads: “O Arabs, Syrian people slaughtered.”

March 15, 2011: Jesus Accepts His Cross 

March 15th is also declared a “Day of Rage” and simultaneous demonstrations took place in cities all across Syria. In Damascus, a group of 200 men grew spontaneously to include over 1,500 people. There were supportive demonstrations in Cairo, Nicosia, Helsinki, Istanbul, and Berlin.

Eight years after I finished this series, I created Stations of the Cross: Refugee Journeys (2020). That series includes several stations addressing the refugee crisis caused by the civil war in Syria. In tomorrow’s post, I’ll discuss how Stations of the Cross for Syria came to influence all of the work that followed.

Always being transformed

Day Two

In the spirit of Lutheranism, let me begin my day two Lenten blog post with a confession: the very first Stations of the Cross I created featured a white Jesus. I feel a hot flush of embarrassment just typing that out. I made my very first Stations of the Cross series while I was still in graduate school at the Candler School of Theology at Emory University. I knew then - just as I know now - that Jesus was not a white man. But, as a young white woman, I had only ever encountered depictions of a nonwhite Jesus in Black churches. And I am now, as I was then, a member in the whitest denomination in the United States. Back then, to draw anything other than a white Jesus felt like I was appropriating something deeply sacred and intimate. Is there anything more deeply personal than the image of Jesus you carry in your heart and mind when you read Scripture?

I called the first series Stations of the Cross for Haiti. I created it in the days and weeks after the 2010 earthquake in Haiti. I was deeply aware of the tension in my own mind between my desire to create an authentic re-telling of the Passion and the reluctance I felt at creating what I worried would be a culturally appropriative depiction of Jesus. In the end, I thought that I could capture that tension by bringing the story of the death of a Haitian man in ICE custody alongside illustrations of a Renaissance-art inspired style. The fourteen paintings were displayed in the chapel at Candler and at each painting was an excerpt from Edwige Danticat’s memoir Brother, I’m Dying. The book includes an account of her uncle’s death in Immigration and Customs Enforcement custody after seeking amnesty from gang violence in Haiti.

Brother, I’m Dying by Edwige Danticat inspired my first Stations of the Cross series. I took sections of the narrative and matched them to moments in the Passion story.

At each station was a small bowl of glass tiles, participants were encouraged to hold the glass tile while they prayed for Haiti and then affix the tile to the painting. (The tiles had a sticky back to them.) All fourteen paintings were installed throughout the chapel and people walked from station to station, praying for Haiti, and adding their colored tiles to the artworks. The paintings went up during Holy Week and people prayed the stations throughout the week. On Easter Sunday, the Stations were filled with bright glass tiles. 

But, in the end, at the very center of the artwork is a white Jesus. And the proliferation of depictions of white Jesus for the past few millennia is precisely why the image of Jesus so many carry in their hearts and minds is white in the first place.  I haven’t made a single depiction of white Jesus since the completion of Stations of the Cross for Haiti. I was fundamentally changed by the creation of that first series which is why I keep coming back to the Stations of the Cross over and over. Every project has changed me profoundly and transformed my perspective on Jesus in big and small ways. 

I’m taking a pause from creating a new Stations of the Cross series this year. For this Lenten season, I’m spending time with and reflecting on the ten series that I’ve spent more than a decade creating. For the 40 days of Lent, I’ll be sharing here some of the insights and experiences I’ve gained from living in this way with the Passion story. Here is the very first Station of the Cross artwork from my first series in 2010 to the last artwork in my most recent series from 2022.

Left: The first Station of the Cross, Jesus is Condemned by Pilate, from the 2010 Stations of the Cross for Haiti. This is the way the piece looked before it was installed and glass tiles were added to it. It was photographed in a dimly lit graduate student dorm, so it’s not the best photo.

