Calvary
Calvary, 2014
Kate Norris
Acrylic paint, oil paint on canvas
84” x 60”
INSPIRATION
To facilitate a communal, anonymous confession during the season of Lent, the season of preparation for Easter.
2014 set up at South Side Anglican
The church calendar builds in times of self-examination. Lent is one of those times. However, Lent is usually portrayed as our action. It is often a time when people try to “give something up” that they like (like chocolate), or they try to quit a bad habit (like eating too much chocolate). They load up on pancakes on Shrove Tuesday and then get busy dieting on Ash Wednesday and every Friday in Lent. This form of food restriction is supposed to create introspection to make a soul get honest. However, all too often it does the opposite. It makes us feel like we are “doing something” to be a better person. It can make us feel self-righteous – Oh look how good I am at avoiding chocolate! Or shame and despair – I can’t even avoid chocolate chips (as you can see, I’ve been down this road...:). When I build up to Easter focused on “my action” it has actually led me away from the heart of Christianity, away from Easter. I am not saying fasting is bad - fasting from food (or anything) can be very meaningful when it is a desire - a fruit of God’s work in your life. However, when it is what we do to become “better,” it moves us away from Jesus. The heart of Easter is that we can’t become better. We have a knee-jerk, subconscious, heart condition that responds to every heartache on our own. We don’t turn God when we need to most. This is the problem. God had to turn to us.
I was struck that God “does a fast to us” in the book of Isaiah. Contrast our typical attempts to fast in Lent with the fast God does to us in Isaiah 58. His work upon us is the deep work of confession, repentance, forgiveness, and redemption.
“Is not this the fast that I [God] choose:
to loose the bonds of injustice,
to undo the thongs of the yoke,
to let the oppressed go free,
and to break every yoke?” (Isaiah 58:7)
This does not sound like patting ourselves on the back for foregoing chocolate. This is the silent work of God stripping us so that he can free us. He acts up on us to break us out of our rut(s) and drag us to himself, specifically himself on the cross.
What fosters honest self-examination if foregoing chocolate (or doing anything) does not?
The Gospel. The Gospel makes safety and community for confession.
Gospel Safety.
Ruthless honesty is only safe (and only possible) when we are already forgiven and loved no matter what. We have someone who is with us and for us in our darkest hour. It is this person who is in fact uncovering the darkness. Jesus did this to us on the cross. He took the full judgement for sin upon himself to free us from its bonds (John 12:31, 32). It then becomes a pattern. God actually gives us the desire to self-examine (or surprises us by exposing sin) because it becomes a time when he breaks our bonds, uncovers our injustice, and leads us to his forgiveness given by Jesus on the cross. As a fruit, we make amends where we have done harm.
I was banking on this promise—that God was more interested in our bonds of injustice and our yokes of oppression than we were. He wanted to uncover, forgive, and free us more than we did. In doing that to us, he would create a community where that could happen for others.
Gospel Community.
We need the fellowship of other people who suffer as we do and know hope outside ourselves. This creates a plausibility structure of hope in the midst of pain. This is the social role of religion, as sociologist, Peter Berger, defined it (P.L. Berger, The Sacred Canopy (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1967). At its best, the family of Christ is meant to come alongside you as God acts upon you, as you face truth, and name it—not minimize it—in the context of grace. Each person has been forgiven just as much too. At its worst the church has shamed others for their sin or manipulated others to follow their particular rules. Yet at the foot of the cross every person--pastor and newcomer alike - is in the same boat.
We are not alone, even in our worst. Jesus knows our worst because he took it upon himself on the cross. He forgave us. He is our advocate before God and others. His Spirit convicts us of sin, reminds us of Jesus’ forgiveness, leads us to make amends (even with ourselves), and leads us into communities of forgiveness.
Jesus gave this promise to his disciples the night before he died. He gives the gift of the Holy Spirit to lead us into truth and into what Jesus did on the cross. He promised the Spirit “will tell you what is yet to come;” this refers to what Jesus would do the next day. In all things the Spirit will bring you back to Jesus (“he will glorify me”). The Spirit speaks in complete union with God and Jesus—they are of one voice leading us into truth and grace. Through the Spirit, Jesus speaks to us: I forgive you, I am with you.
But when he, the Spirit of truth, comes, he will guide you into all the truth. He will not speak on his own; he will speak only what he hears, and he will tell you what is yet to come. He will glorify me because it is from me that he will receive what he will make known to you. (John 16:13, 14)
Art was our language. After the communal part, I took their confession back to my confession booth - my studio. I added my own. I used tape to define the negative spaces. Then I painted. I put our ruthless honesty in the location of our forgiveness: the cross.
Painting gave a silent moment between each person and God. I watched God work. In the communal yet anonymous space, our deepest hurts came out in pictures rather than words. Our struggles were a color. Our marks showed our confusion, regret, loss. In the silence before the canvas we came to Good Friday. We were not alone. And we were safe.
PROCESS
Preparation. A woman approached me as I manned our church booth during the University of Pittsburgh faith fair in 2012. We were a year into our church plant. She was an artist and noticed that we were using the arts in our ministry. She offered to build me canvases on the spot. She made three, 5’x7’. I will always be grateful to Paula and her spontaneous, generous offer.
Calvary under-painting and confession set-up
The under-painting (first layer) of this project surprised me as I painted it. I prepared the canvas using the three primary colors in acrylic paint. It came out more beautiful than I expected it to be—especially as an under-painting for a collaborative confession project. We were going to confess all over it with paint. But then I thought about how we feel the effects of death more poignantly when death kills beauty. Pollution, cancer, and temper tantrums all decay the beauty of creation and the sanctity of life. So I kept the attractive under-painting as it was.
Invitation. Every Sunday in Lent I invited the group who gathered for church that morning to “confess the effects of death in their life” on the canvas. I set up brushes and the canvas at the back of the room so the painter would have the privacy of everyone’s back turned. When the painter finished, she returned to her seat and invited the person next to her to paint. This was an anonymous, communal confession. We admitted to God what he already knew, and perhaps for the first time admitted it to ourselves.
2014 Confession by the people of South Side Anglican
Process. After Easter, I took the painting back to my studio and finished it with oil paint. The collaborative confession is only visible in the negative space of the three crosses. Jesus died on a cross with two other criminals next to him on a hill called Calvary. Later, tradition holds, Peter, one of Jesus’ disciples, was also executed on a cross. However, Peter asked to be hung upside down because he did not feel worthy to die as Christ did. As far as the anti-religious symbolism that an inverted cross has become – well, Jesus died for that too.
Calvary, 2014
Kate Norris & friends
Acrylic paint, oil paint on canvas
84” x 60”
(I wish the quality of this photograph was better but you get the idea)
South Side Anglican (which later became City Anglican) no longer exists… but the work the Lord did in our hearts together always will. Thank you to each of you.
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