Church-Wide Art Project ~ What Do You Hold On To?

 In the poem that follows, William Stafford uses the image of a thread that serves as a lifeline either connecting us to home, or what defines us, or what matters most to us.  What we hold on to helps keep us connected when we are threatened by the world outside or inside us.

The Way It Is by William Stafford

There’s a thread you follow.  It goes among

things that change.  But it doesn’t change.

People wonder about what you are pursuing.

You have to explain about the thread.

But it is hard for others to see.

While you hold it you can’t get lost.

Tragedies happen; people get hurt

or die; and you suffer and get old.

Nothing you do can stop time’s unfolding.

You don’t ever let go of the thread.

As a community of faith we hold certain things in common, but there are other things we hold on to that represent our personal story.  For our next exhibit of The Gallery at First, we want to represent who we are individually and who we are together as a community in a creative, visual way.  It is our hope that through the medium of art we might convey something significant about ourselves in response to the question:  What Do You Hold On To?  You may choose to draw an image, cut paper to create a collage,  or decorate a poem or verse  that is meaningful to you.

Tables in Ingram Hall will be hosted by art enthusiasts and encouragers through May 6.  We’ll have the supplies ready, all we ask is for you to come to the table. We hope the experience of working alongside one another deepens our sense of community.  Come as a family, as a small group, as friends, or on your own or take the project with you and work at home.  We will celebrate the opening of this new art exhibit on May 27.

A sampling of art already created . . .

The front of our sanctuary features a floor to ceiling panel three inches in relief from the wall which frames a mounted cross made of bronze and molten rock-shaped glass.  During this Lenten season our visual arts team has layered black, brown, grey, and newsprint papers onto this panel to represent the slow and progressive encroachment of sin in our personal lives and the sin of the world.

With each successive week in Lent, more and more paper has been added and the original gold painted panel has been overtaken with strips of dark, oppressive colors and shapes.  The presentation is chaotic and disturbing.  What usually is an ornate focal point for worship—the cross—is now difficult to see.  The layered papers, like sin, dominate and pervade our worship experience.

G. K. Chesterton once observed, there is a road from the eye to heart that does not go through the intellect. In a church like ours, which relies heavily on word and cognitive apprehension for worship, it is important we exercise our intuitive and imaginative capacity as part of our worship and growth experience with God.

Through the display of visual arts we want to increase our capacity to bring our whole selves to God in worship and inspire effective service of God in the world.  No doubt as the papers increased and with it the mounting darkness, so did our reaction.  Make it stop and go away.  Replace it with something of beauty. Isn’t that precisely how we feel about the pain, suffering, and anguish of sin in our lives and in this world?

Soon we will see and know that God is more powerful than that which we face: sin, evil, and death.  The message of Jesus’ cross and resurrection means newness of life and God’s re-creation of us into something beautiful.