Right: The final pairing in Stations of the Cross and Resurrection (2022). In last year’s series I paired Stations from the Cross with Stations of the Resurrection, the latter is a relatively new devotional practice drawing on Christ’s post-resurrection ministry. In this piece, Paul on the Road to Damascus is paired with Jesus Dies on the Cross. The bottom piece shows an Afghan family abandoned at the Kabul airport after the withdrawal of American military forces in Afghanistan. The image piece depicts a pair of Afghan siblings meeting art at the Philadelphia airport after being successfully evacuated from Kabul.

Stay tuned! Tomorrow I’ll be back with more art about Jesus!

An Ash Wednesday Invitation

Day One

I’ve always been quite enamored of the 10,000 hour rule. It’s the supposed rule of thumb that doing something – whether it’s writing recipes, or replacing car engines - for 10,000 hours brings a certain level of mastery to a subject. It’s an idea that was popularized by Malcolm Gladwell in his book Outliers. But, the idea comes from an article first published more than forty years ago in American Scientist. At the conclusion of a paper about chess grandmasters the researchers wrote:

There are no instant experts in chess—certainly no instant masters or grandmasters. There appears not to be on record any case (including Bobby Fischer) where a person reached grandmaster level with less than about a decade's intense preoccupation with the game. We would estimate, very roughly, that a master has spent perhaps 10,000 to 50,000 hours staring at chess positions.

This article launched a whole body of psychological research about practice and expertise. The overwhelming conclusion being that expertise takes time and dedication above all else including natural talent.

If you do something 40 hours a week, for 52 weeks that’s a little more than 2,000 hours. So - if we follow this 10,000 hour experiment - approximately five years of full-time dedication to a subject is the sweet spot. If practice makes perfect, it’s when you’re five years into practicing something that you start to achieve a level of expertise. But, for the greatest of chess grandmasters - that level of mastery is only possible after a decade’s work, closer to 50,000 hours than 10,000. Mastery requires practice and dedication. And sometimes demands weird things from us, too. I claim to be an expert in almost nothing. But, there is one thing that I’ve poured tens of thousands of hours into: the Stations of the Cross, the fourteen artworks that tell the story of Jeus’s death from his condemnation by Pilate to the placing of his body in the grave.

In my work as a liturgical artist, I’ve created ten different Stations of the Cross series of artworks. I created my first series in 2010 and my most recent in 2022. Twelve years. 10 series. 145 individual artworks. The creation of each series takes hundreds of hours. Days, weeks, and months of work poured into each of the ten series. I don’t claim to be a master, but I have immersed myself in this very particular way of telling the Passion story for many years and have learned some things along the way that I think are worth sharing, something that I’ll be doing here throughout this Lenten season here on this blog. 

I first became interested in the Stations of the Cross because of how deeply visual it is as a devotional practice. I first saw them sculpted into the walls of cathedrals in Germany when I was a teenager, but saw more modern adaptations in the Roman Catholic churches in South Louisiana where I sometimes attended mass with my grandparents. I soon realized that, for many Christians, the Stations of the Cross are a place of healing. A place of sanctuary within the sanctuary. A place to encounter a God who knows unbearable pain too. 

The Stations of the Cross visually depict moments in the Passion story. In the traditional Roman Catholic version there are fourteen stations. This version includes scenes like Veronica wipes the face of Jesus which is an apocryphal story and part of Roman Catholic tradition, but not based in the Gospel. Catholics in the Philippines use what they call The New Way of the Cross which dedicates an entire station to the penitent thief. These depictions of the Passion vary widely in medium and context. The Stations of the Cross are sometimes sculptural and carved into the walls (or otherwise part of the architecture) while more modern Catholic sanctuaries might have stained glass or painted versions. Whatever the medium, when displayed in a physical space, the person praying the Stations of the Cross moves from depiction to depiction, station to station. Central to this experience is the physical movement from one moment in the story to the next.

