ART and FAITH

Who are you, father of Abraham, Isaac, and the kid on the corner stuffing his veins with heroine?

Who are you, Mother Nature, creator of lilacs and birds and brain tumors?

In my quest for faith I find questions, and in my quest for answers I find a blank space which I call my canvas.

A canvas upon which I paint while the world is going to hell in a hand-basket.

A canvas upon which I dribble colors and make pretty pictures while my mother is dying from brain cancer. A canvas which feels the heat of my unanswered prayers as I smudge black and gray lines criss-crossing dividing and conquering nothing except the endless bleakness of this ecclesiastical life.

Ecclesiastes: my favorite book of the Bible. Because of its raw rejection of clichs and its bold face staring straight into the sorrows of endless nothingness. Because of its blank page with neatly typed words screaming &%*$# at a world that claims to need answers when all we need is silence.

Silence in which to breathe deep and paint pictures of everything inside so we're cleaned and emptied and ready to carry on to another, unnecessary day until finally we reach that point of absolute finis when someone closes the book and our paintbrush reaches out and keeps on coloring on a world we've long since left.

My mother and I live in a gallery of glances which speak volumes. Glances which heal wounds which will eventually kill us unless the world gets there first. So as we sit and die, we paint.

Art is the blood on the cross long after he lay in the ground. Art is the blue in the sky while the bombs shatter lives below. Art is the grip of my mother's hand on mine as we walk towards her grave with me resisting all the way.

Art is, when everything else is not.

Learn more about this author, Emily Wierenga.
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