Glorious Children

There is a tension in the title of this show: Ordinary Saints. We borrowed it from a collaborative project presented last fall at the Cody Center at Laity Lodge. Our conversation about this title grew from two independent bodies of work: Allison Streett’s sculptures and my recent paintings, and the potential of an exhibit during this liturgical season called “ordinary time.” The question is, what is “Ordinary”? Who are “Saints”? Who are we to call anyone ordinary, or even more, why would we call them saints?

Historically, this season in the church focuses on discipleship, growth, outreach, and mission. This time between holidays is not mundane, but ordered as we are moved forward through out daily life with intentionality - working toward growth and renewal. As artists, this focus is reflected in our process of making. We must cultivate practices of studio time, quiet space, and moving material from the disorganized to the organized. For me, I begin the process of making each piece with order and control, but it is the ordinary, organic, personal interactions that transform the materials.

We are also encouraged in this season to look outward, toward our relationships. Our work in this show is modeled after individuals with whom we have personal connections. Allison writes that she desires to challenge the viewer to “acknowledge our true relationship to each other.”

Allison and I both want to communicate the significance of each individual we have represented, a presence that cannot be ignored, and innate “glory” each person possesses, because God created them, and loves them. We all appreciate nature - the beauty of a heron on the river, or a rainbow after a downpour - but people are God’s greatest, most treasured creation. In Psalm 8 we read, “When I look at your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars, which you have set in place, what is man that you are mindful of him, and the son of man that you care for him? Yet you have made him a little lower than the heavenly beings and crowned him with glory and honor.”

The psalmist speaks of the universe, our most vast glimpse of creation, that God made with his fingers, and then says God personally cares for the people He made! Consider what PCA pastor Tim Keller says: “Two things we want so desperately, glory and relationship, can coexist only in God.”

One man, Jesus, who already possessed relationship in its perfect form, and had the greatest glory as Creator of the Universe, left heaven and became the smallest and meekest figure on earth - a baby. His body was broken through a shameful death on a cross. He was rejected by His loving Father. And why? Because He loves us, so we can be weighty, significant, loved, and lovable, and so that we can be clothed in His glory. We are made right with the Father because Jesus rose from the dead, defeated death and sin for all time, and sent His Spirit. Because of Jesus, we can be brought into a true relationship with the God who created us, and be transformed into glorious people, His children, His saints.

- Sonya Menges

“It is a serious thing to live in a society of possible gods and goddesses, to remember that the dullest most uninteresting person you can talk to may one day be a creature which, if you saw it now, you would be strongly tempted to worship, or else a horror and a corruption such as you now meet, if at all, only in a nightmare. All day long we are, in some degree helping each other to one or the other of these destinations. It is in the light of these overwhelming possibilities, it is with the awe and the circumspection proper to them, that we should conduct all of our dealings with one another, all friendships, all loves, all play, all politics. There are no ordinary people. You have never talked to a mere mortal. Nations, cultures, arts, civilizations - these are mortal, and their life is to ours as the life of a gnat. But it is immortals whom we joke with, work with, marry, snub, and exploit - immortal horrors or everlasting splendors.”

- C.S. Lewis, The Weight of Glory