What I Did on Ash Wednesday

 

What I Did on Ash Wednesday

By Tom Wachunas

 

   “God utters me like a word containing a partial thought of him. A word will never be able to comprehend the voice that utters it. But if I am true to the concept that God utters in me, if I am true to the thought of Him that I was meant to embody, I shall be full of his actuality and find him everywhere in myself, and find myself nowhere.”  - Thomas Merton

 

   My newest artwork: Ash Wednesday, mixed media painting (fabric, acrylic, latex and graphite on corrugated panel), 18” (h) x 17 ½” (w).

   Lent begins. A solemn 40-day season of penitent prayer, self-sacrifice, holy preparation. Ash Wednesday invariably takes me to a trove of Catholic childhood memories.

   The pastor, vested in purple, rubs our foreheads with ashes, the resultant smudge often looking more like an accident than a cross. Even so, it was a mindful symbol of our inheritance: Mortality. All of us wore it like a badge of dishonor - a haunting remembrance of our ignominious expulsion from Eden. Yet there was always the promise of a glorious new inheritance to come. Resurrection.

   Once again, my piece includes cursive writing, and more challenging to read than usual (not that my handwriting was ever really easy to decipher). But at one point in making the work, for some mysterious  reason I was thinking about Leonardo da Vinci’s notebooks filled with the “mirror writing” that accompanied his drawings. He wrote his words backwards, right-to-left, and one would need a mirror to read them. I’ve developed no such writing technique. So I cheated the process by writing the words on very thin tracing paper and flipping the paper over, the words still visible in reverse. Words not my own, but from Genesis 3: 22-23:  And the Lord God said, “The man has now become like one of us, knowing good and evil. He must not be allowed to reach out his hand and take also from the tree of life and eat, and live forever.” So the Lord God banished him from the Garden of Eden to work the ground from which he had been taken.”  

   Presenting the words in this manner was intended to make the experience of reading them more interactive and literally personal. I held the finished painting close to my face as I lifted it up to the mirror on my medicine cabinet. There they were, the words now readable, and I, in one reflection, framed together in the same plane. It was a humbling reminder that I am dust become a re-made child of the Lord God.