LOOK: the rain bows and the rainbows by Katy Mixon
Katy Mixon (American, 1984–), The rain bows and the rainbows (one day we will switch sides), 2018. Oil paint and used hand rags on muslin, 100 × 138 in.
I saw this quilt by Katy Mixon in December 2021 at the exhibition Break the Mold: New Takes on Traditional Art Making at the North Carolina Museum of Art. I was struck first by its prismatic color, and then by its title—which, the artist told me, comes from a dream she had after her close friend died. To bow, long o, is to bend into a curve; as a noun, a bow is a weapon used to propel an arrow, or a knotted ribbon typically worn by young girls. To bow, short o (as in “ow”), is to incline in respect or submission. The multiple meanings of this homograph open the title to different readings.
But the overall meaning points to the multihued arc that appears in the sky after a rainfall, as sunlight refracts through water vapor.
In the Judeo-Christian tradition, the rainbow is a sign of God’s covenant with Noah and has come to symbolize divine promise more generally, or hope—after the bleakness, beauty.
Mixon’s making process involves upcycling rags, which is itself a kind of redemptive act, saving used scraps and piecing them together into a new whole.
“Katy Mixon’s ‘quilts’ began as an outgrowth of her painting process,” the NCMA exhibition text read. “She routinely wipes her hands, palette knives, and other tools with baby wipes, which she then tosses into her studio’s garbage can. ‘One day [I] looked at the trash and realized it was full of all this hastily discarded color,’ she notes. She began saving the vibrant detritus with no specific purpose in mind, but after remembering her grandmother’s homemade quilts and discovering the famed African American quiltmakers of Gee’s Bend, Alabama, Mixon had a plan for her colorful scraps. ‘For me, the quilted works are alternate endings in the painting’s life cycle,’ Mixon says. ‘Painting as a practice, with the used rags as kaleidoscopic evidence.’”
Describing her technique, Mixon told me: “I compose the pieced tops and work with local longarm quilters to add the batting and backing. I finish each piece with hand stitching, often using crewel embroidery to define brush marks and tonal variations.”
LISTEN: “Joyful” | Words by Kate Bluett | Music by Paul Zach | Performed by Paul Zach with Taylor Leonhardt and Nick Dahlquist, on Christmas Hymns (2022)
The MP3 file of the song is embedded here with Paul Zach’s permission.
Come, O Lord, and make us joyful as you came to Mary’s womb; buried deep beneath our sorrows, where our hopes take root and bloom. Be the promise that sustains us through the seasons of the years, ’til at last we see your radiance when you shine beyond our tears.
Come, O Lord, and show your mercy as you came in Bethlehem; let us see the sunlight bursting through the shadows once again. Let us hear the song of glory where the silence held us fast. We will come to you rejoicing from the shackles of the past.
Come, O Lord, as living water; make our deserts green again, where the wellspring of our laughter will refresh us like the rain. After all the years of waiting for the promise long foretold, come at last, and let the day break in the morning of your joy!
. . . each day a misery and a marvel, each person also.
—Rachel E. Hicks, from “Accumulated Lessons in Displacement”
A white American born in the foothills of the Himalayas to international school educators, Rachel E. Hicks is a second-generation third-culture kid (TCK) whose writing reflects decades of living as a global nomad, exploring themes of memory, connection, suffering, exile (both physical and spiritual), hospitality, and hope. She grew up in six countries—India, Pakistan, the United States, Jordan, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and Hong Kong—and spent seven years as an adult in Chengdu, China, where she worked for the relief and development organization Food for the Hungry.
In 2013, she, her husband, and their two kids repatriated to the US, settling in Baltimore, where they live today. Hicks has lived in Baltimore longer than in any other city. But even with this rootedness, “the soil of each place in which I’ve lived still clings,” she says.
In her debut poetry collection, Accumulated Lessons in Displacement (Wipf & Stock / Resource Publications, 2025), Hicks grapples with the experience of being a “perpetual pilgrim”—on her way to a particular place but also attuned to the significance of each moment along the way. “Pilgrims learn to walk a life of paradox: even though their hearts are set on their final destination, they walk through each day alive to its possibilities, people and lessons,” she wrote in a 2014 blog post.
What is “home”? How can we bear to leave home, whether forced to do so by war, famine, or natural disaster, or we choose to for opportunity or ministry? What do we do with feelings of alienation when we find ourselves in a culture not our own or in which we don’t fit well? How do we live cross-culturally? How do we make a home where we’re at? What are our responsibilities to place? Who is our neighbor?
“I believe that many—all?—of us live our lives with some sense of exile,” Hicks writes on her blog. “We experience it and are aware of it to varying degrees, but it’s there. So many of our quests, our longings, our purpose-seeking, and the stories we create and tell are about trying to find our way home. Home being that place—literal or figurative—in which we feel wholeness and true belonging.”
Accumulated Lessons is divided into two parts: “Bright Sadness, Bitter Joy” and “A Deeper Knowing.” The term “bright sadness”—a translation of the Greek word charmolypê—comes from the Eastern Orthodox tradition, and it describes the paradoxical state of mourning over sin while rejoicing in God’s grace. It can also describe the paradox of living a life of joy amid suffering.
I was trying to learn the word for joy
that settles awkwardly in grief’s nest, an oversized bird. I didn’t want to scare it away.
So says the speaker in the book’s title poem, “Accumulated Lessons in Displacement.” Unfolding over eight sections, this persona poem draws on Hicks’s own experience of abrupt displacement from Kinshasa as a teenager, as well as the experiences of Bosnian refugee friends, and Syrian refugees she had only read about in the news.
It opens with a reflection on “home” in all its ordinariness—the yellow coffee cup, the dusty houseplant, the sunlit window seat—and laments that “no footpath exists leading back to these things,” which, the reader is led to presume, have been destroyed by armed conflict, or its residents blocked from returning by threat of death.
The poem contains several arresting images, like the green threads of a sweater on barbed wire tracing a path across miles. A boy who collects bullet casings to make a necklace for his sister. Charred diary pages dancing around a blown-out living room, “ma[king] a strange poem in my heart.”
Hicks wrestles with the savage violence humans are capable of:
It makes no sense that a soldier can press a button
and somewhere a baby ignites into flame. And he goes home and brushes his teeth.
What we do to each other, to other created souls. Always I carry this burden like a child on my hip.
Another powerful poem in the collection is “Visit to Sarajevo,” where Hicks describes visiting the Bosnian-Herzegovinan capital with her friend Dragan, who was forced to flee it as a young married adult with a child in the 1990s after the city was besieged by Serbian forces. Hicks had met Dragan and his family in 2000 through her husband, Jim, who worked alongside him at a refugee resettlement agency in Phoenix, Arizona, and the families became close. Meeting up years later in Dragan’s hometown, Dragan leads Hicks through the once-familiar streets “in a haze of pride, nostalgia, nightmare,” giving her a tour of sites both historically significant and deeply personal.
Hicks’s passport country too has its national traumas, one of which was precipitated by 9/11, when in 2001, terrorists flew planes into the World Trade Center in New York City, killing almost three thousand people. In “Disaster Chaplaincy Training,” she describes a course she took, taught by a Ground Zero worker, to become further equipped for her work in China, which was focused on disaster preparedness and response. In the course, she learned how to “loiter with intent” in zones of disaster, “acclimat[ing] to [suffering’s] pungency.” Make sure, said the instructor, to “let them see you cupping a small ball / of hope—toss it up, catch it.”
Nationwide crisis struck the US again when on April 12, 2015, a young Black man from Baltimore, Freddie Gray, died of a spinal cord injury while in police custody, allegedly due to police brutality—though none of the six involved officers was ultimately held responsible. Gray’s death led to civil unrest in Baltimore (which Hicks had recently made her home) and throughout the country, as citizens demanded recognition, in word and practice, that “Black lives matter.”
Hicks wrote “The Morning After Freddie Gray’s Funeral” while Baltimore was on lockdown. Fumbling for words, she tries to explain to her children what’s going on as she, too, tries to educate herself more deeply about the history of racism in America and the longstanding grievances of the Black community she lives in. In the poem, she harvests mint from her garden to brew a gallon of black mint tea to share with her neighbor—
as what? An offering, apology?
A way to say I’m trying—learning about all that fuels these fires still smoldering this hushed morning?
The staining of the clear water as the tea steeps becomes a metaphor.
Accumulated Lessons in Displacement addresses global suffering, more localized suffering, as well as personal and family suffering.
One example of the latter has to do with Hicks’s daughter’s diagnosis, following an ankle sprain, with complex regional pain syndrome (CRPS), Ehlers-Danlos syndrome (EDS), and postural orthostatic tachycardia syndrome (POTS), chronic conditions that cause extreme nerve pain. “Bright Sadness” describes a return car ride from a fruitless medical visit, her daughter crying and gasping in agony in the back seat, when offhandedly, Hicks insists, “Turn your cries into opera!” This unexpected and ridiculous suggestion defuses, if for just a moment, the intense situation, resulting in “joy-laughing” amid plaintive contralto tones all the way home.
“Post-Miracle (I)” celebrates her daughter’s miraculous healing, holds the strange, tentative, empty-handed feeling of a fervent prayer request graciously granted. But then comes “Post-Miracle (II),” written when, after two months of her daughter being pain-free, the CRPS returned. Hicks wrestles with gratitude for the brief reprieve and anger at God’s “undoing” the miracle. She wonders about some of the healings Jesus performed in the Gospels, and whether they stuck.
“Post-Miracle (II)” is one of the few poems in the collection with end rhyme, each quatrain following an abba pattern. Perhaps the choice to work with a rhyme scheme for this particular subject represents, consciously or subconsciously, her attempt to make things rhyme again, to harmonize the reality of chronic pain with a good and loving God, to impose structure on the chaos.
Several of Hicks’s poems engage with biblical stories: the Suffering of Job, the Parable of the Prodigal Son, the Massacre of the Innocents, Zacchaeus encountering Jesus, the Walk to Emmaus. She performs poetic midrash, imaginatively interpreting and expanding the texts to connect with them on a deeper level.
