Advent in Art presentation

13 December 2009

I’d like to tell you about a person who is part of our community of Cityside. She is however not someone whom you’ll ever meet in this building, although she did come here to church quite a few times, and although her name will never be written in the Cityside directory and she’ll never sit with one of the Children’s Space groups, for me there will always be a space where she should be.

This person is my youngest daughter. Her life with us was very short. She had a rare, non-inherited genetic disorder called trisomy 15, a condition which meant major organs like her heart did not develop properly. She died in August. She was the fifth wee baby I have miscarried in the past 18 months.

This art work was done in the weeks immediately after she died. I really didn’t want to do this picture, and initially withdrew from the Advent in Art project. I couldn’t see how I could do anything creative, particularly when the theme was sparkly, twinkly new-baby Christmas. I didn’t want to publish what had been a relatively private pain, or to be the dark spot in all of your advents.

I was in a gray and horrible place. My usual approach is to smother pain, to build internal walls around it to keep it private and within, barely acknowledged, protected by a facade of busyness and competence. But this time was different. The hurt was great, both physical and emotional, and was compounded by my previous losses, and the place where I’d squashed all my earlier hurts was too full. I was barely able to function at all, let alone with competence.

So instead of my usual practices, I have been trying approaches that go against the grain for me.

• I have talked with others about what has happened, including, for the first time in my life, a counsellor.
• I was tired of listening to my own thoughts going in circles, so I have tried to make time for centering prayer more regularly, to make spaces for God in the nanosecond between the time I say my sacred word and when a new thought whisks me away elsewhere.
• I used the Welcoming Prayer to attempt a process to help me to feel, to sit with and to accept some of the huge emotions that had me.
• And I decided that amongst other rituals to process grief, I would do this art piece as a meditative practice, and that I would talk about it now. I chose to work on it at times when I was alone and in silence, rather than distracted with music or company. Usually when I look at an art work I’ve done, I can hear echoes of the music I listened to while doing it, and can sense, smell, and picture the place and people I was surrounded by. Instead, this piece simply resonates with my thoughts during August and September. I find it hard to look at.

I want you to know though, that this picture is not intended to be about gloom and despair. It’s themes are seeking, journeying, and hope, and it aligns with the part in the Nativity story where the wise men follow the star to find Jesus, the baby in whom so much hope was placed. I don’t want you to feel you have to look at this picture and feel sorry for me. Rather, I hope that you might be able to engage with some of the themes in it and relate them to parts of your own journey.

Hope is most useful when you’re in life’s dark places. The hope that I held onto was that I would not be in the same place I was in August by the time I came to Advent. I sought to be able to look back and see that some journeying had been made. I didn’t expect that any particular destination would have been arrived at, but that a bit of a shift might have happened. If I had to have pain, I wanted it to be a catalyst for growth, and to be something that helped me to be present in my own life, instead of just being something to endure.

The title of this piece ‘Seeking the Dancing Star’ is derived from a quote from Friedrich Nietzsche: ‘One must have chaos in oneself in order to give birth to a dancing star’.

The chaos in this picture is represented by the tilting buildings – the off-balance disequilibrium of your world in times of shock, and how that affects every aspect of your life. When relating this to the Nativity story, I wonder if there was a pre-curser event that triggered such a long journey in search of something. It has always seemed strange to me that three people would make such an expedition, and I am intrigued about what their reasons might have been for making it.

The ultrasound scan picture that represents the nativity star is of my youngest daughter. They can scan an embryo when it is only four weeks old to see if it has a heartbeat. If you see a heartbeat, there is a 95% chance that that embryo will continue through to full-term. An ultrasound scan is difficult for a non-medical person like me to make sense of – it mostly looks like swooping shapes and swirling speckles. It reminds me of Van Gogh’s Starry Night painting. And when they find the 4 week-old embryo’s heart beat, it looks like a pulsating point of light. That star of light carries a lot of hope. I wonder what the wise men were hoping to find, really, when they travelled all that way following a star. What were they expecting from the king they followed a star to find? And did they find what they were expecting, or did it take a while for them to come to terms with what they found? What did they take away from the experience, once they returned home, and the adventure was all over?

The baby at the bottom is the 19 week scan picture of my second daughter, Mahalia. This part represents hope realised, albeit currently a bit squashed by the skewed buildings. This was a picture I focused on a lot before Mahalia was born – it reminded me that there was a beautiful wee person in there, despite having been told that she maybe had a syndrome involving brain and kidney damage and webbed hands and feet. The hopes that we have held and realised in the past give us reason to hope again, and they are part of the foundations our journeys rest upon.

The mountain represents a liminal place, a thin place between us and God – close to the star, away from the distracting clutter of the buildings. The volcanoes of Auckland are sacred spaces for me. Anytime something significant has happened to me over the past twenty years, I have headed up my local volcano to process it, in the open spaces, above the everyday busyness and clutter of my daily life.

The figure of the woman in this picture is on a journey. It looks like she’s heading away from the star, but actually she’s heading up the road to the mountain, to her sacred space, which will bring her closer to that which she seeks. The fact that that place is pretty much where she started perhaps eludes her for now.

This picture is set here at the top of Mt Eden Road, looking towards Maungawhau. I find it interesting to ponder how the Nativity might look if set in my environment, in my time and place. What would change? What would stay the same? The woman is surrounded by familiar buildings. There aren’t any other people in the picture, because I wanted to convey a lonely, uphill journey. But at the same time I meant those buildings as evidence of the community that encircles her. I want to take this opportunity to express my very deep appreciation of Mark, my family, Brenda, Megan and the staff at the Recurrent Pregnancy Loss clinic, Helen, and all my Cityside friends who have been such present and loving support over so many months to me. The love that Jesus taught and embodied has been alive for me in you, and I thank each of you for being alongside me.

My hope was that I would not be in the same place now that I was when I did this picture. And I’m grateful to be able to say that I am not. The grief is still there, but it’s not raw and off-balancing and it doesn’t gray my entire life. I have resilience and energy again. I hope that I’ve put in place some strategies that will serve me well the next time I’m in one of life’s hard places. And this wee daughter, I will always carry her with me, but the weight of daily care and responsibility for her I have managed to give to God.

I’d like to give you some space to sit with what I’ve spoken of and to engage with the art work and the nativity story in other ways, if you’d like to. There are some options to choose from:

• The chapel out in the foyer is for people who would like a space for silent reflection or prayer. There are candles to light and stones to place if you would like to as symbols of your thoughts and prayer.

• There are two activity based stations: This Sunday is World Child Remembrance Day, when many people light a candle at 7pm to remember a child or children who, for whatever reason, are with us only in our hearts, imagination or memories. I like the thought that here in New Zealand, we are at the start of a wave of candlelight flowing around the world. The activity here is a chance to prepare a candle for tonight by writing or drawing on the label. You may prefer to light your candle for some other purpose instead.

• The other activity station is here, and it’s for you to think about how you might inhabit this picture – where do you feel you are? Are you on a journey? In a safe place? A scary place? Mountain top? Are you alongside others? Or in one of the buildings? You could draw a wee figure and glue it on. It would be nice to have some company in there.

• You might feel like talking about some of the reflective questions on the back of the card – we’ll make a wee gathering spot over by the piano for those who wish to bounce ideas off others.

• And if you’d prefer to just stay put in your seat, there will be a slideshow playing with some things to ponder (see below for the silent, web sized version)

The music is ten minutes long: the first piece is Mark Laurent and Brenda Liddiard playing, and the second one is Nina Simone’s ‘Here Comes The Sun’ – so when you hear that one, you’ll know the time is nearly up.