The Crib and The Cross: How God Called me to Sacred Art

If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, let my right hand be forgotten.

Let my tongue cleave to my jaws, if I do not remember thee: If I make not Jerusalem the beginning of my joy.

(Psalm 136:5-6 Douay-Rheims)

As I share the testimony of coming to understand my vocation as a sacred artist, I remember with gratitiude that the location of so much of this grace: the Holy Land. I ask you to join me in praying for peace in Israel and Palestine.

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After earning my MFA in painting in 2016, I was initiated into the Catholic Church in 2017.

I had spent eight consecutive years studying painting, and was committed and confirmed in my calling as an artist. But as a newborn Christian, I did not yet know how I would be called to use my artistic talent to serve God and neighbor.

One year after my Baptism, during Holy Week 2018, I made a first vow of celibacy for the Kingdom, advised by my spiritual director to make an annual temporary vow as I continued to discerned my vocation.

Making my first vows before the Altar of Repose at St. John Cantius in Chicago on Good Friday 2018.

A few months later I was in Portland Oregon visiting my family over the summer. One afternoon, near the beginning of my visit, I was in Adoration at Holy Rosary Church. Kneeling before the Blessed Sacrament I made a deep and sincere offering of my life to God. I gave God all my history and affections and ambitions and begged Him to use me however He wanted. Also during this prayer I asked for a Cross pendant to wear to signify to my old friends and family the amazing transformation that had taken place in my life - I wanted a physical sign that I could show and use to tell about the miracle of my conversion and God’s mercy to me.

Immediately after making this prayer I stepped out into the vestibule of the church and a man approached me. Although he was a complete stranger, he asked to talk with me. He confided that last Christmas his 12-year-old daughter, Grace, and her mother had died tragically in a car accident. For some reason this man was inspired to share his broken heart with me, speaking with the intimacy of total trust. After he told me his story, he put his hand in his pocket and pulled out a handful of little mother-of-pear Cross pendants. He said that he had bought them in Jerusalem on a pilgrimage a few years ago and he asked me to choose one for myself. I led him by the hand back into the Adoration chapel and prayed for and with him.

The Cross pendant Tomasz gave me

The following Sunday we met at the same church and then went for a walk together. We discovered that we were both artists. The man, Tomasz Misztal, is a Polish-American sculptor and has had a long career doing liturgical art for churches as well as exhibiting in secular art galleries. He was the first sacred artist I had met in person who had made a career doing religious art that is aesthetically original and powerful. He is still one of my greatest living inspirations in the genre.

Crucifixion by Tomasz Misztal, plaster and wood.

I invited Tomasz to join me in making a consecration to Jesus through Mary in her aspect of Our Lady of Sorrows. I saw that Mary would be able to accompany, understand, and mother Tomasz in his grief for his child.

I returned to Chicago. That September we made our joint consecration through Our Lady of Sorrows. But the destiny we both felt over our friendship - the evidence of God’s hand ordering our lives when we were together - was just beginning to be realized.

The following winter I returned to Portland Oregon, this time for an open-ended visit. I had taught at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago that fall but did not have a contract for the upcoming spring semester. Neither did I have an apartment lease. Nor savings of any kind. Therefore my future was uncertain to me. Tomasz invited me to share his art studio to work in while I was in Oregon. In that environment of prayerful labor - Tomasz was sculpting a statue of St. Pope John Paul II - I was inspired to do my first devotional painting. I wanted to paint a religious subject to experience worshipping God through the work of my hands. I also wanted to collaborate with Tomasz. We conceived of a triptych (three-panel) Crucifixion altarpiece. Tomasz would sculpt and then cast in bronze the Corpus of Christ Crucified; I would paint the other elements of the Crucifixion scene on the central panel as well as other images of the saints on the side panels. We were a few weeks into our preparation for this project when Tomasz remembered that his Pastor from St. Stanislaus Polish Catholic Church in Portland had asked him if he would consider making new Stations of the Cross for the Parish. Originally Tomasz had not accepted the job because the Stations were all paintings and, although he can paint, he is primarily a sculptor. However, with me involved, and us already planning to collaborate on a Crucifixion, it appeared possible for us to accept this project together. To be clear, I had only begun preparations for my very first devotional painting, when suddenly the possibility of a commission for 14 religious paintings for a church was being discussed. I had intended to paint the Cross, and God invited me to paint the entire Way of the Cross. This is characteristic of God’s super-abundance: when I take one tentative step towards Him in faith, He overwhelms me with His rapturous embrace. The concept for the Stations of the Cross was for me to paint the holy figures, Jesus and the Saints, in a more refined manner and for Tomasz to paint the mob and the soldiers in a more expressionistic style, thus combining our disparate techniques and temperaments. The composition and content of each painting we would design together. The Pastor was intrigued and commissioned us to paint the first Station, Jesus is Condemned, to be delivered by Ash Wednesday. He would put the painting on display in the church and ask the parishioners if they wanted to fund the entire project.