Besides the biblical authors, some of her literary conversation partners in this collection are Frederick Buechner, Henri Nouwen, Simone Weil, Czesław Miłosz, Dostoevsky, G. K. Chesterton, Gregory of Nyssa, Paul Kingsnorth, and Karen Blixen.
Although there’s a heaviness to much of the material, it’s not overwhelming, as small graces are woven throughout: complimentary walnuts from a fruit shop owner on a winter Sunday; laughter over language barriers; refreshment from a water hose; the scent of turmeric and cardamom at a Punjab store in Baltimore, reminders of the poet’s birthplace; “the comfort of the priest’s thick thumb / upon my forehead, the signature of / Jesus,” on Ash Wednesday; dandelions and buttercups brushing ankles; a cairn at West Clear Creek; the monks at Great Lavra, Greece, making room for the dispossessed; bundles of sheep ascending limestone slopes at dawn in the Cotswolds; the delightful word cusp; her son’s euphoria upon gliding down a mountain on skis; the slow labor of opening a pomegranate and obtaining its ruby-red seeds for her daughter to eat.
The book is shot through with joy—a joy that coexists with suffering and that is sustained through faith.
“These are poems to live by—to help you stay human, love people, find joy in sorrow, pay attention to the world around you, open yourself to God, welcome mystery, and understand our times at a deeper level,” Hicks wrote in an email announcing the launch of the book. “You’ll journey all around the world and find it—in spite of its sorrow—full of beauty and worth loving.”
One of my favorite poems is “Just Before,” a perfect reading for the upcoming Advent season. It spans four cities of the world—places where people work, play, pray, and rest; places of economic disparity, of spiritual longing as well as mundane concerns—in each imagining the moment just before Jesus returns. In the midst of our threshing corn or lighting a lamp or settling a legal dispute or herding sheep, Jesus will come with a beauty that blossoms all the way out to the horizon, calling all nomads home.
“Just Before” by Rachel E. Hicks
When Jesus comes again in all his glory, somewhere in the Sichuan mountains tires will crackle over corn spread out on the road— easy threshing—while a small child urinates in the gutter, absorbed in watching the car shoot by.
As the first rent opens a fingernail tear in the hazy sky, a woman in the foothills above Rishikesh will lay down her firewood burden and light the clay Diwali lamp in the chilling dusk, circling her cupped hands in blessing.
In the pause before the clamor of heaven’s trumpets, the jurors’ waiting room in Baltimore’s civic court will throb with the quiet turning of pages, a buzzing phone in the hand of a tired man, berating himself for forgetting to bring coffee.
Just before we are aware of him, Jesus will pause to survey the view; two shepherd boys amidst boulders in the Wadi Rum hills south of Amman wipe sleep from their eyes and stand amazed at the blood-red poppies at their feet stretching to the eastern horizon.
Purchase Accumulated Lessons in Displacement here. (Update, 11/14/25: Wipf & Stock is offering a 50% discount through November 30, 2025; use code CONFSHIP at checkout. Media mail shipping is free.)
“Just Before” is reproduced with permission from Wipf and Stock Publishers, www.wipfandstock.com.
>> “What Remains: The Making of Ellsworth Kelly’s Last Work,”Image interview with Rick Archer: I got to experience Ellsworth Kelly’s Austin—a modernist “chapel” containing three stained glass windows, fourteen black-and-white marble panels (Stations of the Cross), and a redwood totem—while in Texas for a CIVA conference in 2021; see some of my photos below. Kelly was an atheist inspired by Romanesque church architecture, and the architect he chose to collaborate with on Austin, Rick Archer, is a Christian. In this wonderful new interview by Bruce Buescher, Archer discusses his working relationship with Kelly, Kelly’s desire for randomization and form over meaning, the technical and architectural challenges of bringing Kelly’s vision to life, religious references, and the artist’s objective for the space. “I hope when people go in here, they will experience joy,” Archer remembers Kelly saying.
Ellsworth Kelly (American, 1923–2015), Austin, 1986/2015. Artist-designed building with colored glass windows, black-and-white marble panels, and redwood totem, 63 × 76 × 28 ft. Blanton Museum of Art, University of Texas at Austin. Photo: Victoria Emily Jones.
In this recent interview for Comment magazine, Anderson explains his purpose in writing the book:
I have become increasingly convinced that so many pivotal artists and artworks over the past century are deeply shaped by religious traditions and seriously engaged in theological questioning, but this remains severely under-interpreted or misinterpreted in the scholarship about these artists. One might see these threads running through an artist’s artworks and personal writings and even discuss these topics with the artist in their studio, but when one moves to the scholarly writing and teaching about that same artist, that language consistently disappears or is transposed into another register—usually politics, occasionally a highly esoteric spirituality. I wanted to understand, at a non-superficial level, why this was the case, and I wanted to see how other ways of speaking and writing about this topic might be possible.
Don’t miss, at the end of the article, his three hopes for the field of “art and theology,” which I very much share!
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LECTURE: “The Problems and Possibilities of Visual Theology: The Ascension as a Case Study” by Jonathan A. Anderson: With Ascension Day coming up on May 29, it’s timely to share this talk given by Jonathan Anderson (see previous roundup item) a few years ago at Duke Divinity School, where he worked as a postdoctoral associate of theology and the visual arts from 2020 to 2023. Anderson explores a handful of images depicting the Ascension of Christ, a particularly challenging subject because of the spatial ambiguity. The scriptural accounts of the event (Luke 24:50–53 and Acts 1:6–11) beg the question, “What does ‘lifted up’ mean? Where is Jesus?” Attempting to work out these spatial difficulties visually can be theologically and exegetically productive, Anderson claims—even if it sometimes leads to unsatisfying results, as, Anderson says, it often does in Western art from the Renaissance onward. By contrast, when artists foster intertextual readings across the biblical canon and focus not so much on what the Ascension looks like as a historical event but rather on what it means, they are generally more successful.
Here are some time stamps, with links to the artworks discussed:
38:33: The Ascension by Andrei Rublev: “Fundamental to all [the Ascension icons of the East],” Anderson says, “is the notion that the Ascension doesn’t have much to do with a higher part of the atmosphere (which Western images are continually struggling with) but with an entirely different kind of space. The relevant coordinates here are not down and up, or even higher and lower, but earth and heaven, old creation and new creation.” Anderson’s quotation of Douglas B. Farrow’s Ascension Theology is illuminating!
44:30: Interior of the katholikon (principal church) of Hosios Loukas
53:40: Q&A
Katholikon of Hosios Loukas monastery, Boeotia, Greece, 1011–12
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INSTRUMENTAL JAZZ: “Prayer” by Cory Wong: This video shows a live performance of Cory Wong’s “Prayer” on July 4, 2023, at Gesù music hall in Montreal. Wong, on guitar at far left, is joined by Ariel Posen on guitar, Victor Wooten on bass, and Nate Smith on drums. I learned about Wong through his collaborative album with Jon Batiste, Meditations (2020), which includes a version of this piece featuring Batiste’s piano playing.
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EXHIBITION: OMG! Reli Popart, Museum Krona, Uden, Netherlands, April 5–September 7, 2025: This exhibition at Museum Krona (housed in the complex of the still-active Birgittine Abbey of Maria Refugie in Uden, Netherlands) explores the connection between the pop art movement and Christianity through works by artists such as Andy Warhol, Corita Kent, Niki de Saint Phalle, and especially Dutch artists, including Woody van Amen and Wim Delvoye. Pop art is characterized by the use of imagery from popular culture, sourced from television, magazines, comic books, ads—and sometimes from the trash bin.
Jacques Frenken [previously], for example, built a body of work by salvaging discarded plaster sculptures of Christ and the saints—mass-produced for Catholic devotional use—and reconstructing them into assemblages. For his Spijkerpiëta, he “brought the Pietà back into our midst and accentuated the pain it radiates with nails,” the artist said.
Jacques Frenken (Dutch, 1929–2022), Spijkerpiëta (Nail Pietà), 1967. Plaster, paint, iron, wood. Museum Krona, Uden, Netherlands.
Another artist represented in the exhibition is Hans Truijen, who was commissioned in the 1960s by St. Martin’s Church in Maastricht to design eight stained glass windows for their worship space. The four along the left aisle of the nave depict human and divine suffering, whereas those on the right express hope, love, freedom, and happiness. He chose photographic images from various periodicals, including ones of the Vietnam War, and transferred them to glass using a special screen-printing process.
Hans Truijen (Dutch, 1928–2005), Studies for the eight stained glass windows commissioned by St. Martinuskerk, Wyck-Maastricht, Netherlands, 1966–68. Courtesy of the artist’s son, Marc Truijen.
I’ve been following the work of comics artist Madeleine Jubilee Saito for several years (you may recall me featuring her here and here), and I’m thrilled that her debut collection of comics, You Are a Sacred Place: Visual Poems for Living in Climate Crisis, has now hit shelves! It’s gorgeous, you all. To coincide with the book’s release date today, I asked if she’d be willing to write a guest post providing some background and insight on comics as an art form and how Christians, including herself, have used the form. Before sharing two of her own comics, she explores three earlier examples by others—an Italian Gothic devotional painting, a late nineteenth-century African American quilt, and (where my mind typically goes when I hear “Christian comics”) a popular series of evangelistic tracts—expanding my sense of what a comic can be.
—Victoria Jones
A guest post by Madeleine Jubilee Saito
Comics have always been an art form for ordinary people—the medium of children, the illiterate, and the learning-to-read.
Since the 1960s, underground comix have been a scrappy, democratic, DIY art form: anyone with access to a black-and-white printer can make their own eight-page zine. And many Christians have found that humblest of publications, the self-published evangelistic tract, in that humblest of locations: the bathroom stall.
I am a Christian artist, and my medium is experimental comics. I define comics expansively as any visual artwork where meaning comes from the viewer reading discrete sections in sequence.
