Artist Reflection: Holy Week Art by Laura Laurie

#1: Wounded 

Watercolor and copper plate gold ink on cold-pressed paper, burnt paper

This is a reflection on the nature of longing that belongs to the human condition. I represented it literally as a hole in the heart that we keep trying to fill - a broken cistern which the disciplines of Lent (namely fasting) expose for what it is. Receiving the salvation of Jesus sublimates that longing so that what is broken (a cistern made to contain water) becomes a vessel (a river made to channel water).  

This piece echoes a few additional Scripture passages: 

“Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one! You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your strength." - Deut 6:4-5

“The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked; Who can know it? I the Lord search the heart and test the mind, to give every man according to his ways, according to the fruit of his deeds." - Jeremiah 17:9-10

"Yet even now, declares the Lord, return to me with all your heart, with fasting, with weeping, and with mourning; and rend your hearts and not your garments." - Joel 2:12-13

"O God, you are my God; earnestly I seek you; my soul thirsts for you; my flesh faints for you as in a dry and weary land where there is no water." - Psalm 63:1

"If anyone thirsts, let him come to me and drink. Whoever believes in me, as the Scripture has said, ‘Out of his heart will flow rivers of living water.' " - John 7: 37-38

"But one of the soldiers pierced his side with a spear, and at once there came out blood and water." - John 19:34

#2: Once Incarnate, Always Incarnate

Watercolor and copper plate gold Ink on cold- pressed paper

In this piece, I have chosen to emphasize just one aspect of Jesus’ physical resurrected existence. Of course, Jesus is not a detached brain floating around in the heavens directing his body the Church to accomplish his will. But it is also true that Jesus does in fact have a brain that is both like and unlike yours and mine. It is shaped and deeply affected by the euchatastrophy of the crucifixion and his resurrection. Today, he reigns on the right hand of God and yet he does so within a human body with a human brain and human hands and feet and a heart that pumps blood and a digestive system and taste buds in his mouth and scars on his skin and no doubt, facial hair! Far from diminishing him, emphasizing Jesus’ humanity after his resurrection glorifies, magnifies, raises our own humanity so that it is no longer a source of shame but an extravagant display of the surpassing power of God (2 Cor 4: 7). His resurrection easters us too. 

“Many Christians, perhaps without thinking too much about it, assume that when Jesus ascended into heaven, he entered into a kind of spiritual existence with no more need for his physical body. Even those of us, like me, who were raised in orthodox Christian churches probably harbor some notion of eternal life as the immortality of our invisible souls. While our bodies may decay in their caskets or urns, the immaterial part of us lives on. But the story of Jesus’ ascension insists otherwise: if Jesus will return to earth in the same way in which he departed (Acts 1:11), then he is and will remain an embodied human person. Once incarnate, always incarnate, we might say, which is why John’s Gospel makes that scene with Thomas so prominent: the body that was crucified, the body with scars from the nails, is the body Jesus has now - though it is, as Wright reminds us, transphysical.” - Wesley Hill, Easter, p. 85. 

“Have this mind among yourselves, which is yours in Christ.” - Paul (Phil 2:5)

“And he is the head of the body, the church. He is the beginning, the firstborn from the dead, that in everything he might be preeminent.” - Paul (Colossians 1:18)

LORD Jesus Christ, our living Head,

How bright Thy glories shine!

Unique in Thy humanity:

Eternally divine    - C.C. Eliott, Hymn Lord Jesus Christ, our Living Head

#3: The Line that Cuts

Watercolor Ink and gold thread, on cold-pressed paper

This piece is a visual reflection of the complexity of human beings who embody both good and evil as well as the action of the Holy Spirit who alone discerns (lit. to separate) what is in our hearts.

"If only it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?" - A. Solzhenistsyn, the Gulag Archipelago

All of us are a" mingled yarn, good and ill together." - Shakespeare, All's Well that Ends Well

"In the sight of God, everyone is in need of deliverance from the forces that are capable of sucking every person into an orbit of anti-human actions." - F. Rutledge, The Crucifixion

"For the word of God is living and active, sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing to the division of soul and of spirit, of joints and of marrow, and discerning the thoughts and intentions of the heart." - Heb 4:12