Art and Grace

On Saturday I went to Seattle by train, my maiden voyage to the soggy city. The purpose of my trip was to be present for the creation of a chapter of a national organization of artists in the Episcopal Church, known as ECVA (Episcopal Church and the Visual Arts). As a member of the board, I wanted to meet some of these artists and see their work in person (we can see a lot of it online at www.ecva.org--you can too).

The artwork was wonderful--a great variety of themes and materials, from fabric to photography, enamel to sculpture. One enigmatic head of Jesus with blue eyes and vaguely Hispanic features was a fresh and somehow disturbing take on a common image. It was almost an icon but also just a photograph mounted on gold. A small box with a dozen nails driven into it sat serenely beside beautiful enamel pendants--and at the other end of the table was a cloth book, each page stitched in homage to community gardens, the cover comprised of dirty gardening gloves. A precise drawing of a crumpled piece of paper and a pencil was a Zen masterpiece.

It was worth the trip to see the work and hear the artists talk about what they had made and how they brought to their art spirit as well as technique. All art, I think, is spiritual in some way; at the core of a work of art is that ineffable something that transforms technique.

A couple of us talked later about whether an image of Jesus or the Madonna would read as a religious object to someone who knew nothing of the story behind the images or of the religious tradition that begat them. I argued that viewers would know that these were spirit-filled images, just as Rothko paintings, which do not contain realistic objects or people, are clearly spiritual at their core and in their effect on viewers. Buddhist art can similarly inspire reverence, even when the viewer knows nothing of Buddhism or the "saints" who animate its memory.

But the most important event of the evening, for me, was an encounter with one artist who had shown us an apron she had made, using materials from a thrift shop that caters to the homeless. It was a simple apron, hardly what we would term art. After the formal presentations, she came up to me and asked if I published work by other writers (I had been introduced as a publisher and she wasn't sure whether I just published myself). I said I did. She told me that she had been homeless herself and while she was in the shelter had written poems.

Her manner was diffident. She was almost girlish in her movements, swinging side to side, twisting a foot nervously behind an ankle--even though she was at least sixty years old. I said that we were planning to publish a book in which her poems might fit, and I offered to read them.

She quickly touched my arm, embarrassed that her motives had been misunderstood, and said, "Oh, no. I have someone who wants to publish them. No, I just wanted to know what you are doing so I can pray for you. For your success."

I admit to being stunned. I assumed I was doing something for her by offering to read her poems, which I also believed were probably not very good. But on the contrary she was offering to do something for me. I gave her my card and she also wrote my wife's name, Connie, on it, so that she could pray specifically for both of us.

I could see in her a spirit at work that had nothing to do with the traditional stories and images we associate with grace. She was, however, a channel of grace, or of the spirit, the heartbeat of the universe, what the Buddhists call a Bodhisattva, or what we, Saturday, were calling an artist.

I suspect her poems are as wonderful as her apron.