Judith is an artist. Her primary medium is textiles. Most of the time she begins her work with raw cotton or wool. She cards, spins, dyes, and then weaves her fabrics. Her weavings are usually on a small scale—a nest of bird’s eggs, a portrait of David’s Abigail, three crows—which she frames and gives as gifts to her friends. She makes her living by repairing tapestries in museums in Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Washington D.C.
Judith had an alcoholic husband and a drug-addicted son. She had kept her life and her family together for years by attending twelve-step meetings. One Sunday, she was about forty years old at the time, she entered Christ Our King Church. She came at the invitation of some friends she knew from her meetings—“You need to come to church. I’ll meet you there.” She knew nothing about church. She was raised in a morally upright home but had no acquaintance with institutional or formal religion. In her family the word “God” was not a part of its working vocabulary. She was well read in poetry and politics and psychology and knew a great deal about art and artists. But she had never read the Bible. If she had heard the stories of the Bible, she had paid no attention. As far as she could recall, she had never been inside a church.
Something, though, caught her attention when she entered this church, and she continued to come. In a few months she became a Christian and I became her pastor. I loved observing and listening to her. Everything was new: scriptures, worship, prayer, baptism, Eucharist—church! It was a tonic to me to hear and see through her excited perceptions everything that I had lived with all my life. All her questions were exclamations: “Where have I been all my life? These are incredible stories—why didn’t anyone tell me these! How come this has been going on all around me and I never knew it!” We had delightful conversations. We became good friends.
Meanwhile her primary community was made up of artists. Painters and poets and sculptors, mostly, with a few of her twelve-step friends sprinkled in among them.
After four years or so of this, I moved across the continent to take up a new assignment. Letters replaced conversations. The following is a portion of a letter that is a witness to the interiority, the “insides” of what church feels like to a newcomer:
Dear Pastor: Among my artist friends I feel so defensive about my life—I mean about going to church. They have no idea what I am doing and act bewildered. So I try to be unobtrusive about it. But as my church life takes on more and more importance—it is essential now to my survival—it is hard to shield it from my friends. I feel protective of it, not wanting it to be dismissed or minimized or trivialized. It is like I am trying to protect it from profanation or sacrilege. But it is strong. It is increasingly difficult to keep it quiet. It is not as if I am ashamed or embarrassed—I just don’t want it belittled.
A longtime secular friend, and a superb artist, just the other day was appalled: “What is this I hear about you going to church?” Another found out that I was going on a three-week mission trip to Haiti and was incredulous: “You, Judith, you going to Haiti with a church group! What has gotten into you?” I don’t feel strong enough to defend my actions. My friends would accept me far more readily if they found that I was in some bizarre cult involving exotic and strange activities like black magic or experiments with levitation. But going to church is branded with a terrible ordinariness.
But that is what endears it to me, both the church and the twelve-step programs, this façade of ordinariness. When you pull back the veil of ordinariness, you find the most extraordinary life behind it. But I feel isolated and inadequate to explain to my husband and close friends—even myself!—what it is. It’s as if I would have to undress myself before them. Maybe if I was willing to do that, they would not dare disdain me. More likely they would just pity me. As it is, they just adjust their neckties a little tighter.
I am feeling raw and cold and vulnerable and something of a fool. I guess I don’t feel too badly about being a fool within the context of the secular world. From the way they look at me, I don’t have much to show for my new life. I can’t point to a life mended. Many of the sorrows and difficulties seem mended for a time, only to bust open again. But to tell you the truth I haven’t been on medication since June and for that I feel grateful.
When I try to explain myself to these friends I feel as if I am suspended in a hang glider between the material and immaterial, casting a shadow down far below, and they say, “See—it’s nothing but shadow work.” Perhaps it takes a fool to savor the joy of shadow work, the shadow cast as I’m attending to the unknown, the unpaid for, the freely given.
Judith gets it right. Nobody has any idea what she is doing. She feels apologetic about that. But she embraces what she is given—that seemingly fragile hang-glider church suspending her in the mystery: “the unpaid for, the freely given.” She is an artist of church: “Don’t look at me—see the shadow down there. Look at the shadow work. You might see what God is doing.” She knows so little about church, yet she knows what it is. She is an artist who knows about the invisible that energizes and shapes visibility, the Spirit that keeps aloft the ligaments and sinews and fabric of the hang glider that she is strapped into, this seemingly fragile church that casts on the earth what she calls shadow work.