Wednesday, March 26
The New Exodus, Katherine Smith.
A few years back, I created a Lent art series for my church to use as a weekly visio divina practice in my preferred medium: graphic art. I had spent that winter listening in silence, sketching ideas, and meditating on Scripture. With a nervous energy, I showed the final pieces to my trusted mentor for her feedback. While her response was enthusiastic and thoughtful, her curious question stuck with me: “Now, do you only work in digital because you know you can make a perfect circle?”
My soul felt exposed but deeply seen. She knew when I sit down at my computer, I am able to perfectly align my designs in the exact right spots, measure everything precisely, make symmetrical shapes, and the outcome is under my complete control. She challenged me to move to paper and draw a circle with my hand. Then, sit with its imperfections. Resist the urge to erase and fix it. Interact with the mistakes, not only to accept them, but to find value in them. Locate the beauty in the imperfections.
In the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew 5:48, Jesus teaches, “Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect.” Looking closer, the word Jesus uses in Greek is telos, which means an end completion or wholeness. The goal in this teaching isn't moral perfection, a public piety or avoiding mistakes, which can be the focus of much religiosity. His goal is our wholeness!
Ironically, it just so happens the journey towards wholeness includes confronting, befriending, and including all of our mistakes, imperfections and shadows—the very things I’ve spent much of my life avoiding. Maybe you have too. Lent invites us to hold the tension of our complex humanity: that we are both beloved children of God created in the Imago Dei and we are from dust and back to dust we will return. The delicate truth that can be found in holding this paradox is incredibly liberating.
The journey of wholeness is integrating every part of ourselves, especially the negative we have avoided, and returning back home within ourselves with a telos, a beautiful completion. This kind of authenticity that invites us to live fully and courageously at home within ourselves is messy and often bumpy, but there’s a sweet freedom that settles in as we rest with confidence in exactly who God made us to be. We are both divinely beloved and imperfectly human. What a relief to accept that beautiful truth! We can loosen our grips around perfection and control and allow this imperfect reality to unfold as it ought. We can exhale and be fully present to enjoy this moment, however it happens.
By day, I am a Catholic elementary art teacher and I have embraced a motto in my art room: the messier the better! With the reminder of our humanity before us, make the squiggly circle. Enjoy it. Delight in it. Embrace it. As Fr. Richard Rohr, OFM encourages, everything belongs. Including the dust.
Katherine Smith is a visual and graphic artist, and an art teacher at a Catholic elementary school based in the westside of Cleveland, Ohio.
You can learn more about her here.