Fitting all the pieces in

I knew I had writing my biweekly blog post on my list for today. I procrastinated. I’d just had a conversation with my husband and creative partner about which part of which days were each of us using our shared studio and workshop, which days either of us was at each of our individual desks for photography work (him) or writing/worship planning (me) or researching (him) or drawing (me) or crafting (both) or not… Resting? Wandering? Time with family? Friends? Time to de-stress and strategize about the international news?

We’d had a wonderful creative conversation last Friday at dinner when we planned amazing new artwork for us both. At this point in our day, this week, Friday last week seemed like eons ago and I could hardly recall. I had to plan. Most of you know that planning is as much in my nature as painting. I had to know how it all and how we fit. We’ve been spending over a year finding out how we fit in a new culture, new bureaucracy, family patterns, church routines and gym schedules. But we hadn’t really sorted how we fit with each other’s aspirations and focus and how we fit in those jigsaw pieces with everything else. I made a weekly plan! It has a big winking face at the top, letting in the reality of every day’s likelihood of having something unexpected, but we have a default!  It at least lets us know the first steps in the morning, so we’re both pleased. His grin was a thing to behold.

This little jigsaw came out of work I did to illustrate an online learning program on a faith filled life. Its final version has a group of people walking on it trying to see where they fit (!).

The in-between time

For many Christians across the planet we are moving inside Holy Week. We worshipped at Palm Sunday last week, tomorrow we remember in Maundy Thursday, Holy Week Friday tradition asks us to call it Good, we wait in Holy Saturday and arrive at Easter. I can’t stop and tell you what all of these dwelling places in Holy Week mean because each one is fraught with religious and political re-interpretation though the history of this much layered faith. Instead, I give you this painting, done 35 years ago (!). It is called Holy Saturday.

It began life as a piece of stretched sheeting on an old picture frame. It’s back depicts military personnel wearily walking and was created for a Churches Together reflection service on Remembrance Day in a suburban Oxford shopping centre. After then, I was having a deep conversation with a hymn writer friend. He told me kindly yet in no uncertain terms, that I wasn’t painting because I could. Essentially, I was taking my talent and skill for granted. I almost whined - “I don’t know what to paint!”. He gently replied to paint what I was angry at. This painting is the first painting I ever did where I painted what was in my head, not in a landscape, still life or of a person in front of me. I’ve not painted other than this inspirational way since.

Here she is, hand, out-stretched and touching a rainbow of fabric. She’s tight in some kind of agony, but her hand could not be painted closed in to the body, no matter how much I tried. The sheer process of trying to close it in while it tried to reach the light was hard work indeed. So I gave up and let it do what it wanted - touch the rainbow.

The name indicates the time between the death and resurrection of Jesus on the Holy Saturday we will remember and live in this week. Death is known and life is not quite there yet, but there is a hint somewhere. This is my version of that in-between time.

I give it to you now, because the in-between time is what we know best. We see living hell around our planet, much of it human caused by greed and arrogance. We know that peaceful human companionship is a passion for many of us. We are in-between. Please let this woman’s compulsion to touch rainbows help you to stretch out to your light.

My Sister, our Death

A very long time ago, I saw a newspaper article and its associated photograph. I couldn’t breathe as I took in the anger, sorrow, injustice, rage and grief. I always am angry with myself for not finding the photographer. Carefully, I forgive myself that I followed copyright law in my use of their image (I only copied parts of it…). The parts of it spoke. Sometimes to blog with you, I simply open my files and wait for something to declare itself. Today, this is it. I called it My sister, Our Death.

I think of my birth country and all the sick racism. I see my last home country and its grinding racism. I see my new home coutry and read more and listen to its horrendous racism. I think of different countries with family members and friends raging at the injustice happening to them at the expense of someone else’s random power. Horribly, we can pick any year of existence somewhere on our planet and find such abuse of power and its ensuing rage and grief.

It must stop. What I did those years ago was read the article, stare at the image, get close to these people by drawing them in a new place on new paper in a home they never knew and dwell with them. The more we can truly see, get energy to engage with someone else’s truth and relay their truth as honestly as we can, the injustice will stop. It will. Eventually. Because more and more of us are speaking and doing. Over the last few years, we’ve seen hell on earth. We’ve also seen people who never in their lives would have risen up to react now by truth telling their rage - as they carry and care for their neighbours. I urge you to rage and love as hard as you can. Deep peace be with you and give you energy.

Two signatures!!

I blog on a Thursday today, not a Wednesday…. there were things to do! The summer has finally arrived in time for Autumn, and I’ve been out in the studio on my Thursdays creative day. As I used to carve out studio days of old, life has settled well enough now for me to carve out a Thursday, the day I always used for creative things during my pastoral ministry. The first few years of ministry, the Thursdays were chaplaincy at Oxford Brookes Uni. The second set of four years or so was the growth of Oxenford, my women’s clerical clothing company. The final set of years before I moved to wider ministry was the development of the Oxford Healthy Living Centre. Wider ministry and moving onto our dear boat meant no studio for a few years. Then, when we settled into a less travelled boat life, I found my Braunston studio, dedicated what time I could for art then moved my office there too. It helped me paint as and when for over ten years turning out commissions for painting and illustrations and the occasional new work. I loved it, but it was too easy for the desk work of ministry to reduce the art time. Now I have my one day a week absolutely dedicated to the creating and do the desk bit of it on other days. It’s fabulous.

