A Work of the Soul
Stories
Contents
“A Work of the Soul” by Keith Hewitt
“Bad Case Of The Guilts” by C. David McKirachan
A Work of the Soul
by Keith Hewitt
Isaiah 40:21-31
The place smelled of uneaten meals and discarded dreams. Roberto Scarpacci—Father Roberto Scarpacci, he reminded himself firmly—looked around the studio and noted a half-dozen unfinished canvases, some partially painted, some just sketched and barely visible in the gloom. Picking his way carefully to avoid tripping over this and that, and once catching himself just before stepping on something that scurried away with an indignant squeal, he crossed the studio to the great north-facing window and pulled aside the curtains, tied them back with sashes attached to the walls.
Light poured in, brushing floating dust motes with a gentle hand. Somewhere behind him there was a groan, and he shook his head as he turned. “Marchionne, is this any way to live?” he chided. There was no immediate answer, only another groan before Marchionne Cellini struggled to a sitting position behind a pile of blank canvases. As he tugged on the blanket covering him, there was the distinct sound of glass clinking. “You’ve been drinking,” Scarpacci added, without asking.
“I have,” Cellini admitted. “But not enough.”
“Not enough? So you still remember what you did?”
Cellini held out a hand, tilted it from side to side. “I’m hazy on some of the details,” he confessed.
“Then let me clear away the haze.” The priest’s voice crackled through the room. “You attended the Cardinal’s banquet last night—you know, the one to celebrate the fresco in the cathedral. You ate his food, drank his wine—entirely too much of it, apparently—at which point you proceeded to grab a hammer from God knows where and flailed against the fresco, managing to render most of the prophets unrecognizable before two of the Cardinal’s assistants grabbed you and grabbed the hammer out of your hand. At which point you broke free and managed to urinate on a cherub before being tackled. Does that help clear the haze?”
Cellini took it in silently, then shook his head—seemed to regret the motion. “That doesn’t sound like something I would do.”
“Trust me, I was there—and you did. And the question that has been gnawing away at me all night has been why would you do this to your own art—a project that took you months? A project for which the Cardinal himself commissioned you, and paid you handsomely? A project for which I recommended you, vouched for you?”
“There is that, I suppose,” the artist mumbled. “Is that why you’re here?”
“Oh, no. His Eminence, out of great concern for your wellbeing, sent me to find out if you were possessed, or merely insane. Those other questions are mine, all mine.” The priest, now standing over the artist, reached down and pulled him up until he stood before him, swaying, clutching his blanket. “So which is it? As your friend, I will tell you that an exorcism is no picnic, but being confined as a madman is probably worse.”
There was a long silence before the artist murmured, “What if I’m neither?”
The priest weighed that possibility for a moment or two, then shrugged. “Then we would be at drunken vandal and thief, and I’m not sure that’s any better. So choose your words carefully, I have to report back to His Eminence the Cardinal.”
There was another long pause. Then, barely audible, the artist said, “I am none of those things, my friend. I am broken.”
The priest looked at him, at once suspicious and curious, then shook his head slowly. “I don’t understand.”
“I wouldn’t expect you to—you already know. You have everything figured out, now…Father.”
“Marchionne, you know I don’t like games. Explain to me, or explain to the tribunal.”
“I’m broken,” the artist repeated. “For years I have studied and practiced my art, my gift. I have looked at the work of the best artists in the world. I have sketched and painted for days on end, a wild man driven by a passion only an artist could understand. By daylight, by dusk, by candlelight—I have poured my heart and soul into learning how to draw, how to paint, how to create a work of art suitable for a place like the cathedral. A work of art that men would look at and be struck dumb by the beauty of it.”
He paused, looked at the priest who only nodded and shrugged expectantly.
“I thought my piece for the cathedral—Prophets at Dawn—I thought it was such a piece, my best work, un’opera dell’anima. And then, the night before last, I went for a walk in the countryside.” He trailed off, then, stared over the priest’s shoulder, toward the window.
“Yes?” the priest prompted.
