Christine has several opportunities to hang her art work, both the icons and her contemplative paintings, in different shows and venues, happening in Sarasota. First Friday of the month the local businesses open for the evening and crowds promenade through downtown visiting galleries and shops. Christine has two large paintings in the window of the Define gallery, on Palm Ave, which are catching a lot of attention.
She has been working on creating icons and religious paintings, exploring how God wants her to do each one. It’s such a privilege to be able to do this work and she uses just about all of her time either teaching , praying, reading, writing, and painting. She’s pretty happy!
To exercise my creativity, I started exploring the early method of cyanotype printing for my extensive collection of photography. It has been a lot of joy rediscovering the pleasure of seeing images in print form develop and come alive again.
Chaplaincy offers the opportunity to run different programs for the activities of independent living residents and we offer at different times of the year the Alpha Course, which is a great blessing to the folks at work.
Originally from Holy Trinity Brompton, Alpha has had a powerful impact on our lives when we first attended the course, on it’s initial introduction to Saint Bartholomew’s in NYC. Since then we have run the course many times for different churches and communities, always with wonderful results.
I have also been facilitating another course which the Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, initiated called Difference. https://www.archbishopofcanterbury.org/priorities/reconciliation/difference-course
The Difference Course, sets out to teach three basic habits to help us overcome division, in relationships, in community etc. We can see how destructive division can be not only close to home, but on a large scale, we see polar opposites in politics, in the church and between nations. The three habits fall under; be curious, find out as much as you can as to how the other person arrived in their present position; be present, do not run away but be able to represent yourself and hear the other; to reimagine, a better outcome for both sides than the present.
This week in the course we were covering forgiveness and we watched a video of a white South African talking about the ending of Apartheid and what happened after the reconciliation period, when he realized he needed to take responsibility for his unwitting complicity in the ramifications of color separation and racism. The discussion about this video afterwards within the group, led to several deep personal revelations, as to how racism had affected their lives as children growing up in America on both sides. From the simplest of childhood memories, like black and white children not holding hands even though their gym instructor had told them to line up as a circle holding hands. The discomfort of early rejection and separation can easily become a root of bitterness, with one layer of hurt after another being laid on top of it, so the division is so embedded it becomes normalized.
Sadly, as we come to black history month in America, those layers upon layers of rejection, negative judgements and fear, has created a full closet of unconscious divisions between black and white people. Which inevitably breaks out as violence and hatred causing death and destruction in this land; once heralded as a melting pot of people. This has to be an abomination to God and all of us. We, collectively, placed those layers of rejection, we are all complicit to one degree or another. Some by radical racism and some with blind eyes or simple denial. And yet when another incident occurs, a killing or a riot in reaction, we express surprise at this outcome and question how could this be? Yet, we told them to go to the back of the bus, we would not hold their hands in gym class, we stopped them swimming in the sea with us, we saw them as nameless and called them ‘boy’, no matter how old they were.
I have to accept my complicity in this tragedy. Born in slavery and colonialism, continued by greed and fear, normalized by rejecting our complicity. I have to accept my complicity and ask God into a full awareness of the cost my behavior has been to others. God is the only way forward through this tragedy and His opening the door for awareness, repentance, forgiveness and healing. Only God through His grace, can direct a way forward, for unraveling and releasing years of pain.
“See to it that no one fails to obtain the grace of God; that no “root of bitterness” springs up and causes trouble, and by it many become defiled;”
Hebrews 12:15
Please, lift up your prayers for healing of these racial divisions and that all the body of Christ would seek God’s grace to help us all to forgive, repent and heal.
Sending much love and prayers,
Michael and Christine
Kingdom Arts Ministry 