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.

Stations of the Cross: Mental Illness in the Time of COVID-19

Jesus Falls from Stations of the Cross: Mental Illness

Never before have my Maundy Thursday preparations included turning my kitchen into a makeshift recording studio. It was a somewhat surreal experience putting this together - usually when I talk about my work it’s in conversation with folks, in person where I can meet people’s eyes and feel the Spirit’s presence in the room.

I didn’t feel too much of the Holy Spirit at midnight last night when I kept tripping over my words and finding typos during my first Zoom meditation. I felt at the end of my rope. When I finished in the early hours of the morning, I was exhausted -- that type of exhaustion you feel when your body says “enough” but your brain has other plans for you so you just lay in bed and wait for the sun to come up.

This is a Maundy Thursday unlike any other, yet the themes of vulnerability and community are as vivid and as enduring as ever. My Facebook and Instagram feeds are full of laypeople and clergy sharing themselves and witnessing to Christ’s work in our world. It is a vulnerable thing to share in this work together.

While I’m not putting my feet into your hands this evening, I am sharing a part of my heart.

Join me in praying for all folks struggling with mental health in this time of COVID-19.

Louisiana Heartsick

I’m not from Louisiana, I’m just a Louisiana partisan who happened to grow up in coastal Texas. Both of my parents are from Baton Rouge and moved back to their hometown almost ten years ago. Growing up, my brother and I spent a big chunk of our school breaks and holidays in Louisiana with family. I was blessed with a childhood filled with crawfish boils, tall tales (and dirty jokes) from Cajun relatives, and lots and lots of trips to New Orleans.

Louisiana has a big piece of my heart. Which means I’m heartsick a lot of the time.

Louisiana is the bellwether of the nation when it comes to disasters both natural and unnatural.

The state loses landmass the size of Manhattan every year to coastal erosion, the result of the logging and oil and gas industries. The loss of barrier islands, cypress marshes, and swamps makes Louisiana more vulnerable to the increasingly powerful hurricanes in the Gulf of Mexico.

The state also ranks second in the country in toxic chemical release and cancer rates. The impact of the petrochemical and oil and gas industries isn’t just environmental, but human as well. “Cancer Alley” is what Louisianians call the 85 mile stretch along the Mississippi River from Baton Rouge to New Orleans. 

Over the years, I’ve made a lot of artwork about Louisiana. Two of my Stations of the Cross series have artworks illustrating some of the social injustices experienced by residents of the state. My Stations of the Cross: Climate Change series focused on one particular aspect of climate change: the biodiversity crisis. My first station in that series addressed the impact of factory farming on the environment. That impact is most evident in the tributaries of the Mississippi River where nitrogen-rich fertilizer seeps into its waters. When the resulting nitrogen run-off reaches the Gulf of Mexico, it cuts off the oxygen needed to sustain ocean life, creating a “dead zone,” a region that cannot support life. The Mississippi and its tributaries form the central design of this station, combined with drawings of the algae build-up that results from nitrogen.

I started the series with a station about Louisiana because it was my way of naming my own social location. I started with Louisiana because it’s where a big piece of my heart is. And when it came time for another Stations of the Cross series about a global justice issue, I again began with Louisiana.

This year’s project, Stations of the Cross: Refugee Journeys, is an exploration of human movement all over the world. Each of the fourteen stations in this year’s series explores the movement of people from one place to another. It begins with the Biloxi-Chitimacha-Choctaw Tribe in Isle de Jean Charles. The tribe is quickly losing their island home in south Louisiana due to coastal erosion and the resulting rising waters. Oil and gas production in south Louisiana has irreparably damaged Indigenous land. Some tribe members remain on the shrinking barrier island, while others have moved inland. Efforts to work with the state government to acquire land near Houma fell apart disastrously. The New York Times have called the tribe the first American climate refugees. The tribe was also the inspiration for the bayou community in Beasts of the Southern Wild.

The coronavirus death toll in Louisiana is mounting. With the high rates of cancer and the toxic impact of the petrochemical and oil and gas industries on people’s health, many Louisianaians  have underlying issues which make them more vulnerable to the coronavirus. It has also become clear that asymptomatic carriers of the virus were among the more than one million people who attended Mardi Gras in New Orleans. There are almost fifteen thousand cases in the state with more than 500 deaths so far. 

Will you be with me in prayer for healthcare workers in Louisiana?

God of earth and air, water and fire, height and depth, we pray for those who work in danger, who rush in to bring hope and help and comfort when others flee to safety, whose mission is to seek and save, serve and protect, and whose presence embodies the protection of the Good Shepherd.

