God Will Provide the Lamb

    "Behold, the Lamb of God

who takes away the sin of the world!"

John, the Baptizer, upon seeing Jesus

      My friend, Deborah Mrantz, challenged me in a email. She wrote, 'Have you considered doing something (visually) with Abraham?' So, while driving, this came to me-

I imagined a series of three images- A knife, thorns and a ram's horn.

I roughed out a quick version on corrugated paper-

God Will Provide The Lamb

Oil on Corrugated Paper

The layers within the Hebrew language run deep, forming a network that both inspires and defies human comprehension. Within the verses of text the individual words speak; within the words the individual characters have a voice.

In Genesis, chapter 22, Abraham and his son Isaac are climbing a mountain when Isaac asks, "Where is the lamb for the sacrifice?" Abraham replies,

"God will provide the lamb."

In my minds-eye I saw the Hebrew lettering for 'the lamb' amidst the thorns, between the knife and the horn. It was as I painted these characters that I focused on their nature as letterforms. The expression 'the lamb' is constructed with three characters: 

The two outer characters are both the letter Hey, making the sound of a breath:

Originally, the character symbolized two outstretched arms.

The character says, 'Behold!' 

During a Jewish wedding ceremony, the couple whispers to each other, "Behold (hey), I will try with all my being to be present for you."

(from The Book of Letters by Rabbi Lawrence Kushner).

The name of the character in the center of 'the lamb' is

sin:

To the ancients, the character symbolized teeth, meaning to devour or consume.

As I meditated on the letters and their meanings, 'the lamb' became pictured to me hebraically as sin, enclosed, consumed and destroyed between the outstretched arms of God the Father and God the Holy Spirit-

the three-in-one God who promises, with all His being, to be present for me.

Show and Tell

The heavens declare the glory of God;

and the firmament shows His handiwork.

Psalm 19:1 NKJV

i'd like to tell you about the clouds

     above me 

but i don't have the words

     they speak

i'd like to be in those clouds

     sky scales of 1-7... maybe 9

but i am here, silent

     beneath their voice

in a second-floor valley

     looking up

from my earth scale,

     ... i am a 5

One Second of Silence

"Imagination is everything.

It is the preview of Life's coming attractions."

Albert Einstein

     One ordinary year is 31,536,000 seconds; a series of future memories, one moment at a time. My to-do list seems to expand and shrink like the kitchen sponge while the inside of my head feels like a power ball container- thoughts, ideas, memories all tumbling and rolling 'round- which ones will fall out, I wonder. Will they be a winner?


     My friend, Tom Sullivan, sends me books. I just finished the latest- In the Heart of the Desert, The Spirituality of the Desert Fathers and Mothers by John Chryssavgis. In Conclusion, the author writes,

"Of course, the flight to the desert will not always be as radical as that practiced by the elders of early Christian Egypt. The ways of detachment, the moments of departure may be insignificant opportunities, ones that we may even miss if we are not attentive: a quiet moment alone; a quiet moment in the presence of a friend; a walk alone; a quiet time of camping, swimming or fishing; a time of reflection in a silent corner; a longer drive; a long wait during a short drive, when we are caught in traffic. We should enter those moments of stillness and understand them. We should also speak from those moments of silence and act out of them. We are what we do with that stillness and silence."

     

     The year goes on and I don't want to miss a second. 

Prayers, Praise and Pomodoro

Grande Disco

Arnaldo Pomodoro

Charlotte, NC

"The social challenge of art today, in my opinion,

is to start a dialogue with the people."

Arnaldo Pomodoro

     "Congenial conversation- what a pleasure!

The right word at the right time- beautiful!" 

Proverb 15:23, The Message.

     Words matter. The art of conversation rests on the right word at the right time. Words are the stock and trade of preachers and politicians, poets and pragmatists... it's no wonder we cringe at the word rhetoric (check out Rhetorica ad Herennium, you can click here to download a copy). FYI- Google translate doesn't list art as a language.


     Saturday I witnessed a beautiful thing- teenagers giving away words of hope, written, spoken and sung, to strangers on a sidewalk in Uptown Charlotte. They defied all the stereotypical 'kids today' comments. They prayed for people, out loud. They sang. Loud. They danced. Extravagantly. They freely gave away one of their most precious gifts- time, for the express purpose of sharing the love of God... without hype or pressure. There were, of course, some who steered clear of the group. These are strange times, filled with strange people. Too many agendas to be leary of.