Below are bits of two new paintings. Faith, the very colourful one I’m caught signing lays tribute to the three wisdom sources for our faith - the Cosmos, scriptures and our Soul. The single photo below Faith’s two is Symbiosis. It challenges the ideas that black is bad and light is good (do look up the dictionary definitions for both words). Here, dark, light and all colours containing both work together and are utterly necessary to each other. Symbiotically, they all need each other to be seen. I’ll write more for each and give a good photos when they get their web pages.

The cycle begins again...

What a week. Yesterday was the start of Ramadan, the Chinese New Year and Shrove Tuesday (Mardi Gras). Today is Ash Wednesday and so Lent begins.  Though the Christian preparation and festival annual cycle touches me most deeply of this list, I find that according to Chinese astrology, I was born in the year of this new cycle – the year of the Horse.  That makes me confident, agreeable, and responsible, although I also tend to dislike being reined in by others. Apparently I’m fit and intelligent, adoring physical and mental exertion; I’m decisive but also easily swayed and impatient. We’ll all have different opinions as to whether that is true for me. 😊 That we have these cycle points to remind us to review and renew is important. They’re a call to stop. Breathe. Pay Attention. Whatever spiritual tradition we find for our home, the cycle points call us to see others more dearly, to see ourselves more lovingly, to help our communities in whatever way makes sense. They’re a call to be part of something larger than ourselves and that, to me, is only a good thing. In this stopping cycle point of 2026, may you find energy to reflect and renew.

For these multiple views of the same moment, I’ve chosen the image below from Living Water, my Artist in Residence painting for the URC General Assembly 2012. In this section, after hearing report after report, I saw churches in all shapes and sizes, and in odd relationship to each other.  A comment in discussion gave the image of the Holy Spirit locked in a cage. 

 I saw images of churches firmly planted in the midst of the world, so buildings began to rise behind the churches.  As I painted the buildings I reflected that it is easy to see corporate buildings as images of evil; yet those buildings are inhabited by vulnerable human beings, some of them as enslaved as the Hebrews of old. So the buildings had to be green, indicating that there was rich ground for transformation.

The Mission Report told some hard stories of the world in which we do mission and the hard realities of so many people’s lives.  The bottom right corner of this land of churches in the world became dark with brown and purple boxes which I thought were other sorts of buildings, some visited by saints and spirit filled people.  Yet the buildings turned to water and I saw the murky waters in which people feel drowned.  As I turned those buildings into murky water, I realised that there needed to be water over the remaining panel, able to indicate that some people and churches can feel all ‘at sea’

I give it to you as an image of truth and hope.

In Chaos, Love is confrontation

You must be reading what I’m reading, more or less. Seeing what I’m seeing in various media from international newspapers, platforms like Substack and BlueSky, TV news if you can bear to see it. Years ago, there was a QAnon hoax that the Democrats were running an international paedophile cabal led by wealthy elites.  Now, almost ten years later than the start of that hoax, we know that whatever the right wing accuses Democrats of doing is a confession for the elite right wing leaders including many (and not all!) Republicans.  It seems too impossible to be true. But the truth is oozing out. The damage to so many women has been a lifetime of trauma. The damage to so many men who disabled their morality is a life sentence.  The damage to governance in country after country is incalculable.  Add to that the trauma for military and neighbours in torn country after torn country and we have to stop, breathe, and focus.

What can we do?  Love. That’s all and that’s a lot. We can see it being acted out in march after protest after blogpost after podcast after Newspaper Opinion Editorials after late night talk show hosts after Grammy award winners.  As we watch love in action, it turns out to be far more radical than any sermon or poem could have said. Love in action has been what selfish leaders could never have guessed, assuming that if we were all frightened enough, we’d submit to terror. Oh, Love can face anything.  We have to love harder now than at anytime ever. It may be only to our near ones and dear ones and stops there. But they’re seeing what we’re seeing; we all can fly off the handle because of the stress. We have to Love near and far.

I did this image almost ten years ago now, around the time the QAnon-ers were confessing for the right wing. I was artist in residence for a rural Christianity conference. This section of a much larger piece shows a rising Jesus Love being the largest agent amidst community groups working for good and ill alike. Please take energy from this to revive your Love as much as your own body and soul can accept.

Martin Luther King Day – a few days after

I give you this picture, inspired as I was listening to stories of the abuse of power when I was Artist in Residence for a Free to Believe conference many years ago. It speaks to the Martin Luther King narrative, celebrated on January 19th in the USA. He was, at the simplest, pointing out that power was being abused and most often to suppress those without white male skin. See on the bottom right corner the brown people struggling under the weight of the ‘laws’ and laws which excluded them from full humanity. At this time in all of our lives, I can’t begin to write all I know, feel and think about the horrendous track record and present behavior of my birth country.  Right now, new atrocities are rising from the depth of what has always been seething through the pores of what kind of nation the USA has been struggling to be. Such oppression is a critical function for a society building its identity out of the massacres of indigenous peoples and the transportation of stolen African citizens who were converted to wealth for owners. To cover such crimes, myths of puritan patriotism are the mortar between the bricks of the wall against truth. People like Martin Luther King bloodied themselves to knock those walls down. And often succeeded.  People like Martin Luther King inspire us now to see that not all is gone; not all is evil. Justice is being fought for, legislated for, revived where it has been trod to dust. Hope isn’t the retreat of wimps. Hope is the scary radical stuff of keeping truth alive and shouting it to those who think they’re in power. May you have much outlandish tangible hope as you fly courageously into 2026.