Give them caution and concern for one another, so that is safety they may do what must be done, under your watchful eye. Support them in their courage and dedication that they may continue to save lives, ease pain, and mend the torn fabric of lives and social order; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

From Evangelical Lutheran Worship

A Palm Sunday Second Line

The jazz trumpeter William Pajaud loved to tell people, “I’d rather play a funeral than eat a turkey dinner.” Pajaud was a trumpeter with the Eureka Brass Band, one of the most iconic bands during the golden age of New Orleans jazz. His specialities were the booming, mournful dirges played on the way to the cemetery. 

In New Orleans jazz funerals, it’s only on the way to the cemetery that sad music is played. On the way home, after the body has been “cut loose,” there’s a joyful parade with people dancing in the streets behind the brass bands and musicians. The exuberant dancers, belting out Just a Little While to Stay Here and When the Saints Go Marchin’ In, make up the Second Line. There are few experiences more life-affirming than being part of a Second Line.

The Second Line has its origins in West African culture and follows a history of dance that began in Congo Square where slaves gathered in secret to dance in what is now the Treme neighborhood of New Orleans. During the Jim Crow-era, Black New Orleanians were denied life insurance by white-owned companies and formed “Social Aid and Pleasure Clubs” to meet the needs of their communities. These benevolent societies offered assistance through illness, support to family members, and funds for burial. They also organized musicians like William Pajaud and the Eureka Brass Band to play at the funeral and their society members would come out in force to form the Second Line on the way home from the cemetery.

The death this week of jazz patriarch Ellis Louis Marsalis from COVID-19 complications brought home to me the reality of the surreality of the last few weeks. Coronavirus is killing residents of New Orleans at a higher rate than anywhere else in the country now, with a death rate of 4.5 per 100,000 residents. New York City’s is 3.2. 

Little has shaken me more than the sight of quiet streets in New Orleans the evening after the announcement of Marsalis’ death. This is what Treme looked like last summer the day after Dr. John died. Around the one minute mark is when the crowd sings I’ll Fly Away, another Second Line classic. 

The streets of New Orleans should be filled with a joyous, raucous celebration of a larger-than-life musician. Their emptiness is an affront to our grief. I’ve been privileged to experience a few Second Lines in my life and each time I think of the woman of valor in Proverbs 31:

Strength and dignity are her clothing

and she laughs at the time to come

In a Second Line, a community joins together in joyful brass harmony to laugh at the time to come. 

Today is Palm Sunday, when Christians remember the story of Jesus’ triumphant entry into Jerusalem:

As Jesus was now approaching the path down the Mount of Olives, the whole multitude of the disciples began to praise God joyfully with a loud voice for all the deeds of power they had seen, saying, “Blessed is the King who comes in the name of the Lord! Peace in heaven and glory in the highest heaven!” Some of the Pharisees in the crowd said to him, “Teacher order your disciples to stop.” He answered, “I tell you, if these were silent, the stones would shout out.” (Luke 19: 37-40, NRSV)

The closer to Jerusalem, the closer Jesus journeys toward his death. There is profound and primal sorrow in this journey toward the city walls. There is joy and laughter, too. Jesus knows what is to come, the disciples have been warned, but jubilation overtakes them and they cry out, “Blessed is the King who comes in the name of the Lord!” 

Christians begin our journey into Holy Week with a Second Line. 

The Second Line is rooted in resistance to white supremacy, just as Jesus’ triumphal entry into Jerusalem is an act of resistance to the Roman Empire. Christians hold out palms and Second Liners hold up umbrellas. The ethnomusicologist Joachim Berendt in his study of New Orleans jazz wrote, “One of the most popular accessories of the true “second liner” is an umbrella… They are the symbol of a little sky, under whose friendly container there is safety and security. Outside this ‘sky’ lies the hostile white world.”

On this Palm Sunday, I find myself looking for such umbrellas, for the things that bring joy in the midst of fear, that hold up a little sky for each of us as the world crashes down. Icons are like that for me. When I can’t find words for my grief, I draw. I’m sharing here the beginning of an icon of Ellis Louis Marsalis, Jr. There are umbrellas and palms and scenes from Second Lines surrounding the Patriarch of New Orleans Jazz. I invite you to color it with me in the sure and certain hope of a Second Line to come. We will be with each other again soon, dancing through the streets in sorrow and celebration. In the meantime, we search for new umbrellas and we hold the sky up for each other.

An Icon in honor of Ellis Louis Marsalis, Jr.