The Stations of the Cross emerged as a devotional practice to imitate the pilgrimage made by hundreds of thousands of Christians through the Via Dolorosa, the path supposedly taken by Jesus through the city of Jerusalem as he carried the cross toward Golgotha. Today, that path begins where the Antonia Fortress, the military headquarters built by Herod the Great, once stood and ends at the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, a total distance of around 2,000 feet. The route that pilgrims take today dates back to the eighteenth century when consensus began to emerge on where exactly these things happened. Nine of the stations are outdoors and in the street, while five of the stations are inside the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. 

The Stations of the Cross are meant to replicate this pilgrimage through art. By contemplating fourteen paintings (or sculptures, etc.) which tell the Passion story, a person can experience the journey with the cross through the heart of Jerusalem. But, the Passion story isn’t just about Jesus’s journey with the cross. It’s a story about suffering in every age, in every place. Jesus was born in the most ordinary of circumstances, in poverty and obscurity. And he died the same way. The death of a common criminal. So, what does it mean to love and worship a God who died on the cross?

For me, it has meant living with the Stations of the Cross, using those fourteen moments in the Passion story to tell other stories about human suffering, suffering in our midst. 

If I had to sum up the thousands of hours I’ve poured into making Stations of the Cross artworks, it would be with this: you can’t fully understand the Passion story if you can’t also see and hear it in stories of suffering right here and now. Over the years, my Stations of the Cross series have addressed the 2010 earthquake in Haiti, the Syrian uprising, the struggle for LGBTQ+ equality, mass incarceration, mental illness, climate change, the crisis at the U.S./Mexico border, the plight of refugees around the world, and the ongoing COVID pandemic. I will be posting paintings from these series every single day during this Lenten season. I invite you to follow along as I share artwork and stories from the years I’ve spent living with the Passion story. 

Annotated Bibliography

The bibliography is in process, check back later in the week!

Introducing the 2022 Stations of the Cross and Resurrection

Around this time last year I was weeping almost everyday. I’d open up Facebook and see photo after photo of my family and friends finally receiving their COVID vaccine shots and I’d be a weepy and joyful mess for the rest of the day. It seemed that we were finally beginning to emerge from this once-in-a-century pandemic. By the time spring arrived, and with it Eastertide, I decided that my tenth Stations project would be a Stations of the Resurrection. And by the time summer arrived, I decided that that was a terrible idea.

“Maybe not this year,” one of my mentors said when I told him about how I was considering scrapping my plans. And then, sometime in the fall, I remembered a conversation that I had with the incomparable Rev. Sam Lewis more than a decade ago. It was a Sunday evening at the Brick Store Pub where a group of us had gathered for one of our endless evenings arguing about theology.  As soon as she walked in the door, it was clear she was ticked off about something. “I heard the cross preached this morning without any mention of the resurrection!” she practically shouted after she’d ordered a beer. 

It’s her outrage over that homiletic misfire that’s been ringing in my head the last few months as I’ve prepared this year’s project. The promise of the resurrection is with us always - especially when we find ourselves in the shadow of the cross. So, I’m especially excited to share with you my first Stations of the Cross and Resurrection: Pandemic Resilience. I’m creating eight diptychs using the scriptural Stations of the Cross and pairing them with eight Stations of the Resurrection, which take viewers from the empty tomb to the road to Damascus where Saul becomes Paul. 

Jesus Is Condemned to Death/The Empty Tomb

Jesus’ condemnation by Pilate is paired with the empty tomb, and while the Station of the Cross lifts up images of the devastating second wave of COVID in India, the Station of the Resurrection features images of the first COVID vaccinations. My hope is that by pairing these two artworks we’re able to hold together and in tension, the ongoing pandemic, the unequal distribution of the vaccine globally, and the joy and hope many of us felt - and still feel - seeing medically vulnerable people receive the protection against serious illness that the vaccine provides.

Jesus Accepts His Cross/Jesus Meets Mary Magdalene

This second diptych pairs Jesus accepting his cross with the resurrected Christ meeting Mary Magdalene. The Station of the Cross features images from U.S. meatpacking plants where exploitative labor practices fueled devastating and deadly COVID outbreaks. The Station of the Resurrection features images from the workers rights movement of the last year. I have found great hope in the ways Americans are re-thinking and re-configuring their work lives.

