Rend and Remember.... and repeat

Rend and Remember is a seven panel mosaic comprised of blue and white souvenir state plates, commemorative Mother's Day plates and antique dishes, made with violence and lament. For years when people saw my work, they declared, "Oh, you must be getting your frustration out, just smashing up dishes." I decided to feel the start this project by doing just that: smashing dishes with force and violence, letting out my anger and grief over gun violence, immigration injustice, and the lack of support for mothers in a country that swears it is pro-life. I climbed a ten foot ladder and filmed the process of letting my most beautiful and old dishes fall and shatter in the center of a shooting target. The fact that a human body-shaped shooting target can be purchased nonchalantly from Amazon for a few bucks, and shipped in two days or less to your doorstep is surreal. In the falling twilight that night, I got down on my knees and glued the pieces where they fell on the substrate I laid out on my driveway.

Early in September of this year I got a message celebrating the installation and planned opening for More Clay: an exhibition that began in Washington DC at the Katzen Center on The American University campus. The show includes ceramic artists with considerable gravitas like Bean Finneran David Hicks, Kahlil Robert Irving, Walter McConnel and more. It was hard not to feel small in their presence, but they were all nothing but kind and lovely souls when I met them in person. When our gallery talk was recorded on Youtube, I was distracted by the sight of my child coming up the driveway, crying, after getting hurt at a friends house and I was not really able to speak about the project in the way I wanted to. Time passed, and I tried to find my words, but something always prevented me. For over a year, I have had "Write about the mosaic" on my to-do list.

There are seven panels and the state souvenir plates are laid out approximate to their geographical location, thus the whole piece functions as both a calendar and a map. As I tried to clear my mind and schedule to finally take the time to share about the upcoming show, instead on that Wednesday, there was another shooting. Lives were lost and traumatized at Annunciation Catholic Church in Minneapolis. For me, places are the poeple I know who live there. When I checked in, I learned that a child from my friend's church had been grazed by a bullet. Bitterness and bile filled my throat when I thought again about the mosaic I had made.

On Wednesday, the middle of the week, we are horrified. Mother's minds fear the worst, like the face of the woman on the plate I chose for the head of the shooting target. The day after, we settle into something too polite, like midwestern manners, talking about it too long and from every angle. On Friday, we think again about the government and money and the power of the east coast cities like New York and DC and how perhaps they can do something. But by Sunday, we go to church and hope perhaps that establishment can fix it. We double down on beliefs, some helpful and some not. We offer those thoughts and prayers and get ready to go back to normal on Monday, a little shakier, but what else are we going to do? We have to keep going to work and earning money to stay in the controllable routine. Perhaps Hollywood can distract us with some story, or some monument in the mountains or desert can answer us. And then another Wednesday happens ... another shooting... another senseless breaking of a family circle, of goodness, beauty and life.

This is America. The red of our blood, the white and denim blue of the dishes. My blood is in the work, and a blackened hole pierces a heart at the center of the human shape. There are people more upset about my breaking these dishes than they are about the human lives I am trying to mourn. I have been shaped by the stories in the Bible, and in Biblical times, grief was shown by rending, tearing their clothes, and sitting in ashes. Breaking these plates, especially the ones that celebrate motherhood and the state of the so-called union, it's a subversive, F-you to the illusion that we are on our way to "being great again" or that we ever really were.

I am also shaped by activists and writers who choose non-violence. From Shane Claiborne, Dr. Roberto Che Espinoza, and Valerie Kaur, I have absorbed a commitment to disbelieve in violence. We don't need a spanking or a kick in the pants or a smackdown or a come-uppance. We don't need to watch someone be shot in the neck and killed before our very eyes. We are a traumatized people. Our nervous systems need ritual, connection, lament, beauty, and redemption.

I sometimes feel as though I am chaplain to a nation that refuses to accept their illness, hell-bent on doing as they please, in denial about how sick they really are. For deaths like these, there is more pain, more fear, more frantic energy than for those who admit their disease. If perhaps instead, we could accept our diagnosis, that we are made of dust and to dust we will return, I wonder if we could find some peace. To accept who and what we really are. To make amends. To learn to say the five things that matter:

I love you.

I'm sorry.

Thank you.

Forgive me.

I forgive you.

I write not as someone with answers. I create not as someone with answers. As a chaplain, I have no answers. I'm here to listen. To sit in the heartbreak. To reflect back the size of the sorrow. To ask better questions.

Rend and Remember is now showing at the Academy Art Museum in Easton, Maryland.