Lost Lent, Found Easter

Photo: Mary van Balen

This year’s Lent was not one of my best. Disciplines, a bit vague from the beginning, fell away early. Life simply “happened” as usual. I did write my columns, always a spiritual discipline I tell myself, and prepared for a presentation on compassion. But other resolves seemed to dissolve, swallowed up by illness, cataract surgery, and well, just life.

I don’t go to Holy Thursday mass anymore (always my favorite) because incense doesn’t agree with my lungs. Friday, after working in the morning and getting work completed on my car and feeling a bit guilty about my “lost Lent,” I decided to take an evening walk and pray with my steps.

The almost blue moon was brilliant in a clear sky. I cleared my mind and simply walked, mindful of the Presence which enveloped me and everyone else on our struggling planet. Trying not to think too much, just to be open, I found myself at the door of a local Catholic church. Lights were on. Lots of cars in the parking lot. I decided to go in.

I’m not sure where everyone was. Two women sat quietly in the front pews, one on each side of the center aisle. That was it. I sat in the back. The altar, usually draped with white or liturgically correct colored cloths was stripped bare. The tabernacle, which in Catholic churches usually contains consecrated hosts from previously celebrated Mass, stood empty, doors ajar. At the bottom of the steps leading to the altar was a crucifix flanked by two tall beeswax candles, flames steady.

As I focused on the crucifix, I became aware of how white the figure of Jesus was, white with auburn hair. I don’t know why, but it just struck me. I looked at the paintings that cover much of overhang above the chancel. White men. White Madonna. White child Jesus.

Last Supper #6 by William L. Hawkins
Exhibit: William L. Hawkins: an Imaginative Geography
Columbus Museum of Art
Photo: Mary van Balen

Suddenly I remembered the art exhibit I had seen at the Columbus Museum of Art (CMOA) a couple of weeks ago: William L. Hawkins: An Imaginative Geography. Hawkins was a self-taught artist born in Kentucky in 1895. He moved to Columbus when he was 21 and remained there for the rest of his life. His paintings are described in a CMOA description of the exhibit as “intense, playful, wondrous, quirky, and flamboyant.” What came to mind as I sat in church on Good Friday were the paintings in his Last Supper series. Eight of the nine he created are hanging in the exhibit

Last Supper #9 by William L. Hawkins
Photo: Mary van Balen

Thought to have been inspired by a painting on velvet that Hawkins had recovered from a trash bin, in which Jesus and his disciples were portrayed as Black men, Hawkins offers a vision of the Last Supper that is at once unique and universal. Unique in that the images are like none other I’ve seen depicting this iconic scene. They definitely don’t show thirteen white men gathered around the table.

The signage at CMOA stated that “…perhaps the greatest achievement of the Last Suppers is how, through his manipulation of paint and found mass media images, Hawkins took a story central to the Christian religion that had been whitewashed in the Western imagination and broadened it to include an almost universal cast.”

Detail from Last Supper # 9 by William L. Hawkins
Photo: Mary van Balen

Almost anyone seeing these paintings could identify with someone in them. They include men and women of many races. When collage was used, even the food on the table seems familiar. The pictures cut from newspapers or magazines, are of plates filled with ordinary dishes you might order at a restaurant or make at home. Everyone could find a place at this table. Of course, you’d have to be comfortable with diversity to enjoy the meal.

As I left the quiet of the church, the images of Hawkins Last Suppers came too. Along with the almost blue moon, the candles, the pleasant night air, the turmoil of our times, the candle flames, and the white Jesus on the cross, they had slipped into an opening in my heart and kept me company on the walk home.

Today, Easter, I celebrated with a diverse group of people packing the OSU Newman Center. My lost Lent was not an issue. No one there was wondering about how anyone had observed Lent. I don’t think God was interested either but was simply glad we had shown up at the table.

The amazing thing is that no matter how we got there, we all found our way to be together, to share faith, and as the presiding priest reminded us in his homily, to give thanks for the unimaginable love of a God who is crazy in love with all of us. To give thanks for Jesus’ willingness to remain faithful to who he had come to know himself to be…God’s own Love in the world, even when it led to the cross. And to believe that as we share in Jesus life and death, we also share in his love and resurrection.

Happy Easter!

© 2018 Mary van Balen