Tomasz working on Station 1: Jesus is Condemned to Die

After delivering our first painting to the church, while we were still awaiting the Pastor’s decision, we agreed that we would complete the Stations of the Cross no matter what circumstances prevailed. Having come to this agreement I said: “You know what would be best? To go to Jerusalem and walk and pray the way of the Cross in person while we make the preparatory drawings for all of the other paintings.” Tomasz agreed with me. Further, he was confident that we would get the commission. So, right then, while we were still sitting at the table where we began the conversation, he bought tickets to Israel for us to depart in less than a week and spend Lent in the Holy Land!

Now we had to: 1) pray we receive the commission and the funds for our pilgrimage, and 2) find a place to stay and work with very short planning time and practically no money.

In this season the Infant Jesus made His Divine presence and mercy powerfully known to us in many small ways. I was spontaneously invited to lead a church procession carrying a statue of the Divine Infant; we saw posters of the Infant of Prague on billboards downtown. We also both felt Grace’s intercession. Alongside my dear friend, fellow pilgrim, and collaborator, I was confronted by the mysterious conjunction of the Christmas joy of the incarnation, Grace’s innocence, and faith in the Resurrection, with the Way of the Cross, Our Lady of Sorrows, and the inconsolable grief at the death of a child. When the only available lodging in the Holy Land that we could afford was an Airbnb in Bethlehem we accepted it as another sign of the Divine Infant’s favor and the mystery we were living. With Grace, let us go Adore the Infant King and from there, from Bethlehem, follow Jesus along the Way of the Cross.

We arrived in Bethlehem on March 9th, 2019. We were dismayed after long days of travel to find that the road leading directly to the front door of the Airbnb was bulldozed and we either had to climb around huge dig-outs and mounds of earth and construction equipment or climb up a stairway from the street below to the back door of the house. We also learned that it is cold in Bethlehem at night. There was no heating in the house. That first night we shivered in our respective rooms. It was Lent. We agreed we could suffer a little. So, undaunted, on our second day we took the bus from Palestine to Israel and to the old city in Jerusalem to walk the way of the Cross.

If you have not been on pilgrimage on the way of the Cross in Jerusalem it is difficult to understand the intensity of the layers of history and humanity on those streets. I cannot write at length about those strata, or all of the impact on our hearts here. What I want to communicate in this short narrative is the testimony of God’s provision and healing providence as we collaborated on this sacred artwork, and the most manifest ways were we changed through the spiritual and corporeal pilgrimage of walking, praying, and painting the Via Dolorosa.

The altar at Calvary in the Holy Sepulcher.

When we arrived at the Holy Sepulcher that first day in Jerusalem, Tomasz got in line to go to up to the altar at Calvary, and I (most uncharacteristically!) stepped aside and followed an impulse to check my email. There was a letter from an Orthodox sister who ran a guest house in Jerusalem. She offered us a place to stay for our whole pilgrimage within our budget. What is more, the guesthouse was only a two-minute walk from the Holy Sepulcher, in the heart of the heart of the old city!

The doorway entrance to the Convent of the Sisters who ran the guesthouse.

Glad that we had begun in Bethlehem, but grateful to move to the old city of Jerusalem and so close to the inspiration for our artwork, we set up our studio at Number 3, St. George Street.

Then Jesus told his disciples, “If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me.”

(Matthew 16:24 ESV)

Panel showing the development of the Second Station: Jesus Accepts the Cross from idea, to drawing, to finished painting.

