What if
a painter pencils a prayer
across bare canvas before
covering it with
swashes of primer — an act
of trust akin to
a life laid down,
layer by layer . . .

Is that cry lost?

As works-of-God-in-progress, how to embrace erasure? Or surrender our lifestyle, our preconceived notions?

Decades ago during my ardent art-student days, flush with ideas, I itched to paint them! Skip stage one: forego the whitewash; flourish the paint. Wasn’t it enough that I’d mitered and hammered each wooden crosspiece, stretched the canvas taut?

No, my professor said. The surface had to be prepped to receive pigment. Didn’t I want my work to endure?

Fine. Atop that dead-white expanse I penciled guidelines. A roof here, a horizon there. Colors and forms accrued. Shadows, too.

I never thought to begin with a graphite entreaty.

What if underneath those long-ago layers a penciled cry of the heart had somehow suffused my finished painting? Perhaps viewers would have perceived added richness, translucence, depth.

A riveting glimpse of meaning,
bodied forth through managed obliteration . . .

What might we be “writing” within these days, while caring for a loved one? Or battling disease in our own minor masterwork(!) body?

I’ve long admired this line from French author Collette. Facing her later years, she spoke of “the supreme elegance of learning to diminish.”

But how? Dare I trust the Creator’s unseen hand at work?

I can only lay bare the questions. Invite God into each one.

Take our home (my personal canvas, signed each day these past 34 years): Turns out, it’s contaminated with mold. Catastrophically toxic. Five rooms must be emptied. Then remediated.

Hard not to feel shamed by ignorance: e.g. When the roof is redone but fails due to shoddy workmanship you know nothing about. Or when the dishwasher overflows and you don’t enlist professional help.

Hard, too, not to despair over casual housekeeping. Black mold and its cousins, secretly colonizing on joists, beneath drywall . . .

What’s the message here?

Perhaps, for now, this: The Master Artist signs the nucleus of every created thing. Even mold. A world full of valentines to us all.*

All-seeing God, write your words on the primed canvas of our hearts. 

Renew our inscape.
Update our outlook.
Illumine the next step . . .

Friends, what do you picture God writing today? It might be obvious. Or, it might live under the primer . . .

Photo by Steve Johnson on Unsplash