“I looked up at the sky—and suddenly it was like I was looking for the first time. I stood there, just at the top of the hill outside the gate, and stared up. There was a depth to the blackness I had never seen before—and the stars were like diamonds, set within the blackness, going on forever…” He blinked, drew the blanket closer around himself. “And suddenly I was aware of the ground, the earth beneath my feet, and I looked at the hills, barely visible in the darkness, and it all. Just. Hit me. This was a beauty I could never recreate. This was a beauty that had been brought into being by God, and could never be equaled by me or anyone else. The ground, solid beneath my feet, was a world created by God, created with everything it needs to sustain me. All around me, plants and trees and animals, all beyond my ability to create…and a single being…God…created them all, and watches over them today.
“I call myself an artist, I say I can paint a picture that will look like what God has already created—but I can’t. I’m a fake, a fraud, a hopeless pretender, and I should not be trying to match my vision to God’s. Me painting something and pretending it looks lie God’s handiwork is—well, it’s worse than fraud. I think it’s almost blasphemy.”
“So you destroyed your fresco because…?”
“Because it’s a fraud. A fake. It pretends to be what it cannot be. Only God can truly create.”
Father Roberto Scarpacci took it in, pondered what the artist had said. He looked down at the floor, spotted the bottle that he had heard before, and leaned over, picked it up. There was something in the bottom of the bottle, so he took a swig to finish it, set the bottle carefully on the table. When he began to speak, he chose his words carefully.
“Marchionne,” he began, “I don’t think you’re mad or possessed. Or a thief. Or a fraud. I think, for whatever reason, the night before last you had an encounter with the divine, and it did something to you. For want of a better word, you met God, and you experienced something powerful—but I think you took away the wrong lesson.”
“What do you mean?” the artist asked, with a hint of hope in his voice.
“I think the truth is that you have a gift—a gift from God. And the gift is not to create as well as God…not to create with God’s perfection and infinite grandeur. But to create works of art that are like little pieces of God’s creation—little visions of God, I would call them. Reflections in a glass, darkly, but still reflections that will draw people to stare at them and consider the beauty and perfection of God’s work.”
He reached out, lay a hand on the artist’s shoulder and smiled. “My friend, you are not blaspheming—you are offering people a chance to look at your work and consider the greater work of God that lies behind it. In a way, it may even be your gift to God.”
The artist raised an eyebrow, looked at the priest closely.
“I’m serious,” the priest said with a smile. “I sometimes wonder, looking at a great work of art, if the real reason God created man was so that man would eventually create art—and then begin to ponder the complexity of the world behind it, and come to a greater appreciation of the God who created the universe.”
The artist rubbed his eyes, then sighed. “I think I’ve had just enough wine to understand what you said.”
“Good,” the priest said. “Then get dressed, because we’re going to see the Cardinal. You have a vision of God to restore.”
* * *
Bad Case Of The Guilts
by C. David McKirachan
Mark 1:29-39
If we consider ourselves to be followers, disciples of the Lord, we can look to him to consider exactly what we should be doing, right? Well, in like kind, I think we need to consider what to expect and prepare ourselves to cope with as we journey on his road, as we follow him.
Again, and again, Jesus was misunderstood, confronted by expectations that had little to do with what he was here to do and to be. Pharisees and Sadducees and the rich and powerful consistently were opposed to his teachings and his inclusive actions. So, we should be ready to confront the judgment of that bunch. And if we’re not running into such flack, what aren’t we doing? What are we leaving out of our proclamation of the Lord’s good news?
That kind of consideration can give the best of us a bad case of the guilts.
But it really gets painful when the people doing the criticizing are the leaders, the faithful of our own communities. They go to the meetings. They go and visit each other. They give so much of their time and resources. Often, they may wonder why we are ‘wasting our time’ doing things like praying or walking in the woods or my personal favorite, working on my bonsai trees. People are looking for us. People need our presence. After all, we are the ministers. We SHOULD be there. My mother told me, whenever anybody started throwing around ‘should’ or ‘ought’, the best strategy was a strategic withdrawal. I asked her what about when she used those words? She said, “Well obviously, that doesn’t apply to your mother or your wife.” I made a strategic withdrawal. I knew I wasn’t going to get any traction in that swamp.
That’s something Jesus didn’t do. No withdrawals. He plowed into the swamps with the courage and capability of a beaver. But I ain’t got no flat tail. People who I’ve worked with, pastored through rough spots, helped find new meaning and hope in dark times, they are precious to me. When they drop little hints about my non-attendance or an e-mail I didn’t respond to, or… you get the theme. ‘Should’ and ‘ought’ my not have shown up in the conversation, but they were there. Expectations were loudly unstated. And my thin skin got a definite rash that tended to motivate me into a serious case of the guilts. Which always tends to destroy my sleep schedule and make my bonsai feel neglected.