Breaking down my definition of comics
To put it more simply, comics are pictures (and sometimes text) that you read across panels.
Christian artists throughout time have been drawn to working in this medium. And because comics have always been a popular medium, often directed at those on the margins, reading Christian comics from the past can tell us something about how Christians of a particular time viewed ordinary people.
Three very different examples:
1. Pacino di Bonaguida, 14th century, Italy
Pacino di Bonaguida (Italian, active 1302–ca. 1340), Tabernacle with Scenes from the Life of Christ, ca. 1325. Tempera and gold leaf on panel, 44.5 × 63.5 cm. University of Arizona Museum of Art, Tucson.
Pacino di Bonaguida is one example of an Italian artist making sacred comics alongside the rise of the Dominican and Franciscan mendicant orders in the thirteenth through fifteenth centuries.
Panels showing sequential scenes from the life of Christ were a popular choice for altarpieces. (An example of artworks in this tradition is the Stations of the Cross—I made my own entry into that tradition a few years ago.)
Pacino di Bonaguida, Tabernacle with Scenes from the Life of Christ, bottom left detail. Note the way that the rock forms echo between the two panels, creating rhythmic repetition between the Baptism of Christ and the Agony in the Garden.
In this period, Dominicans and Franciscans helped launch a movement in the church emphasizing preaching to and teaching common people and seeing oneself in the biblical story.
While we don’t have any writing from Pacino, we can look to the theological trends of the time to understand his comics.
The Dominicans and Franciscans encouraged ordinary Christians, including the illiterate, to move sequentially, systematically, through the story of Christ. The anonymously authored manual The Garden of Prayer (1454) instructs:
Alone and solitary, excluding every external thought from your mind, start thinking of the beginning of the Passion, starting with how Jesus entered Jerusalem on the ass. Moving slowly from episode to episode, meditate on each one, dwelling on each single stage and step of the story. And if at any point you feel a sensation of piety, stop: do not pass on as long as that sweet and devout sentiment lasts.
Pacino di Bonaguida, Tabernacle with Scenes from the Life of Christ, bottom right detail
We see this sequential movement reflected in the sacred comics of the time—sometimes in square panels, other times in more creative shapes.
Pacino di Bonaguida, The Tree of Life, 1320. Tempera and gold leaf on wood panel, 248 × 151 cm. Galleria dell’Accademia, Florence. Note the round panels extending from a central point.
Sermons from the time extolled the usefulness of images depicting scenes from the life of Christ as a way to expand access to the gospel narrative. In 1492, for example, the Dominican friar Michele da Carcano, citing a famous letter of Pope Gregory’s from around 600, preached that images were introduced in churches “first, on account of the ignorance of simple people, so that those who are not able to read the scriptures can yet learn by seeing the . . . faith in pictures.”
These comics were intended to expand ordinary Christians’ access to the biblical story—making it more present and compelling, especially for those who couldn’t read.
2. Harriet Powers, 19th century, American South
Harriet Powers (American, 1837–1910), Pictorial Quilt, 1895–98. Cotton plain weave, pieced, appliqued, embroidered, and quilted, 175 × 266.7 cm. Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.
Harriet Powers was a Black American quilter and folk artist who was born into slavery in 1837 and lived near Athens, Georgia.
Like the Dominicans and Franciscans several centuries earlier, Powers saw her comics as a more-than-verbal way to preach the gospel. She described her work as “a sermon in patchwork,” saying she intended to “preach the gospel in patchwork, to show my Lord my humility” and to “show where sin originated, out of the beginning of things.”
Rather than preaching a discursive message, [Powers] offers one that is “archaic,” or “predicated on the priority of something already there, something given.” Her symbols and textures facilitate a process of “crawling back” to a deeper level of consciousness or evoking knowledge that is already within but encumbered. . . .
Powers focuses on what her audience already knows by nurturing memory and offering faith-enlivening symbols that will embolden their Christian imagination.
Powers’s quilts weave historical scenes from the recent past with biblical scenes—visually and metaphorically linking the biblical story and her immediate reality.
In her Pictorial Quilt, five of the fifteen panels depict recent historical and climatological events. The remaining ten depict stories from scripture.
Harriet Powers, Pictorial Quilt, edited by the author to highlight historical and climatological panelsPanels from Pictorial Quilt by Harriet Powers
Left: “The dark day of May 19, 1780. The seven stars were seen 12 N. in the day. The cattle wall went to bed, chickens to roost and the trumpet was blown. The sun went off to a small spot and then to darkness.“
Right: “The crucifixion of Christ between the two thieves. The sun went into darkness. Mary and Martha weeping at his feet. The blood and water run from his right side.”
Note the way that the visual repetition of celestial bodies creates a link between the scene of recent history and Christ’s passion.
Powers’s comics, written from the margins (Powers was a formerly enslaved woman in Reconstruction-era Georgia) and for those on the margins, reflect a vision of a world where biblical stories and lived reality are not distant or separate, but already intertwined.
God is already fully present on the margins. In “Quilting the Sermon,” McCray remarks:
A vibrant spirituality drives Powers’ preaching. She envisions God as a mighty sovereign who intervenes in earthly affairs and is known primarily through obedience to scripture and attentiveness to divine revelation. This revelation is not limited to scripture but continues to unfold in human history through climatological events, celestial occurrences, and everyday activities.
Chick tracts are broadly viewed as hate literature because of their anti-Semitic and anti-Catholic content. And Jack Chick (and his collaborators) are likely among the best-selling cartoonists in human history, with one billion tracts sold (according to Chick.com’s numbers).
While I don’t commend Chick’s work for distribution or personal meditation, I think that a critical reading of his comics reveals something interesting about a particular tradition of American Christianity—and how that tradition views the ordinary people who encounter Chick tracts in their mailboxes and workplaces and on public bathroom floors.
Each tract is a little larger than a business card (3″ × 5″), and usually around twenty pages long. Most tracts have a consistent rhythm: a setup, a shocking encounter, and a dramatic conversion.
If reading the Stations of the Cross feels like solemnly walking behind Christ as he makes his way through Jerusalem, Chick tracts feel like being pushed off a cliff.
In Chick’s imagination, the reader’s encounter with Christ is flat, rote, and tightly choreographed: Chick gives his readers the words to say. The reader’s encounter with God is compressed and mass-produced—an industrial object, like the tracts themselves.
Detail from The Bull, in which the titular character has a conversion experience while reading a Chick tract
For all three artists—Pacino di Bonaguida, Harriet Powers, and Jack Chick—the form’s legibility, irresistibility, and overall accessibility made comics a compelling tool to facilitate their readers’ encounters with God.
When I started making comics in high school, I was drawn to the medium for similar reasons: there is something irresistible and magical about the format.
My first comics were influenced by the autobiographical cartoonists of the early 2000s, especially Kate Beaton and Marjane Satrapi. In recent years, I’ve begun working more experimentally, influenced by the tradition of Christian comics described above.
I’ve always loved the poetry and repetition of the Psalms and the Prophets. Comics, especially poetry comics, can have poetic resonances on multiple levels at once: in the text, in the imagery, and in the interplay between the text and imagery.
My first book, You Are a Sacred Place: Visual Poems for Living in Climate Crisis (out from Andrews McMeel March 25, 2025), is my attempt to bring the comics medium’s unique complexity into questions about the climate crisis, God’s justice, and how it feels to live in our moment in history.
Madeleine Jubilee Saito is a cartoonist and artist from rural Illinois living in Seattle and the author of You Are a Sacred Place (Andrews McMeel, 2025). In 2022, she was an inaugural artist-in-residence at On Being. Her comics open each section of the best-selling anthology of women’s writing about climate, All We Can Save (One World, 2020), and her work was recognized in Best American Comics 2019. Follow her on Instagram @madeleine_jubilee_saito.
From the publisher: “In her debut collection of comics, artist and climate activist Madeleine Jubilee Saito offers a quietly radical message of hope. Framed as a letter in response to a loved one’s pain, this series of ethereal vignettes takes readers on a journey from seemingly inescapable isolation and despair, through grief and rage, toward the hope of community and connection. Drawing on the tradition of climate justice, Saito reminds readers that if we’re going to challenge fossil fuel capitalism, we must first imagine what lies beyond it: the beauty and joy of a healed world.”
Vincent van Gogh (Dutch, 1853–1890), Pietà (after Delacroix), 1889. Oil on canvas, 73 × 60.5 cm. Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam.
“Poor fighter, poor sufferer,” my brother’s words for me. Self-pity— I have to beat it down. But how, exactly? Never know when the next attack will come. How to suppress religion? Down the cloisters of the sick it beckoned— I abused my God . . . that lithograph of Delacroix’s, irredeemable sheets I flung in the paint and oil, his Pietà in ruins. Reconstruct it from memory. Good technical exercise. Start with the hands, there were four hands, four arms in the foreground— mother and son, and the torsions of their bodies almost impossible, draw them out— painfully . . . no measurements— into a great mutual gesture of despair.
Delacroix and I, we both discovered painting when we no longer had breath or teeth. Work into his work, strain for health, the brain clearing, fingers firmer, brush in the fingers going like a bow, big bravura work—pure joy! I copy— no, perform his masterwork of pain.
Genius of iridescent agony, Delacroix, help me restore your lithograph with color. I mortify before your model— how to imitate my Christ? The bronze of my forelock shadows his, the greatest artist: stronger than all the others, spurning marble, clay and paint, he worked in living flesh.
Living and yet immortal, Lord, revive me— let me inhale the blue of Mary’s cape billowing hurricanes of hope, clothe me in your cerements gold with morning— mother and son, from all your sorrow all renewal springs, the earth you touch turns emerald as your hand that burgeons green.
Robert Fagles (1933–2008) (PhD, Yale) was an award-winning American translator, poet, and academic. He is best known for his many translations of ancient Greek and Roman classics, especially the epic poems of Homer. He taught English and comparative literature at Princeton University from 1960 until his retirement in 2002, chairing the department from 1975 onward.