     Not too far from the youth, across the street, there stands a sculpture by Arnaldo Pomodoro. The Grande Disco. The artist's statement at the base reads:


     Our life today is one of crisis... of movement... of tension.
     We do not know what our world will become.
     I try to say something about this uncertainty in my work.
     I try to communicate a sense of vitality and connection
     with the movement of life today...
     and to be a part of its movement.
     The social challenge of art today, in my opinion, is to start
     a dialogue with the people.
     I hope that is what happens here with the Grande Disco.


Saturday, a group of teenagers in Charlotte, North Carolina started a dialogue with a few people. Face-to-face, in real time, in front of The Grande Disco.

Street Worship
Tryon and Trade
Charlotte, NC

What if...?

"Kids think with their brains cracked wide open;

becoming an adult, I've decided, is only a slow sewing shut."

Jodi Picoult

     As a teacher, one of the questions that drives me is "What if...?" The universe is contained within those three dots. Every good teacher knows that the right question is more important than the right answer. Here are a few of the 'what ifs' I've been chewing on:

     What if time is an expanding circle rather than a spring unwinding?

     What if there is a sound inside me someone needs to hear?

     What if everyone could be childlike and released their sound?

     What if the One who created time stepped into the circle?

     What if anything is possible?

Scribes, Skins and Screens

My Kindle

    "History plays odd jokes sometimes, and it seems a prank that the first to use a true alphabet should be a people with no literature at all."

Oscar Ogg, The 26 Letters

     My disease is probably hereditary. I suspect my Father. It isn't painful, though at times it can be annoying. The description is as follows:

     Bibliomaniaor Book-Madness from the Greek biblion=book+ mania=madness.Behavioral disorder caused by bacterial infection, bacilli librorum (attributed to Eugene Field). Common symptoms include the uncontrollable urge to acquire and hoard books, indiscriminate bookstore hopping, and delusions of authorship, which alone or in combination may result in prolonged disruption of daily life. The more severe forms of bibliomania may involve recurring incidents of bibliokleptomania (book theft) and/or lying about supposed ownership of titles. No cure is known to exist... 

from The Gutenberg Project

     It began, I think, when I discovered a shelf of books in the basement- The World's Great Literature in twenty volumes. As my fingers touched the words of Stevenson, Poe, H.G. Wells and a host of others, the infection began. The very smell of the paper... the feel of the paper was a thing of wonder. I knew something was happening that I did not want to end. Several volumes from the shelf assimilated into my DNA. The feeling returns when I enter a used-book store; when I see that the well-crafted book I am holding is a first edition, causing a stirring in my inner-man (I once discovered a first edition To Kill A Mockingbird in a Memphis Goodwill- $1.00... still in the original dust jacket). 

Some old friends

     And so, when Joshua gave me a Kindle for Christmas my first thought was, 'What will I do with this?' It feels cold. The pages are stored beneath a screen of plastic. It smells of... well, it doesn't have a smell. Books are supposed to smell. And what about the books of old, carefully produced on handmade paper and animal skins (each Gutenberg Bible printed on Vellum required the lives of 170 young calves). Little did I know. 

     My Kindle currently holds 126 titles. There are, beneath my screen, four Bibles, two dictionaries and works by Thoreau, Ruskin, Kant, Kierkegaard, Aquinas and my old friends Stevenson, Poe and Wells. I confess- Kindle is convenient, and, no animals were harmed in the making of it. According to The Association of American Publishers, 3.4 million ebook units sold last year. Thanks to Project Gutenberg, I can download 39,000 ebooks- free. I can even download articles as a PDF.  If only it had the right smell.

  

  Alas, I can always go to the library for my bibliofix. 

A shelf in my library (Fort Mill Public Library)

Time is Weird

Samuel being tattooed

"Life is what happens to you while you're busy making other plans."
John Lennon, Beautiful Boy


     Time is weird. In the past two weeks my son Samuel turned 18, was tattooed and graduated from High School... in that order. Three benchmark moments occurred within a few days. But that's not the weird part. The weird part is that he was born just the other day. Well, it seems like the other day. Was it really eighteen years ago?   


     Samuel has always been perceptive. His child-like comments become known in our household as Sammyisms. I recorded some of them in journals. Here are a few, each spoken before Samuel turned five: 

"God can see the wind."

"God made butterflies so art can fly."

"You don't see rainbows at nighttime."

"Sometimes God asks us to do hard things."

"Dad, I want to fly. Will you make gravity go away?"

"My heart feels I should have a cookie."

"When you live in the Bible the Bible is your world."

"When I get to heaven, the first thing I'm gonna do is give God a kiss and a hug."

     Congratulations, Samuel. You are a blessing to me and to all who know you.

May the Lord bless you, and keep you;

The Lord make His face shine on you, and be gracious to you;

The Lord lift up His countenance on you,

and give you peace.

Graduation Day