But I wonder why we’re so often surprised by this, this flank attack by our trusted allies. In this passage, Jesus was swamped, healing, casting out demons, even healing Peter’s mother-in-law. You would have thought with those accomplishments in his job bank, he would have enough credit to take a day away from the hustle. But nope, they came looking for him, out there in the woods. “Hey Jesus, what are you doing out here, wasting your time? There are all kinds of people waiting for you. If you’re expecting to build a following you know you ought to pay more attention to ya-da, ya-da, ya-da…” The search party probably included Peter. The guy whose mother-in-law had just gotten healed. Sometimes I wonder why he didn’t just fry them all.
Yup, the magic words were invoked, ought or should stated or implied. But he didn’t fry his followers, or engage in a strategic withdrawal. He had better things to do than wallow in guilt or to climb down their throats. “Common guys, it’s time for us to move on down the road. We’re here to spread the good news.”
I don’t know how popular that made him with all the people who were waiting in line, or came a distance to hear him. But he’d come up with a different agenda, probably out there in the woods, talking to god and angels and beings who had other things in mind that paying the bills.
That’s a hard one to walk away from, but that’s what he did. And, to their credit, the disciples went with him. I wonder how Peter’s departure went over with his wife, or his mother-in-law. That isn’t mentioned in the Gospel. The writer followed the Lord, what he did and said, what he was. Just like his disciples did.
Maybe I need to go spend more time with my trees. Maybe I’ll have fewer guilts. But I really have some things I really ought to get to. You know, deadlines and everything.
*****************************************
StoryShare, February 7, 2021 issue.
Copyright 2021 by CSS Publishing Company, Inc., Lima, Ohio.
All rights reserved. Subscribers to the StoryShare service may print and use this material as it was intended in sermons, in worship and classroom settings, in brief devotions, in radio spots, and as newsletter fillers. No additional permission is required from the publisher for such use by subscribers only. Inquiries should be addressed to permissions@csspub.com or to Permissions, CSS Publishing Company, Inc., 5450 N. Dixie Highway, Lima, Ohio 45807.
“A Work of the Soul” by Keith Hewitt
“Bad Case Of The Guilts” by C. David McKirachan
A Work of the Soul
by Keith Hewitt
Isaiah 40:21-31
The place smelled of uneaten meals and discarded dreams. Roberto Scarpacci—Father Roberto Scarpacci, he reminded himself firmly—looked around the studio and noted a half-dozen unfinished canvases, some partially painted, some just sketched and barely visible in the gloom. Picking his way carefully to avoid tripping over this and that, and once catching himself just before stepping on something that scurried away with an indignant squeal, he crossed the studio to the great north-facing window and pulled aside the curtains, tied them back with sashes attached to the walls.
Light poured in, brushing floating dust motes with a gentle hand. Somewhere behind him there was a groan, and he shook his head as he turned. “Marchionne, is this any way to live?” he chided. There was no immediate answer, only another groan before Marchionne Cellini struggled to a sitting position behind a pile of blank canvases. As he tugged on the blanket covering him, there was the distinct sound of glass clinking. “You’ve been drinking,” Scarpacci added, without asking.
“I have,” Cellini admitted. “But not enough.”
“Not enough? So you still remember what you did?”
Cellini held out a hand, tilted it from side to side. “I’m hazy on some of the details,” he confessed.
“Then let me clear away the haze.” The priest’s voice crackled through the room. “You attended the Cardinal’s banquet last night—you know, the one to celebrate the fresco in the cathedral. You ate his food, drank his wine—entirely too much of it, apparently—at which point you proceeded to grab a hammer from God knows where and flailed against the fresco, managing to render most of the prophets unrecognizable before two of the Cardinal’s assistants grabbed you and grabbed the hammer out of your hand. At which point you broke free and managed to urinate on a cherub before being tackled. Does that help clear the haze?”
Cellini took it in silently, then shook his head—seemed to regret the motion. “That doesn’t sound like something I would do.”
“Trust me, I was there—and you did. And the question that has been gnawing away at me all night has been why would you do this to your own art—a project that took you months? A project for which the Cardinal himself commissioned you, and paid you handsomely? A project for which I recommended you, vouched for you?”