Vincent van Gogh (1853–1890) was raised in the Dutch Reformed Church, the son of a small-town minister—and even worked himself as a lay preacher in the Borinage mining region of southwestern Belgium for two years in his mid-twenties. While there, he gave away all his possessions and lived in poverty like those he served, eating a spare diet, wearing rough garments, and sleeping on the floor. Ironically, his sponsoring evangelical committee deemed such behavior unbecoming of a minister of the gospel, and, due also to his lack of eloquence and theological refinement, they withdrew their support.
This rejection soured Vincent on institutional Christianity. But it didn’t squash his faith. After moving back in with his parents in Nuenen, the Netherlands, he wrote to his brother and close confidante, Theo:
Life [. . .] always turns towards one an infinitely meaningless, discouraging, dispiriting blank side on which there is nothing, any more than on a blank canvas.
But however meaningless and vain, however dead life appears, the man of faith, of energy, of warmth, and who knows something, doesn’t let himself be fobbed off like that. He steps in and does something, and hangs on to that, in short, breaks, ‘violates’ – they say.
Let them talk, those cold theologians. [Letter 464]
Although Vincent left the church and developed conflicted feelings about the Bible, he maintained a reverence for Christ to the end of his days. His time in the Borinage was not for nothing, as it’s there that he discovered, through sketching his parishioners and the surrounding landscapes, his calling to be an artist.
This new vocation was one he ascribed metaphorically to Christ. In a letter to his friend and fellow artist Émile Bernard dated June 26, 1888, Vincent wrote that Jesus’s masterworks are human beings made fully and eternally alive:
Christ – alone – among all the philosophers, magicians, &c. declared eternal life – the endlessness of time, the non-existence of death – to be the principal certainty. The necessity and the raison d’être of serenity and devotion. Lived serenely as an artist greater than all artists–disdaining marble and clay and paint – working in LIVING FLESH. I.e. – this extraordinary artist, hardly conceivable with the obtuse instrument of our nervous and stupefied modern brains, made neither statues nor paintings nor even books . . . he states it loud and clear . . . he made . . . LIVING men, immortals. [Letter 632]
In the same letter, he contended that “the figure of Christ has been painted – as I feel it – only by Delacroix and by Rembrandt…….. And then Millet has painted…. Christ’s doctrine.”
These are the three artists Vincent admired most. He mentions them many times throughout his ample correspondence with family and friends, and he made paintings after all three.
The only painting Vincent ever made of Christ was his Pietà, which he painted in two versions in September 1889, both after the French artist Eugène Delacroix (1798–1863). These are among the many works Vincent painted at a psychiatric hospital in Saint-Rémy-de-Provence in southern France, to which he had voluntarily committed himself after suffering an acute mental breakdown that resulted in his infamous severing of his left ear on December 23, 1888. Theo had rushed to Arles, where Vincent was living in “the Yellow House” at the time, and on December 28 reported on Vincent’s condition in a letter to his wife, Jo van Gogh-Bonger:
I found Vincent in the hospital in Arles. The people around him realized from his agitation that for the past few days he had been showing symptoms of that most dreadful illness, of madness, and an attack of fièvre chaude, when he injured himself with a razor, was the reason he was taken to hospital. Will he remain insane? The doctors think it possible, but daren’t yet say for certain. It should be apparent in a few days’ time when he is rested; then we will see whether he is lucid again. He seemed to be all right for a few minutes when I was with him, but lapsed shortly afterwards into his brooding about philosophy and theology. It was terribly sad being there, because from time to time all his grief would well up inside and he would try to weep, but couldn’t. Poor fighter and poor, poor sufferer. Nothing can be done to relieve his anguish now, but it is deep and hard for him to bear. [Letter 728]
Vincent returned to the Yellow House in January 1889 but over the next few months experienced recurring bouts of mania and depression and was in and out of the hospital. Some of the people of Arles grew increasingly frightened by his erratic behavior, and they essentially ran him out of town. That’s when he made his way twenty miles northeast to the town of Saint-Rémy to check in to Saint-Paul-de-Mausole, a former monastery that then, as now, served as a hospital for the mentally ill.
Vincent had two rooms there, one of which he used as a studio, setting up the various print copies he owned of acclaimed paintings. One was a lithograph by Célestin François Nanteuil-Leboeuf after Delacroix’s Pietà, from the portfolio Les artistes anciens et modernes. (Theo had bought and sent him this litho at his request.) Vincent lamented to his brother that he accidentally damaged it with spilled paint—but that impelled him to paint his own copy of Delacroix. On September 10, 1889, he wrote:
Work is going very well, I’m finding things that I’ve sought in vain for years, and feeling that I always think of those words of Delacroix that you know, that he found painting when he had neither breath nor teeth left. Ah well, I myself with the mental illness I have, I think of so many other artists suffering mentally, and I tell myself that this doesn’t prevent one from practising the role of painter as if nothing had gone wrong.
[. . .] In the very suffering, religious thoughts sometimes console me a great deal. Thus this time during my illness a misfortune happened to me – that lithograph of Delacroix, the Pietà, with other sheets had fallen into some oil and paint and got spoiled.
I was sad about it – then in the meantime I occupied myself painting it, and you’ll see it one day, on a no. 5 or 6 canvas I’ve made a copy of it which I think has feeling. [. . .] My fingers [are] so sure that I drew that Delacroix Pietà without taking a single measurement, though there are those four outstretched hands and arms – gestures and bodily postures that aren’t exactly easy or simple. [Letter 801]
LEFT: Eugène Delacroix, Pietà, ca. 1850, oil on canvas, 35.6 × 27 cm, National Museum of Art, Architecture and Design, Oslo. CENTER: Célestin François Nanteuil-Leboeuf, Pietà (after Delacroix), 1853, lithograph, Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam. RIGHT: Vincent van Gogh, Pietà (after Delacroix), 1889, oil on canvas, 42 × 34 cm, Vatican Museums.
The painted copy he refers to here is the smaller of the two, which he gifted to his sister Willemien and is now in the collection of the Vatican Museums in Vatican City. In another letter, from September 19, he tells Wil “this little copy of course has no value from any point of view,” but “you’ll be able to see in it that Delacroix doesn’t draw the features of a Mater Dolorosa [sorrowing Mother of God] in the manner of Roman statues – and that the pallid aspect, the lost, vague gaze of a person tired of being in anguish and in tears and keeping vigil is present in it.”
The other Pietàthat Vincent painted—which is similar to the first but larger and brighter—he kept for himself, hanging it in his bedroom at Saint-Rémy. He describes the painting to Wil:
The Delacroix is a Pietà, i.e. a dead Christ with the Mater Dolorosa. The exhausted corpse lies bent forward on its left side at the entrance to a cave, its hands outstretched, and the woman stands behind. It’s an evening after the storm, and this desolate, blue-clad figure stands out – its flowing clothes blown about by the wind – against a sky in which violet clouds fringed with gold are floating. In a great gesture of despair she too is stretching out her empty arms, and one can see her hands, a working woman’s good, solid hands. With its flowing clothes this figure is almost as wide in extent as it’s tall. And as the dead man’s face is in shadow, the woman’s pale head stands out brightly against a cloud – an opposition which makes these two heads appear to be a dark flower with a pale flower, arranged expressly to bring them out better. [Letter 804]
Vincent van Gogh (Dutch, 1853–1890), Pietà (after Delacroix), 1889. Oil on canvas, 73 × 60.5 cm. Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam.
Although Vincent may have at one time seen Delacroix’s Pietàpainting in person, at Saint-Rémy he had only a grayscale image, the lithograph by Nanteuil-Leboeuf, to reference. For his version, he invented his own color scheme—bold blues and yellows.
On September 20, Vincent described to Theo his process of “copying,” or interpreting, the masters:
What I’m seeking in it, and why it seems good to me to copy them, I’m going to try to tell you. We painters are always asked to compose ourselves and to be nothing but composers.
Very well – but in music it isn’t so – and if such a person plays some Beethoven he’ll add his personal interpretation to it – in music, and then above all for singing – a composer’s interpretation is something, and it isn’t a hard and fast rule that only the composer plays his own compositions.
Good – since I’m above all ill at present, I’m trying to do something to console myself, for my own pleasure.
I place the black-and-white by Delacroix or Millet or after them in front of me as a subject. And then I improvise colour on it but, being me, not completely of course, but seeking memories of their paintings – but the memory, the vague consonance of colours that are in the same sentiment, if not right – that’s my own interpretation.
Heaps of people don’t copy. Heaps of others do copy – for me, I set myself to it by chance, and I find that it teaches and above all sometimes consoles.
So then my brush goes between my fingers as if it were a bow on the violin and absolutely for my pleasure. [Letter 805]
Some art historians believe the Christ figure in the painting is a self-portrait—Vincent identifying himself with the suffering Christ, or recognizing Christ’s presence with him in his suffering, and expressing his longing to be cradled in loving arms and for resurrection from the grave of psychosis. In Vincent van Gogh: The Complete Paintings, Ingo F. Walther and Rainer Metzger write,
Nothing could convey more clearly his need to record his own crisis in the features of another than these two copies [of Delacroix’s Pietà]. The face of the crucified Christ in the lap of a grieving Mary quite unambiguously has van Gogh’s own features. In other words, a ginger-haired Christ with a close-trimmed beard was now the perfect symbol of suffering, the (rather crude) encoding of van Gogh’s own Passion. The painter was to attempt this daring stroke once more, in his interpretation of Rembrandt’s The Raising of Lazarus. Here, van Gogh gave his own features to a Biblical figure who, like Christ, passed through Death into new Life. It was as if, in his work as a copyist, van Gogh was pursuing the kind of oblique allegory he disapproved of in Bernard and Gauguin [see Letter 823]. Five weeks of mental darkness demanded artistic expression – and even that incorrigible realist Vincent van Gogh could not be satisfied with landscape immediacy alone. (542)
On May 16, 1890, Vincent left the hospital at Saint-Rémy, bringing his Pietà painting with him. He moved to Auvers-sur-Oise, a suburb of Paris, placing himself under the care of the homeopathic doctor Paul Gachet, who became a friend. Dr. Gachet admired the painting very much and requested his own copy. (As far as we know, Vincent never got around to making one.)
