Cut It Up

Just when we are all settled in, safe and snug, resting, complacent even, BOOM another change? challenge? blow? comes our way…and I don’t even write about politics!

We’ve had many such blows, or perhaps said more charitably – challenges, in our relationship with our Church and its unending repression of some genders over others.

At a recent art and spirituality workshop, I had an insight I’d like to share. The subject was change, and the presenters gave us a challenge. Focus first on the current changes affecting our lives. Contemplate and even mourn the losses these changes bring forth. Pause… and then begin to concentrate more deeply on what we had been able to salvage and take with us to sustain us as we either embraced or confronted the new changes. Oh, and by the way, create an art piece to express outwardly what we are experiencing inside.

That task turned out to be the easy part! Step two was even more powerful – and disturbing.

One artist leader began by describing how she had come upon a perfect woodland scene and wanted to recreate its dynamics, its colors and shades, its shifting shapes. She worked all day playing with light and texture and space and could not achieve what she wanted. After many frustrating hours of working, she sat defeated.  Another artist sharing the same space asked if she could make a suggestion.

“Cut it up,” she said.

In fact, she said it several times over as the first artist rebelled, protested, agonized, and, then – finally – cut it up. Of course, the new product was magnificent; it captured completely the essence of what she had wanted. Even we amateurs could see that.

But then it was our turn. Those wonderful representations of past internal and external treasures we needed to take with us to sustain us, those images, our very own creations we had worked so hard to dream up, draw, paint, charcoal, collage…well, you guessed it, we had to cut them up… or paint over them, partially or fully cover them with something new, add, subtract, mutilate, liberate. One of the artists told us that when she became too enraptured by a particular part of her work, when she believed she had finally created something she really loved, something finally so perfect – you guessed it – she cut it up. And that is what freed her to see anew, to work with and from rather than against the changes and challenges to innovate and hopefully create or recreate something magnificent.   

You see, cutting up, covering over, slashing, did not necessarily mean throwing away. It meant rearranging the pieces in a way we hadn’t even seen as possible before. That’s why I was excited about how the art exercise might apply to our situation. I think the ordination and leadership of women actually will do what so many in the hierarchy most fear: It will cut up. It will tear down. It will paint over. And then, as silenced, oppressed, patronized people often do, we will add ideas, concepts, and actions that are generative rather than stifling. For example, we might transform traditional drivers of morality and ethics that are sin-based, self-centered, focused on personal salvation and an evil secular world into emphases on what is evolving now, what is nurturing, unfolding and calling out to us from all around us. Then we create, fail, recreate, cut that up and paste and recut and repaste again and lo and behold what happens.

It makes me breathless with readiness to go forth…again.