“There is that, I suppose,” the artist mumbled. “Is that why you’re here?”
“Oh, no. His Eminence, out of great concern for your wellbeing, sent me to find out if you were possessed, or merely insane. Those other questions are mine, all mine.” The priest, now standing over the artist, reached down and pulled him up until he stood before him, swaying, clutching his blanket. “So which is it? As your friend, I will tell you that an exorcism is no picnic, but being confined as a madman is probably worse.”
There was a long silence before the artist murmured, “What if I’m neither?”
The priest weighed that possibility for a moment or two, then shrugged. “Then we would be at drunken vandal and thief, and I’m not sure that’s any better. So choose your words carefully, I have to report back to His Eminence the Cardinal.”
There was another long pause. Then, barely audible, the artist said, “I am none of those things, my friend. I am broken.”
The priest looked at him, at once suspicious and curious, then shook his head slowly. “I don’t understand.”
“I wouldn’t expect you to—you already know. You have everything figured out, now…Father.”
“Marchionne, you know I don’t like games. Explain to me, or explain to the tribunal.”
“I’m broken,” the artist repeated. “For years I have studied and practiced my art, my gift. I have looked at the work of the best artists in the world. I have sketched and painted for days on end, a wild man driven by a passion only an artist could understand. By daylight, by dusk, by candlelight—I have poured my heart and soul into learning how to draw, how to paint, how to create a work of art suitable for a place like the cathedral. A work of art that men would look at and be struck dumb by the beauty of it.”
He paused, looked at the priest who only nodded and shrugged expectantly.
“I thought my piece for the cathedral—Prophets at Dawn—I thought it was such a piece, my best work, un’opera dell’anima. And then, the night before last, I went for a walk in the countryside.” He trailed off, then, stared over the priest’s shoulder, toward the window.
“Yes?” the priest prompted.
“I looked up at the sky—and suddenly it was like I was looking for the first time. I stood there, just at the top of the hill outside the gate, and stared up. There was a depth to the blackness I had never seen before—and the stars were like diamonds, set within the blackness, going on forever…” He blinked, drew the blanket closer around himself. “And suddenly I was aware of the ground, the earth beneath my feet, and I looked at the hills, barely visible in the darkness, and it all. Just. Hit me. This was a beauty I could never recreate. This was a beauty that had been brought into being by God, and could never be equaled by me or anyone else. The ground, solid beneath my feet, was a world created by God, created with everything it needs to sustain me. All around me, plants and trees and animals, all beyond my ability to create…and a single being…God…created them all, and watches over them today.
“I call myself an artist, I say I can paint a picture that will look like what God has already created—but I can’t. I’m a fake, a fraud, a hopeless pretender, and I should not be trying to match my vision to God’s. Me painting something and pretending it looks lie God’s handiwork is—well, it’s worse than fraud. I think it’s almost blasphemy.”
“So you destroyed your fresco because…?”
“Because it’s a fraud. A fake. It pretends to be what it cannot be. Only God can truly create.”
Father Roberto Scarpacci took it in, pondered what the artist had said. He looked down at the floor, spotted the bottle that he had heard before, and leaned over, picked it up. There was something in the bottom of the bottle, so he took a swig to finish it, set the bottle carefully on the table. When he began to speak, he chose his words carefully.
“Marchionne,” he began, “I don’t think you’re mad or possessed. Or a thief. Or a fraud. I think, for whatever reason, the night before last you had an encounter with the divine, and it did something to you. For want of a better word, you met God, and you experienced something powerful—but I think you took away the wrong lesson.”
“What do you mean?” the artist asked, with a hint of hope in his voice.
“I think the truth is that you have a gift—a gift from God. And the gift is not to create as well as God…not to create with God’s perfection and infinite grandeur. But to create works of art that are like little pieces of God’s creation—little visions of God, I would call them. Reflections in a glass, darkly, but still reflections that will draw people to stare at them and consider the beauty and perfection of God’s work.”
He reached out, lay a hand on the artist’s shoulder and smiled. “My friend, you are not blaspheming—you are offering people a chance to look at your work and consider the greater work of God that lies behind it. In a way, it may even be your gift to God.”
The artist raised an eyebrow, looked at the priest closely.
“I’m serious,” the priest said with a smile. “I sometimes wonder, looking at a great work of art, if the real reason God created man was so that man would eventually create art—and then begin to ponder the complexity of the world behind it, and come to a greater appreciation of the God who created the universe.”