Vincent was incredibly prolific in Auvers, but his mental health continued to decline, and he died a little over two months after relocating there, on July 29, 1890, from a gunshot wound to the lower chest that was likely self-inflicted.
In his poem “Pietà” from an ekphrastic collection based entirely on Vincent’s paintings, Robert Fagles draws on Vincent’s biography and letters in addition to the titular painting to voice the spiritual and emotional yearnings of Vincent’s final year. The last stanza is a prayer that the poetic speaker Vincent addresses to God—for hope, renewal, light:
Living and yet immortal, Lord, revive me— let me inhale the blue of Mary’s cape billowing hurricanes of hope, clothe me in your cerements gold with morning— mother and son, from all your sorrow all renewal springs, the earth you touch turns emerald as your hand that burgeons green.
In Vincent’s Pietà, the dead Christ’s limp hand rests on a grassy boulder or knoll, which Fagles reads as signifying life awakening from death. You can even see the green reflected in Christ’s face and chest, not to mention the golden sun (“after the storm,” as the historical Vincent wrote) glinting on his right arm, abdomen, and shroud, a faint promise of resurrection.
Emily Dickinson (1830–1886) of Amherst, Massachusetts, is one of America’s most celebrated poets. There are hundreds of musical settings, from various genres, of her poems. Here are ten I really like.
Created by Beach4Art, a family of four who assemble rocks and shells into images on the beaches of Devon, England
1. “I’m Nobody” by Emma Wallace: This is the first poem I ever read by Dickinson—in sixth grade. I was hooked, and I relished the assignment to memorize it and recite it to the class. The idea of being famous was apparently distasteful to Dickinson, and though she was a prolific writer of almost 1,800 poems, only ten were published during her lifetime, and those anonymously; some she sent in letters to friends, but most she kept private. She wrote this one in 1861, and it has contributed to her mystique. Singer-songwriter Emma Wallace turned it into a lovely, understated, minor-key waltz for The Thing with Feathers (2021), one of her several literary-themed albums.
I’m Nobody! Who are you? Are you – Nobody – too? Then there’s a pair of us! Don’t tell! they’d advertise* – you know!
How dreary – to be – Somebody! How public – like a Frog – To tell your name – the livelong June – To an admiring Bog!
* Dickinson often provided alternative words in the margins of her pages, which some editors have favored; “advertise” she marked as a possible substitute for “banish us.”
2.“I Shall Not Live in Vain” by Bard and Ceilidh (Mary Vanhoozer): Mary Vanhoozer’s debut album, Songs of Day and Night(2015), comprises original settings of classic poems by the likes of Emily Dickinson, Christina Rossetti, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and others. “Music has a unique ability to transform ordinary things into special things—the mundane into the extraordinary,” she writes. “This song cycle is all about exploring that further. Each song roughly represents an hour of the day. The CD begins at dawn and ends at dusk. As we travel through the day, we learn to perceive familiar objects and situations in a new light, infusing joy and a sense of mystery into the everyday experience.” For this track she is joined by her husband, Josh Rodriguez, on guitar. The text is a sort of purpose statement, committing to a life of love, kindness, and compassionate outreach.
If I can stop one Heart from breaking I shall not live in vain If I can ease one Life the Aching Or cool one Pain
Or help one fainting Robin Unto his Nest again I shall not live in vain.
3. “His Feet Are Shod with Gauze” by Emily Lau: The natural world, especially bees, was one of Dickinson’s favorite topics to write about. I think of her as a poet of summer. (Other great bee poems: “Bee! I’m expecting you!” and “Bees are Black, with Gilt Surcingles –.”) “His Feet are shod with Gauze –,” a panegyric, praises bees’ delicacy, might, and beauty. This musical setting is part of the suite Seven Dickinson Songs by composer and vocalist Emily Lau, which appears on her album Isle of Majesty (2019). Be sure to check out the other songs, including “I Can Wade Grief” and “I Never Saw a Moor,” in which Lau is joined by her chamber music ensemble, The Broken Consort.
His Feet are shod with Gauze – His Helmet, is of Gold, His Breast, a single Onyx With Chrysophras, inlaid –
His Labor is a Chant – His Idleness – a Tune – Oh, for a Bee’s experience Of Clovers, and of Noon!
4. “Some keep the Sabbath going to Church” by Michael McGuane: Dickinson was raised as a Congregationalist but never officially joined the church and by 1868 had stopped attending altogether. Her poems vary in tone toward Christianity, with some expressing devout sentiments and others irreverence. One thing that’s clear is that she often encountered God in nature. In this poem the fruit trees create a sanctuary for her and the birds serve as choir—an elevating, worshipful experience. Christians throughout history have spoken of how the “book of nature” complements the book of scripture, both revealing God’s truth. Here Dickinson acknowledges the same, emphasizing the goodness of creation, our enjoyment of which is sacred. On YouTube, the Americana musician Michael McGuane performs a guitar-picked, folk-rock tune he wrote for the poem.
Some keep the Sabbath going to Church – I keep it, staying at Home – With a Bobolink for a Chorister – And an Orchard, for a Dome –
Some keep the Sabbath in Surplice – I, just wear my Wings – And instead of tolling the Bell, for Church, Our little Sexton – sings.
God preaches, a noted Clergyman – And the sermon is never long, So instead of getting to Heaven, at last – I’m going, all along.
5. “Split the Lark” by Drum & Lace (Sofia degli Alessandri-Hultquist) and Ian Hultquist, feat. Ella Hunt: This pop music setting of “Split the Lark” was written by husband-and-wife composing duo Drum & Lace and Ian Hultquist for the Apple TV+ comedy-drama Dickinson (which I have mixed feelings about). It’s featured in season 2, episode 6, where it’s sung by Ella Hunt, the actress who plays Emily’s sister-in-law (and in the show, secret lover), Susan Huntington Gilbert Dickinson. Emily is attending an opera performance in Boston and imagines—in place of the soprano—Sue, singing her own words to her.
Split the Lark – and you’ll find the Music – Bulb after bulb, in Silver rolled – Scantily dealt to the Summer Morning Saved for your Ear, when Lutes be old –
Loose the Flood – you shall find it patent – Gush after Gush, reserved for you – Scarlet Experiment! Sceptic Thomas! Now, do you doubt that your Bird was true?
Containing echoes of William Wordsworth’s “We murder to dissect,” this poem derides empiricism as the sole method of arriving at truth. The addressee wants to better comprehend the lark’s song, to observe the internal apparatus that enables it to make such beautiful music. Go ahead, the speaker exasperatedly tells him: take up your scalpel and dissect the bird. You’ll unleash a flood of blood and guts (“bulb after bulb” could refer to globular anatomical structures—e.g., the aortic bulb, the jugular bulb—or organs, or to musical notes). But would such prying really bring you closer to knowing the lark? Your experiment will have only caused the song to stop. The poem references the apostle Thomas, who demanded physical proof of Christ’s resurrection (personally, I think he’s unfairly maligned for this; his probing does, in fact, lead him to a deeper level of knowledge).
Dickinson was very much a supporter of science, but she also recognized its limitations when it comes to explaining certain mysteries or trying to produce physical evidence of the invisible. On one level, this poem may describe Dickinson’s stance on poetry, which, once you start to pick it apart, can sometimes lose its magic. I’m all for poetic analysis, but there’s something to be said for simply letting the sounds and musicality of poetic verse wash over you without going at it with a scalpel.
6. “I Had No Time to Hate” by Gerda Blok-Wilson: Look what Dickinson can do with the cliché “Life is too short to be angry”! She had a dark wit, which you get a glimmer of here. The poem is structured in two stanzas, the first about hate, so we might expect the second to wax rhapsodic about the virtues of love. But instead we get a matter-of-fact admission that life is also too short to complete the work of love. However, because we must choose either hate or love, she chooses love—it’s for us to fill in why it’s the superior choice. I like the interplay of littleness and largeness, suggesting that even in small caring acts, there’s a substantiality and a sufficiency, no matter how imperfect our love may be. The following recording, from June 2021, is of the premiere performance of Gerda Blok-Wilson’s choral setting of “I had no time to Hate –” by the Vancouver Chamber Choir, directed by Kari Turunen.
I had no time to Hate – Because The Grave would hinder me – And Life was not so Ample I Could finish – Enmity –
Nor had I time to Love – But since Some Industry must be – The little Toil of Love – I thought Be large enough for Me –
7. “I felt a Funeral, in my Brain” by Andrew Bird, feat. Phoebe Bridgers: This is another Dickinson poem that made a strong impression on me when I read it in school—what a fabulous first line. Though some have interpreted the poem as Dickinson imagining her own funeral, I see the funeral as a metaphor—for, possibly, the loss of a cherished friendship, long-held belief, or hope or dream, any of which would take a heavy psychological toll, or for the temporary loss of sanity, a mental breakdown, due to some stressor. The mood is oppressive, and the speaker grows increasingly unraveled. The singer-songwriter, violinist, and whistler Andrew Bird set the poem to “a simple two-note melody,” he said, and, in collaboration with the Emily Dickinson Museum in Amherst, made a music video featuring Dickinson’s handwriting and footage of her lifelong home.