Simon Helps Jesus Carry the Cross/Jesus on the Road to Emmaus

The third artwork in this series pairs Simon carrying the cross with Jesus on the road to Emmaus. The Station of the Cross depicts Simon carrying the cross in the midst of the shrine outside of Gold Spa in Atlanta where Asian women were brutally murdered. And the Station of the Resurrection lifts up images of hope and solidarity from the peaceful protests in Philadelphia in the wake of George Floyd’s murder.

You can pre-order both postcard and print sets. Each will include all 16 artworks. Prints will ship by the last week of February. Postcards will ship mid-March as production time will take a little longer. Just like last year, a portion of the proceeds from poster print sales will benefit RIP Medical Debt. 

Stations of the Cross Video Devotions and Prayers

Over the years, I’ve made several videos for my Stations of the Cross series. I’m including here YouTube videos from over the years as well as additional Zoom meditations that were created by myself and in collaboration with other folks over this unusual and challenging Holy Week.

It’s been a profound decade-long experience creating these bodies of work, I hope that they bless you the way that they’ve blessed me.

Stations of the Cross for Syria

The Stations of the Cross in this series take participants on two journeys: one through the death of Christ and another through the violence that has broken out across Syria. Each station incorporates images from the Syrian uprising and as you move through them a historical chronology of the unrest in Syria.

Stations of the Cross: Mass Incarceration

Stations of the Cross: Mass Incarceration is an attempt for Christians to engage in prayerful reflection and study of the issues surrounding mass incarceration.

The series combines images from the history of mass incarceration in America with those of the last day of Jesus’s life. The Stations begin with the advent of the War on Drugs because at the time of its start in the 1970s there were roughly 300,000 men and women incarcerated in the U.S; today there are over 2 million.

The Stations of the Cross are an ancient devotion meant to ground viewers in the story of Jesus's death, the Passion narrative. It is the story of the execution by empire of a political dissident and it is at the very heart of the Christian faith.

The 14 Stations in this series address just some aspects of the legal, historical, and cultural context of mass incarceration. By pairing events in the Passion narrative with events in the history of mass incarceration, I invite viewers into a new understanding of a God who suffers with those whom we have pushed to the margins of society and hidden from view in an increasingly powerful Prison Industrial Complex.

Stations of the Cross: Mental Illness

Stations of the Cross: Mental Illness addresses the cross-cutting theological implications of mental illness. The artwork in this series expresses some of the experiential quality of mania. As the colors darken, I hope to illuminate the darkness of depression as well as some of the implications for social justice presented by American society’s mistreatment of those with mental illnesses. The narrative shape of the series comes from Kay Redfied Jamison’s book Touched with Fire: Manic Depressive Illness and the Artistic Temperament. This book shepherded me through the first year after my diagnosis and helped me to understand the central point of this series of work: people with mental illness experience the world in ways that illuminate great truths about the very nature of human existence.

The stations illustrate the words of artists profiled in Jamison’s study of creativity and bipolarity, as well as some mentioned in another of her excellent books, Night Falls Fast: Understanding Suicide. Robert Lowell, Delmore Schwartz, August Strindberg, and Virginia Woolf are just a few of the artists included in this series.

This is a Stations of the Cross: Mental Illness meditation with spoken prayers from yesterday’s Maundy Thursday observance at Trinity Lutheran Church in Norristown, PA.

And, here’s a Zoom meditation on Stations of the Cross: Mental Illness led by the Rev. Mitzi Plummer Johnson from Saluda and Columbus UMC in Asheville, NC.

Stations of the Cross: Refugee Journeys.

I was thrilled to join this Zoom meditation on Stations of the Cross: Refugee Journeys led by the Rev. Sarah Hedgis and the Rev. Claire Nevin-Field of St. Peter’s Episcopal Church (Philadelphia) and myself.