The artist rubbed his eyes, then sighed. “I think I’ve had just enough wine to understand what you said.”
“Good,” the priest said. “Then get dressed, because we’re going to see the Cardinal. You have a vision of God to restore.”
* * *
Bad Case Of The Guilts
by C. David McKirachan
Mark 1:29-39
If we consider ourselves to be followers, disciples of the Lord, we can look to him to consider exactly what we should be doing, right? Well, in like kind, I think we need to consider what to expect and prepare ourselves to cope with as we journey on his road, as we follow him.
Again, and again, Jesus was misunderstood, confronted by expectations that had little to do with what he was here to do and to be. Pharisees and Sadducees and the rich and powerful consistently were opposed to his teachings and his inclusive actions. So, we should be ready to confront the judgment of that bunch. And if we’re not running into such flack, what aren’t we doing? What are we leaving out of our proclamation of the Lord’s good news?
That kind of consideration can give the best of us a bad case of the guilts.
But it really gets painful when the people doing the criticizing are the leaders, the faithful of our own communities. They go to the meetings. They go and visit each other. They give so much of their time and resources. Often, they may wonder why we are ‘wasting our time’ doing things like praying or walking in the woods or my personal favorite, working on my bonsai trees. People are looking for us. People need our presence. After all, we are the ministers. We SHOULD be there. My mother told me, whenever anybody started throwing around ‘should’ or ‘ought’, the best strategy was a strategic withdrawal. I asked her what about when she used those words? She said, “Well obviously, that doesn’t apply to your mother or your wife.” I made a strategic withdrawal. I knew I wasn’t going to get any traction in that swamp.
That’s something Jesus didn’t do. No withdrawals. He plowed into the swamps with the courage and capability of a beaver. But I ain’t got no flat tail. People who I’ve worked with, pastored through rough spots, helped find new meaning and hope in dark times, they are precious to me. When they drop little hints about my non-attendance or an e-mail I didn’t respond to, or… you get the theme. ‘Should’ and ‘ought’ my not have shown up in the conversation, but they were there. Expectations were loudly unstated. And my thin skin got a definite rash that tended to motivate me into a serious case of the guilts. Which always tends to destroy my sleep schedule and make my bonsai feel neglected.
But I wonder why we’re so often surprised by this, this flank attack by our trusted allies. In this passage, Jesus was swamped, healing, casting out demons, even healing Peter’s mother-in-law. You would have thought with those accomplishments in his job bank, he would have enough credit to take a day away from the hustle. But nope, they came looking for him, out there in the woods. “Hey Jesus, what are you doing out here, wasting your time? There are all kinds of people waiting for you. If you’re expecting to build a following you know you ought to pay more attention to ya-da, ya-da, ya-da…” The search party probably included Peter. The guy whose mother-in-law had just gotten healed. Sometimes I wonder why he didn’t just fry them all.
Yup, the magic words were invoked, ought or should stated or implied. But he didn’t fry his followers, or engage in a strategic withdrawal. He had better things to do than wallow in guilt or to climb down their throats. “Common guys, it’s time for us to move on down the road. We’re here to spread the good news.”
I don’t know how popular that made him with all the people who were waiting in line, or came a distance to hear him. But he’d come up with a different agenda, probably out there in the woods, talking to god and angels and beings who had other things in mind that paying the bills.
That’s a hard one to walk away from, but that’s what he did. And, to their credit, the disciples went with him. I wonder how Peter’s departure went over with his wife, or his mother-in-law. That isn’t mentioned in the Gospel. The writer followed the Lord, what he did and said, what he was. Just like his disciples did.
Maybe I need to go spend more time with my trees. Maybe I’ll have fewer guilts. But I really have some things I really ought to get to. You know, deadlines and everything.
*****************************************
StoryShare, February 7, 2021 issue.
Copyright 2021 by CSS Publishing Company, Inc., Lima, Ohio.
All rights reserved. Subscribers to the StoryShare service may print and use this material as it was intended in sermons, in worship and classroom settings, in brief devotions, in radio spots, and as newsletter fillers. No additional permission is required from the publisher for such use by subscribers only. Inquiries should be addressed to permissions@csspub.com or to Permissions, CSS Publishing Company, Inc., 5450 N. Dixie Highway, Lima, Ohio 45807.