I felt a Funeral, in my Brain, And Mourners to and fro Kept treading – treading – till it seemed That Sense was breaking through –
And when they all were seated, A Service, like a Drum – Kept beating – beating – till I thought My mind was going numb –
And then I heard them lift a Box And creak across my Soul With those same Boots of Lead, again, Then Space – began to toll,
As all the Heavens were a Bell, And Being, but an Ear, And I, and Silence, some strange Race Wrecked, solitary, here –
And then a Plank in Reason, broke, And I dropped down, and down – And hit a World, at every plunge, And Finished knowing – then –
8. “Because I Could Not Stop for Death” by Susan McKeown: From the 2002 album Prophecy by Susan McKeown, a Grammy-winning musical artist from Ireland, this song takes as its lyrics one of Dickinson’s most famous poems, one that promotes a gentle, welcoming attitude toward death. It personifies Death as a kindly gentleman driving a carriage, transporting the speaker at a casual pace past the final traces of her mortal life and into eternity. (Note: Emma Wallace, from the first entry, also wrote a compelling setting!)
Because I could not stop for Death – He kindly stopped for me – The Carriage held but just Ourselves – And Immortality.
We slowly drove – He knew no haste And I had put away My labor and my leisure too, For His Civility –
We passed the School, where Children strove At Recess – in the Ring – We passed the Fields of Gazing Grain – We passed the Setting Sun –
Or rather – He passed Us – The Dews drew quivering and Chill – For only Gossamer, my Gown – My Tippet – only Tulle –
We paused before a House that seemed A Swelling of the Ground – The Roof was scarcely visible – The Cornice – in the Ground –
Since then – ’tis Centuries – and yet Feels shorter than the Day I first surmised the Horses’ Heads Were toward Eternity –
9. “Hope’s the Thing with Feathers” by Julie Lee: Another classic poem, this one about the warmth and persistence of hope. Julie Lee gives it an uplifting banjo tune.
“Hope” is the thing with feathers – That perches in the soul – And sings the tune without the words – And never stops – at all –
And sweetest – in the Gale – is heard – And sore must be the storm – That could abash the little Bird That kept so many warm –
I’ve heard it in the chillest land – And on the strangest Sea – Yet – never – in Extremity, It asked a crumb – of me.
10. “In this short Life” by Scott Joiner: Dickinson wrote this compact poem of just two lines on an upcycled envelope flap, as she was wont to do, around 1873 and saved it. It expresses the paradox that we humans possess free will, a potent trait, and yet so many things are beyond our control. Composer Scott Joiner wrote a piece for voice and piano for this text, performed by Jessica Fishenfeld and Milena Gligić on the album Emily that released just this month (it features settings by Joiner of five poems by Dickinson and five by her near contemporary from across the pond, Emily Brontë). The tone is contemplative and resigned.
In this short Life that only lasts an hour How much – how little – is within our power
Envelope poem by Emily Dickinson, ca. 1873, from the Emily Dickinson Collection, Amherst College (Amherst Manuscript #252, Box 3, Folder 88)
Hansa (Hans Versteeg) (Dutch, 1941–), Between Hope and Despair, 2015. Oil on canvas, 125 × 150 cm.
Everything is plundered, betrayed, sold, Death’s great black wing scrapes the air, Misery gnaws to the bone. Why then do we not despair?
By day, from the surrounding woods, cherries blow summer into town; at night the deep transparent skies glitter with new galaxies.
And the miraculous comes so close to the ruined, dirty houses— something not known to anyone at all, but wild in our breast for centuries.
This poem was originally published in Russian (title: “Все разграблено”) in Anno Domini MCMMXI by Anna Akhmatova (Petrograd: Petropolis, 1922). The above translation by Stanley Kunitz, with Max Hayward, appears in Poems of Akhmatova (Boston: Mariner Books, 1997).
Akhmatova wrote “Everything Is Plundered” in June 1921, during a time of great social and political upheaval caused by the Russian Revolution (1917), which established Communism in the country, and the resultant Russian Civil War (1917–1922). Just two months later, her first husband, the father of her nine-year-old son, would be arrested and executed as a counterrevolutionary. Despite the death and destruction she was witnessing, she did not want to abandon hope. She grasps for a miracle, which is elusive but, she senses, near—will it land?
Like the poet, I too marvel at how such ugliness and beauty can coexist in the world. For Akhmatova, it’s in large part gifts from nature, such as the scent of cherry blossoms or the sparkle of a starry night sky, that prevent her from despairing, that rekindle in her that faith-flame. When humans make a terrible and violent mess of things, there’s still the persistence of seasons and the steadiness of sky. I consider such things graces from God, reminders of God’s deep-down, benevolent, outreaching presence.
Anna Akhmatova, the pen name of Anna Andreevna Gorenko (1889–1966), is one of the most significant Russian poets of the twentieth century. She was active as a writer during both the prerevolutionary and Soviet eras, though in the latter, her work was condemned and censored by Stalinist authorities, who viewed it as too pessimistic and rooted in bourgeois culture. Though many of her friends emigrated out of the country to escape oppression, she chose not to, believing that her poetry would die if she left her homeland; she wanted to stay and bear witness to the events around her, and to hold out hope for a better tomorrow. One of Akhmatova’s most famous poem cycles, Requiem, she wrote while her only child, Lev Gumilev, was detained in Kresty prison in 1938 along with hundreds of other victims of the Great Terror; he would spend the next two decades in forced-labor camps. It wasn’t until the late 1980s, after her death, that Akhmatova achieved full recognition for her literary accomplishments in her native Russia, when all her previously unpublishable works finally became accessible to the public.
Chagall’s Peace Window is one of the most significant works in the United Nations’ art collection. On my quick visit to New York City last month, where the UN is headquartered, I was hoping to see it, but I emailed ahead of time and found out it’s not currently available for viewing due to construction behind it. (You can “see” it but not really, because it’s not lit, and there’s a tall plastic barrier in front.) I was disappointed, but I decided to visit the UN anyway, to see what other art I might find.
The United Nations was founded in 1945 for the purpose of preventing a third world war. Comprising 193 member states, the organization is committed to maintaining international peace and security, developing friendly relations among nations, and promoting social progress, better living standards, and human rights. Their motto is “Peace, dignity, and equality on a healthy planet.”
After presenting my ID, getting my photo taken, being stickered, and going through security, I was inside the campus and directed to the General Assembly Building. Outside the entrance to this building is the famous Non-Violence bronze, aka TheKnotted Gun, by Carl Fredrik Reuterswärd of Sweden. The artist made the sculpture in 1980 after his friend John Lennon was murdered. He wanted to honor the singer-songwriter’s vision of a peaceful world.
Carl Fredrik Reuterswärd (Swedish, 1934–2016), Non-Violence, 1984. Bronze, 79 × 44 × 50 in. United Nations Headquarters (outside the General Assembly building), New York. Gift from Luxembourg. Photo: Victoria Emily Jones. [object record]
The original cast was first placed at the Strawberry Fields memorial in New York City’s Central Park, across the street from the Dakota apartment building where Lennon and his wife, Yoko Ono, lived, and where he was shot. But Reuterswärd worried it would be stolen there. In 1988, the Government of Luxembourg bought the sculpture and donated it to the United Nations, who installed it inside the gate of their New York headquarters.
Non-Violence is an oversize replica of a Colt Python .357 Magnum revolver with the barrel tied in a knot and the muzzle pointing upward, rendering the weapon useless. In his statement from 1988, Reuterswärd said, “Humor is the finest instrument we have to bring people together. While making my peace-symbol, I thought of the importance of introducing a touch of humor, just to make my ‘weapon’ symbolically ridiculous and completely out of order.”
Reuterswärd ultimately made over thirty additional casts of Non-Violence, which are publicly installed in cities such as Beijing, Beirut, Cape Town, Lausanne, and Mexico City.
After spending some time with this iconic work, I entered the General Assembly lobby. What first caught my eye, on the right wall, was a monumental Mola Tapestry from Panama, made by unidentified Kuna women. (To learn about the art form, see my previous blog post from Lent 2022.)
Mola Tapestry by the Kuna people, 1993. Reverse appliqué tapestry, 190 × 284 in. General Assembly Building, United Nations Headquarters, New York. Gift from Panama. Photo: Victoria Emily Jones. [object record]
Molas are made using a reverse appliqué technique, in which several layers of multicolored cloth are sewn together and then parts of each layer are cut out to form the design. These textile panels are traditionally made on a smaller scale and sewn onto women’s blouses, but as outside interest in them grew, local artisans started making some to be displayed as wall hangings.
This one shows a colorful array of indigenous flora and fauna, including a toucan, owl, hummingbird, monkey, turtle, frog, squirrel, rabbit, deer, and wildcat.
On the opposite wall is a nearly thirty-foot-long painting titled La Fraternidad (Brotherhood) by Mexican artist Rufino Tamayo [previously], which shows a group of people gathered around a fire with interlaced arms. The fire may represent enlightenment, knowledge and power, or the Divine Presence.
Rufino Tamayo (Mexican, 1899–1991), La Fraternidad (Brotherhood), 1968. Oil on canvas, 160 × 358 in. General Assembly Building, United Nations Headquarters, New York. Gift from Mexico, 1971. Photo: Victoria Emily Jones. [object record]
At the left is an ancient Aztec or Mayan pyramid, whereas the structure at the right is modern. Tamayo said this shows the span of time, from the ancient era into the present and future.
From 2009 to 2014 the painting was on display at the Mexican state legislature, after which it was restored and returned to the UN.
Situated in front is a replica of an ancient Greek sculpture depicting Poseidon of Artemision, god of the sea, in an active stance. His right hand would have originally wielded a trident, representing his power. At first I thought it an odd choice for the UN to display an apparently militant figure, as Poseidon used his trident as a weapon to fight Trojans, Titans, and others, and indeed here he seems poised to deliver a death blow. But after some rudimentary research, I found that Poseidon also created life-giving springs with the strike of his trident (think Moses striking the rock with his staff), and used it to calm turbulent waters. These ameliorating acts align with the UN’s mission and make the Poseidon sculpture a fitting addition to their collection.
Also in the lobby is a wool tapestry from Latvia. Titled Hope, it’s by the well-known Latvian textile artist Edīte Pauls-Vīgnere.
