Spring 2016 - Submission
Original artwork by anonymous
Original artwork by Ben Kolesar
The Shepherd, original artwork by Carlo Scherer
Original artwork by Lisa Shirk
Artist Reflection:
What is the Holy Spirit birthing in you that requires submission to bring it to fruition?
A bird is not ready to fly the moment it’s laid as an egg. An Eagle cares for its egg for 35 days before it’s hatched. Sometimes to allow maturation for something bigger, the wait is much longer... an elephant’s gestation period is 22 months: that’s 660 days of submitting to the process in order to birth that which she is to bring into the world in fullness and health.
How long am I willing to let what the Spirit has put inside me gestate? Do I require answers of Him now? Will I stay awake when He asks me to? Do I ask Him to complete His work in me in 35 days when it might actually take 660? Will I be patient enough to allow the fullness of the Spirit to come to fruition in me?
I’d like to wear down my hardened worldview and see that nest as a safe place of preparation; to embrace what feels like the ‘in between,’ and know it rather as my co-abiding in the Spirit.
Original artwork by Geraldine Weld
Artist Reflection:
In my mind she is a saint in triumphal submission.
I came across her eight years ago, caught by the fluid vitality of her gesture in cast bronze, immortalized in an ecstasy of worship.
Possibly I neglected to read the plaque beneath the statue, or else simply forgot her name, her significance, while walking quickly on to keep up with my traveling companions. But her image was captured in my camera, and more so, in my imagination.
So it wasn’t until being asked about this contribution to Macalla that I did due diligence to find out “which saint this is, for the benefit of my dear Anglican friends who pay attention to these things.”
Ah, but then it turns out she is not so much canonized by the Church, but by pop culture. Chabuca Granda is her popular name, and if you are Peruvian you have heard her music all your life. She is a legend, a songstress who broke convention both in music and in life.
Her rhythms bring to her poems a pulse of earthy life, utterly human, insistent, celebratory, messy with unmet longings.
And when we approach our Maker, coming undone with hands upward to an open heaven, do we not also bring the same?
“Music that stirs the most intimate fibers of the soul” Photograph taken in Barranco. Lima, Peru, 2008.
Original artwork by William
Artist Reflection:
"This is, to me, the loveliest and saddest landscape in the world.”
-Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
Most know him as the author of “The Little Prince” — a whimsical and profound French children’s book tinged with sadness. But Antoine de Saint-Exupéry was so much more. Among other things, he was a pilot who had a habit of crashing his planes with an alarming frequency. (It did not help that he often enjoyed reading novels and jotting down notes on philosophy while flying.)
One of these near fatal crashes happened in the Sahara Desert, where this picture was taken. It left Saint-Exupéry stranded with only an orange, some grapes and a little leftover coffee and wine.
I like to think of him munching on these dwindling rations, admiring the dry desert around him even as it threatened to kill him. The timeless sand against the urgency of human life. The beauty in the barren. It is a place where you could sit forever, watching the wind shape and reshape the mountains.
Life to me so often feels like a struggle — desires thwarted, dreams strived for and dashed. It is so messy. But this picture makes me wonder if we are nothing but a few grains of sand floating in the wind.
It is a thought that is both lovely and deeply terrifying.