The Key

By Kathy Schuth

Artist Statement

What does it mean to have a rooted and very much alive, and thus changing and growing, church? What is the true power of the church? What power confuses us and holds us back? What power invites us into new life, again and again?

What does it mean to have an expanding love which gathers? (Luke 13) To have Jesus lament over Jerusalem, and wish to be like a hen who broods over her chicks. To have Isaiah tell the barren woman to enlarge the space of her tents (Isaiah 54). What did Peter do with the key given to him, to loose and to bind, after his vision that sent him to see a Gentile? What did the other disciples do, given this same authority? Did he or they remember what Isaiah said about binding and loosing, such as in reference to true fasting (58:6) - “Is this not, rather, the fast that I choose: releasing those bound unjustly, untying the thongs of the yoke; Setting free the oppressed, breaking off every yoke.”?

In this image, we see Mary’s Guadalupen mantle of stars indicate a shelter without sides, a hen gathering her chicks, a lowered sheet of a heavenly vision that says, “Do not call unclean what I have called clean”, and with it - hints at what the key can do - to loose and bind, to enlarge the tests, to release those bound unjustly. And below this shelter and vision, we climb over our altars, turned stones, overturned money tables, and other human formed ideas of what is foundational. Ultimately, when we are able to be gathered together, all come different and differently, and meet at the same eye level, the same tent, loosed and open-sided.

About the Artist

Kathy Schuth is an architect working in neighborhood community development in South Bend, Indiana. Kathy was once asked, “What lie has the world told you,” and realized that being told that she wasn’t an acceptable candidate to volunteer to mentor teenagers, because she is gay, had created a self-heard lie of “You aren’t good enough or safe enough to be with children.”