Edīte Pauls-Vīgnere (Latvian, 1939–), Hope, 1994. Tapestry, 126 × 114 in. General Assembly Building, United Nations Headquarters, New York. Gift from Latvia. Photo: Victoria Emily Jones. [object record]
The female figure in the foreground is, I’m assuming, a personification of hope, dressed in a white gown and golden headband and holding the sun. She stands in front of the Freedom Monument in Riga, which shows Lady Liberty holding three gilded stars, symbolizing the three constitutional districts of Latvia.
Deeper inside the lobby was a temporary exhibition, Interwoven: Refugee Murals Across Borders, organized jointly by UNHCR (the UN Refugee Agency) and Artolution. It opened on June 20, World Refugee Day, and will continue through July 19. The exhibition presents paintings by refugees and host communities in refugee camps, conflict zones, and crisis-affected communities across the world. These were created through a collaborative process in which the work circulated to different locations, with artists contributing additions at each stop. The end results show interwoven narratives of the diverse peoples forced to flee their homes. Themes include joy, lament, labor, empowerment, identity, and home.
Made by about a dozen refugee girls and women from four countries, Fabric of Women’s Resilience began in Uganda with a small group of South Sudanese, who prepared the traditional bark cloth from the bark of a mutuba tree. This substrate then traveled to Bangladesh, where Rohingya women painted a pregnant woman lying on a bed while a female doctor presses a stethoscope to her belly, and on the left, a mother bathing her child. The artists said they wanted to encourage mothers to seek access to prenatal healthcare and to practice good hygiene with their babies.
Fabric of Women’s Resilience, a collaborative painting by approx. twelve Rohingya, Syrian, Afghan, and South Sudanese refugee women, 2018. Acrylic on bark cloth, 24 × 60 in. Photo: Victoria Emily Jones.
In Greece, the bark cloth traveled to Samos refugee camp, where one young Afghan woman, with the help of others, painted one of her traumatic childhood experiences: being married off at age twelve to an older man. This scene at the top is a bit crumpled in the frame, so it’s difficult to see, but the child bride is crying, and the man has a white beard.
The painting also went to Azraq refugee camp in Jordan, where Syrian women added a woman carrying a baby on her back while reading a book to show that women can be mothers and pursue an education. (This scene was at the extreme right but must have come off; view the full original painting on the exhibition webpage, fourth image down.) It ended its journey with a return to Uganda, where the South Sudanese women filled in the remaining spaces with plants, fish, and fruits.
Other artworks include The Creature of Home and Play in the Midst of Chaos, painted on food distribution bags and as a collaboration between South Sudanese and Rohingya refugees, both children and adults.
The Creature of Home, which traveled to BidiBidi Refugee Settlement in Uganda and Balukhali Refugee Camp in Bangladesh, depicts chickens, a soccer field, memories of home, and tools needed to take care of the land.
The Creature of Home, a collaborative painting by South Sudanese refugees at BidiBidi Refugee Settlement, Uganda, and Rohingya refugees at Balukhali Refugee Camp, Bangladesh. Photo: Victoria Emily Jones.
Play in the Midst of Chaos, which traveled to BidiBidi Refugee Settlement in Uganda and Bhasan Char Island in Bangladesh, captures a sense of joy with its vivid colors and depiction of sports. It also highlights the importance of planting trees and taking climate action.
Play in the Midst of Chaos, a collaborative painting by South Sudanese refugees at BidiBidi Refugee Settlement, Uganda, and Rohingya refugees at Bhasan Char Island, Bangladesh. Photo: Victoria Emily Jones.
Seeing the Interwoven exhibition sent me down an internet rabbit trail of learning more about the co-organizer, Artolution, and the work they’re doing, which then impelled me to learn more about the refugee communities in which they’re active. Follow them on Instagram, Facebook, or Twitter. I also commend to you the Founder Spirit podcast interview with Artolution cofounder and public artist, educator, and humanitarian Max Frieder.
All the above artworks can be seen for free without an appointment. (However, note that the temporary exhibitions change throughout the year.) But to access the sculptures in the garden, which is kept locked, your only option is to pay $26 for the guided, forty-five-minute Garden Tour.
I had seen photos of the biblically inspired Let Us Beat Swords into Ploughshares and wanted to see it in person, so I paid up. It’s vaguely visible from the vantage of the free-access plaza outside the main entrance of the General Assembly Building.
But let’s move in closer.
Yevgeny Vuchetich (Russian, 1908–1974), Let Us Beat Swords into Ploughshares, 1959. Cast bronze and granite pedestal, figure 111 × 76 × 35 in., pedestal 44 × 75 × 34 in. North Lawn, United Nations Headquarters, New York. Gift from the USSR. Photo: Victoria Emily Jones. [object record]
Gifted to the United Nations by the USSR in 1959, the bronze sculpture is by the Soviet artist Yevgeny (sometimes spelled “Evgeniy”) Vuchetich, who was of Russian, French, and Serbian heritage and lived most of his life in Russia. It shows a muscular man (modeled by Olympic wrestler Boris Gurevich) hammering a sword into a plow blade, used to cut furrows for planting crops. Representing the transformation of tools of death into tools of life, the imagery is taken from Isaiah 2:4 in the Hebrew Bible, in which the prophet proclaims that “in days to come,” people of all nations “shall beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks; nation shall not lift up sword against nation; neither shall they learn war any more.” The vision is that in the kingdom of God, instead of the land being littered with human blood and corpses, it will be cultivated and bring forth good food.
This scripture text is the basis of the African American spiritual “Down by the Riverside” [previously], whose refrain declares, “I ain’t gonna study war no more!” One of the commonly used verses is “I’m gonna beat my sword into a plow.” Here’s Michael Wright’s version:
And, from 1959, the Golden Gate Quartet’s, arranged by Orlandus Wilson:
Reflecting the song lyrics, Vuchetich’s sculpture is itself planted “down by the riverside”—the East River.
Vuchetich was one of the major figures of Soviet government–backed monumental sculpture, making his name from depictions of military heroes. So I find it a little odd that he was commissioned to make this peace sculpture that subverts the very militarism his other sculptures celebrate. One of his most famous pieces is The Motherland Calls; located at the top of Mamayev Kurgan hill overlooking the city formerly known as Stalingrad, it shows a female personification of Russia lifting high a sword in one hand and calling the Soviet people to battle with the other.
Look, many artists will take what work they can get, regardless of whether a commission matches their own ideology. I don’t claim to know what Vuchetich’s personal views were about war, violence, and empire.
Regardless of its disjunction with the artist’s larger oeuvre—and the uncomfortable fact that the donor’s successor state and caretaker of the sculpture, the Russian Federation, is persisting in an illegal and immoral war against its neighbor Ukraine—I really appreciate the theological imagination that Let Us Beat Swords into Ploughshares embodies, entreating us to apply our strength to constructive, not destructive, acts.
Nearby in the garden, not pictured in this article, is a literalization of the “swords into plowshares” principle. A recent gift from the Government of Colombia, Kusikawsay (Quechua for “peaceful and happy life”) is made of steel armaments melted and cast into the shape of a canoe, sailing upward. A donor representative said the sculpture for them symbolizes the end of an over-fifty-year armed conflict in their country. The idea is that the grotesque paraphernalia of war is metamorphosed into a benign watercraft that, in how it’s positioned, symbolizes humanity’s traveling into a lofty future.
Another boat on the UNHQ’s North Lawn is Arrival by the Irish sculptor John Behan, which shows Irish immigrants disembarking into a new world. The sculpture was intended as a thank-you to the many nations that have received the Irish over the years, including Great Britain, the United States, Canada, Australia, Argentina, Chile, Mexico, New Zealand, and Brazil.
John Behan (Irish, 1938–), Arrival, 2000. Bronze, stainless steel on granite pavers, 26 × 23 ft. North Lawn, United Nations Headquarters, New York. Gift from Ireland. Photo: Victoria Emily Jones. [object record]
This piece wasn’t covered by the Garden Tour, nor was the colossal Mother and Child by the Italian artist Giacomo Manzù, which I spotted across the lawn and hurriedly snapped a distant photo of while scurrying to keep up with the group.
Giacomo Manzù (Italian, 1908–1991), Mother and Child, 1989. Bronze, 254 × 66 × 52 in. North Lawn, United Nations Headquarters, New York. Gift from Italy. Photo: Victoria Emily Jones. [object record]
One of the pieces our guide did stop for and spend a good amount of time on was a fragment of the Berlin Wall gifted by Germany in 2002, after the wall came down in 1989. The ninety-six-mile-long barrier was erected in 1961 to divide the country into East (Communist) and West (Federal Republic), but a peaceful revolution in East Germany resulted in its fall and the country’s reunification as a federal republic, marking the end of the Cold War in Europe.
Kani Alavi (Iranian German, 1955–), Trophy of Civil Rights (Berlin Wall Fragment), ca. 1998. Precast reinforced concrete wall sections with paint, overall 84 × 114 in. North Lawn, United Nations Headquarters, New York. Gift from Germany. Photo: Victoria Emily Jones. [object record]
The front of this three-slab wall fragment (that is, the side visible from the paved path) bears a mural by Kani Alavi, an Iranian artist who moved to West Berlin in 1980, living in an apartment overlooking the formidable “Checkpoint Charlie.” Throughout the 1980s, artists painted images on the west side of the wall as a form of political commentary and resistance. The east side, however, was unpainted during the Cold War because it was so heavily guarded; attempted art interventionists probably would have been shot.
After the border opened on November 9, 1989, and demolition of the wall began, Alavi was a key organizer of what’s known as the East Side Gallery, inviting artists from Germany and around the world to paint murals on the east side of the wall, across a segment that would be deliberately left standing as a memorial. “Alavi helped transform the most visible symbol of the Iron Curtain into an enduring monument to the power of freedom,” Ryan Prior wrote for CNN. This open-air gallery is one of Berlin’s most visited attractions, featuring the work of at least 118 artists from twenty-one countries.