Our life in Jerusalem fell into a rhythm which also allowed for variation as we explored the city and prayed at different cites. Our routine usually followed this pattern: Divine Office (at Dormition Abbey with the Benedictines when possible), daily Mass (most often a pilgrimage Mass at Calvary), breakfast (Arab coffee and saffron buns), work, walking the Way of the Cross, dinner, work, and nightly Adoration at Notre Dame. We called this our ‘rulette’ because it was far less formal than a real monastic rule of life. We enjoyed a strange combination of child-like play and very somber piety that continued to embrace the paradox of the Crib (Christmas joy) and the Cross. A good example of this spirit was in our taking of ‘monastic’ names: ‘Tomek of the Wood of the Cross’ and ‘Sarah of Our Sorrowful Mother.’

Shrine at the Fourth Station: Jesus Meets His Mother

Our Lady of Sorrows was truly our mother and guide. From her Tomasz learned how to grieve and rejoice simultaneously. From her I leaned compassion. She invited us to offer all our struggles and sorrows through her heart to her Son Jesus.

A pilgrim praying at the Anointing Stone in the Holy Sepulcher.

At the Anointing Stone where Jesus’ crucified body was anointed by the women for burial I was given the most significant image of the driving purpose and desire of my life: to anoint the crucified body of Jesus my Bridegroom - the Church. What is my anointing oil? My whole self and life, my love, and yes the very real actual oils of my paints. I learned there that I am called to paint for the consolation of God and of souls.

As we made drawings of the Stations in black and white charcoal, the city colored our imaginations, and we absorbed from her streets the textures and the palette of the paintings we would complete back in Oregon and Chicago.

Before the end of Lent, we were invited back to Bethlehem by a friend of my godmother who would became a spiritual father to me. He is a local who manages an ecumenical pilgrimage center (ECPBS) to educate pilgrims and support Palestinian Christian businesses and families. Back in Bethlehem we attended a Mass in the grotto of the Nativity. This was Lent and we celebrated a Christmas Mass! There, in the Nativity grotto, it is always Christmas; at the Tomb of Jesus, it is always the Resurrection; at Calvary it is always the Mass of the Exaltation of the Cross… This is a sign for the faithful of God’s eternity. His saving Sacrifice is complete once and for all. Yet He condescended to enter into human history, and we, on this side of eternity, usually pilgrimage through the liturgical year in an ordered way. But at these holy place, where Divinity and humanity were indelibly married in Jesus’ birth, death, and resurrection, His everlasting glory breaks through our temporal veil.

Me under a painting of the Child Jesus in the Grotto of the Nativity in Bethlehem.

We returned to Jerusalem to celebrate Palm Sunday!

Lent, and our physical pilgrimage complete, we brought our finished charcoal drawings of all the Stations back to the US. We celebrated Easter at my home parish St. John Cantius in Chicago where I made my first renewal of vows.

Then, back in Oregon, we transferred our finished drawings to prepared canvases and painted together again in Tomasz’ Portland studio.

Tomasz’s studio with our completed drawings (done in Jerusalem) above and our incomplete paintings below.

Then I shipped all of the paintings with me to Chicago where I returned in August 2019 to teach again at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. I turned my small bedroom in Chicago into a studio for the Stations. While I worked on finishing the paintings I was also given the privilege of being a temporary custodian of a real relic of the True Cross.

I completed the paintings and shipped them by train across the country again to install them at St. Stanislaus Church in Portland before Christmas 2019.

Some of the Stations installed in the pre-existing frames in the church.

The consummation of our pilgrimage with the Infant Jesus and Our Lady of Sorrows on the way of the Cross was the unimagined and un-looked-for gift of Archbishop Alexander Sample of Portland Oregon celebrating the Christmas day Mass at Saint Stanislaus Church and blessing our Stations of the Cross on that most holy feast of the Nativity!

Me and Tomasz with Archbishop Alexander Sample.

“Bless the Lord, O my soul, and all that is within me, bless his holy name! Bless the Lord, O my soul, and forget not all his benefits, who forgives all your iniquity, who heals all your diseases, who redeems your life from the pit, who crowns you with steadfast love and mercy”

(Psalm 103:1-4 ESV)

All of the completed Stations of the Cross, in order from top left to right.