The Painted Prayerbook

© Jan L. Richardson ◊The Painted Prayerbook◊

One of the cool things about going to The Grünewald Guild each summer is that it offers an opportunity to see what other artists are doing. One of the challenging things about going to the Guild each summer is that it offers an opportunity to see what other artists are doing. Coming into contact with creative folks is a two-edged sword: even as it supplies inspiration and camaraderie in a vocation that requires much solitude, it can also provide an opening for envy to seep in.

Take my friend Gilly. Gilly regularly comes over from England to teach at the Guild. As if having a fabulous accent weren’t enough, she’s also a fantastic artist. Much of Gilly’s work involves painting on fabric. Oftentimes, really big pieces of fabric. In churches, in her local theological school, and in other settings, Gilly creates large-scale pieces that both evoke and invoke a sense of the sacred.

Folks who teach at the Guild have an opportunity to give an evening presentation in which we share what we’ve been working on. This year, Gilly offered a PowerPoint presentation that contained images of her work, both in progress and completed. I was taken in particular by a series of large painted fabric pieces inspired by St. Patrick’s Breastplate, that remarkable prayer for protection attributed to the patron saint of Ireland. As Gilly described creating the pieces, and how she has used them with groups, I felt a stab of envy. For nearly a year the main artwork I’ve done has been the collages for this blog, which are 3 x 4 inches. I love working small right now. Particularly after completing a commission last year that was 4½ x 6½ feet, took nearly two years to do, and was a real trick to create in my 300 square foot studio apartment, the wee collages have been a wonderful way to explore some new directions and techniques in a more manageable and intimate fashion. But listening to Gilly, and seeing her images, it was hard not to compare. I envied her talent, her vision, her access to a church and a school where she could explore and offer her gifts. I envied her having a space that enabled her to create such large pieces.

I’ve been thinking about Gilly as I’ve pondered next Sunday’s gospel lection, Matthew 20.1-16. This passage is part of the conversation that Jesus has with the disciples following his encounter with the rich young man who asks him what good deed he must do in order to have eternal life. In talking with the disciples, Jesus tells a parable about a vineyard owner who hires laborers in the early morning, making an agreement to pay them the usual wage. He goes out to hire laborers again at 9:00, noon, 3:00, and 5:00, telling them he will pay them what is fair. When quitting time comes in the evening, the owner begins to pay them, starting with those he has most recently hired and working his way back to those he brought in first. Hearing that he paid the latecomers the full daily wage, the early birds are full of anticipation, then seething with resentment when he pays them the same wage. When they begin to grumble, he reminds one of the workers of their agreement. “Take what belongs to you,” the vineyard owner says, “and go; I choose to give to this last the same as I give to you. Am I not allowed to do what I choose with what belongs to me? Or are you envious because I am generous?” I like how the King James Version renders that last question: “Is thine eye evil, because I am good?”

In talking about this parable, we often use it as a way to describe not only the wideness of God’s mercy but also the wildness of it. We acknowledge how God’s sense of justice doesn’t always match our own, and how the grace of God is lavish and limitless, extending in an equally drenching measure to each person, irrespective of status. We admit that we don’t always understand the way that God’s love works, and that we are sometimes embarrassed by how much greater and deeper God’s generosity is than our own.

Even as I know and acknowledge these things, and am aware of how God tends to work with such incomprehensible mystery, I find myself lingering with the complaint of the first-come workers. The owner is right, of course; it’s his prerogative, he’s paid them the wage they agreed upon, they have no real cause for griping just because someone else got a sweeter deal. All the same, I resonate with their sense of indignation. I want to fix it for them. And not by negotiating with the owner for better wages. Rather, I find myself wanting to step into the story and say to the workers, “Oh, for Pete’s sake, get your own darned vineyard!”

I recognize the class issues that might have precluded day laborers’ purchasing a vineyard in that society. But for me, pondering this passage here in my 21st-century life, Jesus’ parable prompts me to ask, What does it look like to cultivate a vineyard of one’s own? How do we create a place in our lives where we aren’t beholden to others, subject to their whims? Where do we experience the freedom and the focus to tend a vision that God has given us, using all the gifts that God has provided us?

I’m not suggesting that cultivating one’s own vineyard means giving up the structures that provide income and some measure of security and stability. (I’m not suggesting it doesn’t, either.) As someone whose call led me to a nontraditional ministry that involves raising my entire income, I’m really clear about the kind of discernment that needs to go into making the big decisions about what work we will give our hands to, and how we will find support to do this, and what kind of structure we need. Yet whatever field God calls us to labor in, God also calls us to cultivate a space of freedom, a place where we have room to explore and discover and create what will bring sustenance and delight for ourselves and for the world—as vineyards are meant to do. I’ve found that creating such a place often involves piecing it together a scrap at a time. In forming connections, in cultivating relationships that sustain us, in moments of insight and inspiration, in making creative choices, in becoming clear about the work that’s uniquely ours to do, in doing whatever is necessary to do that work, in finding allies who can help us: in each action, we find another patch of the vineyard to which God beckons us.

Obsessing about what others are doing and constantly comparing our work to theirs distracts us from our own work of cultivation. Left unchecked, envy saps our energy, robs our creative focus, and eats us alive. I appreciate the way that Bonnie Friedman writes about this in her book Writing Past Dark: Envy, Fear, Distraction, and Other Dilemmas in the Writer’s Life. She asks,

What is this thing that can take the best from us and yet remain unsatisfied? When I think of envy, I think of Pharaoh’s lean cows [from Pharaoh’s dream in Genesis 41]. They eat up the healthy ones—cannibals, those cows!—yet they remain as skinny as ever, so that, the Bible tells us, ‘when they had eaten them up, it could not be known that they had eaten them; but they were still ill favored, as at the beginning.’ I’ve always felt sorry for those cows. We’re told they’re poor and lean-fleshed, emaciated and ugly. They feed, but cannot digest. They are unhealthy desire incarnate.

Friedman closes her chapter on envy by writing, “The antidote to envy is one’s own work. Always one’s own work. Not the thinking about it. Not the assessing of it. But the doing of it. The answers you want can come only from the work itself. It drives the spooks away.”

Maybe that’s what Jesus is trying to say, really, in telling this parable about the vineyard. He wants to remind his hearers that whatever circumstances we are in, we find a measure of power in staying focused on discerning and doing the work that is ours to do. Cultivating that quality and depth of attention is its own kind of vineyard.

The stab of envy can be painful, but its knife has a way of laying us bare and revealing to us what we need to work on. It’s a tool for cultivating the vineyard. When I acknowledge the presence of envy and let it do its piercing work for a limited time, it opens up room both to explore new directions that other artists inspire me toward, and also to renew my commitment to what I am uniquely called to do.

Who knows, maybe one day I’ll get desperate enough to knock out one of the walls of this cozy apartment, unroll a bolt of fabric over the side until it touches the driveway below, and start painting. Until then, I’m keeping my eye on these bits of painted paper, piecing them together inch by inch. There’s a vineyard in here somewhere.

How about you? Does envy surface in your own life? What triggers it? What message or invitation does it hold for you? What kind of vineyard are you cultivating, or longing to? Who can help? Whom can you help to do this?

Wishing you peace and sustenance and delight as you tend what is yours.

This entry was posted on September 14, 2008 at 2:33 PM and is filed under art, Gospel of Matthew, lectionary, Ordinary Time. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.