Alavi painted Trophy of Civil Rights (I’m not sure whether that inscription was his or just a remnant from another artist, but it’s become the mural’s de facto title) on a section of remaining wall sometime around 1998. “It is a representation of two people hugging over the wall, a dramatic situation of people trying to get close to each other,” he told NPR through a translator. “It shows how the people were separated. It shows how a culture was divided by a wall. That’s what happened, and that’s what I showed.”
The other side of the wall is painted with miscellaneous graffiti by anonymous artists.
The largest sculpture on the North Lawn, standing at thirty-one feet tall and weighing forty tons, is Good Defeats Evil by the Georgian Russian sculptor Zurab Tsereteli. It depicts the Early Christian martyr-saint George, who was tortured and executed in 303 under the Diocletian persecution. Legends about him started developing in the sixth century and by the thirteenth century were widely circulated and embellished to include a tale of him slaying a dragon to save a Libyan princess whom the terrorized villagers had planned to sacrifice to it for appeasement.
Zurab Tsereteli (Georgian Russian, 1934–), Good Defeats Evil, 1990. Cast bronze figure with dragon formed from sections of two destroyed nuclear missiles, 31 × 18 × 10 ft. North Lawn, United Nations Headquarters, New York. Gift from the USSR. Photo: Victoria Emily Jones. [object record]
(Side note: Saint George is not to be confused with Saint Michael the Archangel from the book of Revelation, who in Christian iconography is usually shown on foot [but occasionally on horseback], also slaying a dragon. The easiest way to tell the two saints apart is that Michael has wings, whereas George does not.)
The most intriguing aspect of this sculpture is that the two-headed dragon is made up of sections of two destroyed nuclear missiles, making the piece a symbol of disarmament. According to the UN website, here
the dragon is not the mythological beast of early Christian tradition, but rather represents the vanquishing of nuclear war through the historic treaty between the Soviet Union and the United States [the Treaty on the Elimination of Intermediate-Range and Short-Range Nuclear Missiles, signed in 1987]. Created as a monument to peace, the sculpture is composed of parts of actual United States and Soviet missiles. Accordingly, the dragon is shown lying amid actual fragments of these weapons, the broken pieces of Soviet SS-20 and U.S. Pershing missiles.
The dragon’s two heads thus represent the world’s two largest nuclear arsenals during the Cold War: those of the Soviet Union and the United States.
The last sculpture I’ll mention is Consciousnessby the Mongolian artist Ochirbold Ayurzana. It consists of a rounded, high-luster steel alloy floor plate on which stands a human figure, made of twisted metal strings, examining the footprints they’ve left on the planet. What mark will we make, for good or ill? The sculpture is dedicated to the historic adoption of two global developmental milestone documents: the UN 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and the Paris Agreement on Climate Change.
Ochirbold Ayurzana (Mongolian, 1976–), Consciousness, 2017. Steel, metal on pedestal, 110 × 196 × 125 in. North Lawn, United Nations Headquarters, New York. Gift from Mongolia. Photo: Victoria Emily Jones. [object record]
This is just a selection of the many artworks on view at the United Nations Headquarters in Manhattan. To view a full catalog, click here.
Garden Tours are offered every Wednesday at 2 p.m. from May through August, and Art Tours are offered every other Thursday at 1:15 p.m. year-round—or either one upon request. I’m grateful for their having accommodated me and my husband while we were in town!
I really wish the UN would allow visitors to move through the garden at their own speed, though, as the tour was so fast-paced that I hardly had time to take in a sculpture before we were made to move on to the next one. Approximately one to three minutes was apportioned for each work, which is hardly enough time to sit with the weight and history of some of these pieces. And I didn’t have time to change camera lenses for different types of shots. Because you have to be accompanied by a staff person, you are not allowed to linger behind when the group advances. Some leeway was given to me, but overall I felt rushed. Perhaps the pacing was anomalous because it was such a hot day—in the nineties—and the few shaded areas were prioritized.
Despite the swiftness, I really enjoyed the tour and experiencing and learning about the variety of sculptures and other art pieces from a variety of UN member countries, which celebrate peace, joy, and global unity and project a hopeful future.
Every warrior’s boot used in battle and every garment rolled in blood will be destined for burning, will be fuel for the fire. For to us a child is born, to us a son is given, and the government will be on his shoulders. And he will be called Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace.
—Isaiah 9:5–6 NIV
LOOK: Nativity by Irenaeus Yurchuk
Irenaeus Yurchuk (Іриней Юрчук), Nativity, 2022. Mixed media on canvas. Used with permission.
Irenaeus Yurchuk was born in Ukraine during World War II and raised in central New York, where he still resides. He worked professionally as an urban planner until 2010, when he turned to art full-time.
“Over the years my work has evolved to combine multiple-image photography with drawing and painting, using a variety of digital editing and physical montage techniques,” Yurchuk says. “This includes adjusting inkjet images by applying acrylics, watercolors, pastels, markers, colored pencils together with selected collage materials to achieve a desired effect.”
Yurchuk’s Nativity is a response to Russia’s 2022 military invasion of Ukraine. This is no facile depiction of that historic birth, no cozy winter idyll. It is a war-zone Nativity. It shows the Holy Family, rendered in iconic style, sheltering at night in the rubble of a bombed-out apartment complex. Surrounded by fallen steel beams, concrete, and broken glass, Mother Mary holds the newborn Jesus while a downcast Joseph sits beside them with head in hands. Though their circumstances are dire, through the building’s shell shines one particularly bright star, signifying hope in the horror.
One of the biblical names for Jesus is Emmanuel, Hebrew for “God with us.” By showing the Christ child being born amid the ruins of a contemporary Ukrainian city, Yurchuk reinforces the ongoing relevance of the Incarnation, meditating on God’s descent into our world of woe to dwell with and to deliver. Jesus is “God with us” in our suffering. When everything around us is crumbling, God is there too, hurting alongside and calling all oppressors to account.
Do you recall the famous Christmas text from Isaiah, further immortalized by Handel, that begins “Unto us a child is born . . .”? Well, it is immediately preceded by a prophecy of war’s final demise, of soldiers’ uniforms and accoutrements and all their bloody violence being consigned to one great big burning trash heap. In the new world government established by Christ, the Prince of Peace, tyrants will be overthrown (Luke 1:51–52), and the nations will study war no more (Isa. 2:4).
May this artwork and the song below prompt you to intercede for those suffering under war today, in Ukraine and elsewhere.
LISTEN: “Drive Out the Darkness” by Paul Zach, Isaac Wardell, Dan Marotta, and John Swinton, on Lament Songs by the Porter’s Gate (2020)
Refrain: Come, O come Be our light Drive out the darkness Come, Jesus, come
Every year under the thorn Every wrong that we have known Every valley will be raised Ancient ruins will be remade [Refrain]
Every weapon made for war Every gun and every sword Will be melted in the flame To be used for gardening [Refrain]
In the emptiness of grief Through the night of suffering In the loss and in the tears God of comfort, O be near [Refrain]
Coda: Come, and end all the violence Come, do not be silent Come, we cling to your promise Come, you’ll break all injustice Come, Jesus, come
For my review of the Lament Songs album by the Porter’s Gate, see here.
In addition to these words that the Porter’s Gate has given us to pray, I commend to you this prayer by Rev. Kenneth Tanner, which he posted October 13 in response to recent atrocities in Israel and Gaza (I’ve been returning to it a lot over the past month):
This post is part of a daily Advent series from December 2 to 24, 2023 (with Christmas to follow through January 6, 2024). View all the posts here, and the accompanying Spotify playlist here.
Advent is a season of waiting with deep longing and hope for that long-looked-for day when fear and pain will be no more because Christ will reign and set this world free. These songs tap into that.
>> “Redemption Draweth Nigh”by Gordon Jensen (1970), performed by Rumbi Lee (2018): The title and refrain of this contemporary hymn are drawn from Luke 21:28: “And when these things begin to come to pass, then look up, and lift up your heads; for your redemption draweth nigh” (KJV).
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STREET ART SERIES: Medicinal Flowers of Lebanon by Faith XLVII: In September 2021, South African artist Faith XLVII (Liberty Du) traveled to Beirut to paint curative flowers across the rubble of the Lebanese city in the wake of the August 4, 2020, port explosion that caused at least 218 deaths, 7,000 injuries, and $15 billion in property damage, as well as leaving an estimated 300,000 people homeless. Rosehips, horned poppies, chicory, African carline thistle—all these botanicals are used in remedies for common ailments. “Each flower urges us, in a sense, towards healing as they grow out of the concrete,” the artist said.
Faith XLVII (South African, 1979–), Glaucium flavum, from the Medicinal Flowers of Lebanon series, Beirut, Lebanon, 2021. Photo courtesy of the artist.
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NEW ALBUMS:
>> The Soil and The Seed Project, vol. 8: Advent-Christmas-Epiphany: For the Advent-Christmas-Epiphany triad of the church year comes this new album from The Soil and The Seed Project, a ministry of Virginia Mennonite Missions—and recently Lilly-Endowed! All their music is free—for download, and even as physical CDs while supplies last. Below are two of my favorite tracks, both written by new contributors to the project. The first verse of Philip Fisher Rhodes’s “Bethlehem One” is in the voice of the in utero Christ; the second, the shepherds; the third, the wise men. The song is sung by Ben Luna. And “Peace Prayer” by Susan Gascho-Cooke is a plea that God would hold his arms around “this tilting planet,” the world’s wounds, and all people.
Each TSATP album is part of a larger project that also includes “Little Liturgies” booklets perfect for families with small kids (but that can also be used by individuals and small groups). Each booklet includes litanies, prayers, reflection questions, suggested activities, and visual art—and again, they’re free! Request a digital or physical copy here.
>> Kindness Is Solid Stone, Violence Is a Heavy Loan to Pay by David Benjamin Blower: Released November 3 and available on Bandcamp only, this album features nine original songs by writer, poet, theologian, and podcaster David Benjamin Blower of Birmingham, UK. I appreciate the minimalist sound and the stark lyricism. My favorite track is probably “Meet Me Where I Sing and Stamp My Feet”:
Art & Theology 