We are Pedernal

September 8, 2013

Jeremiah 18:1-11

 

Most of you know that my family recently returned from vacation in the southwest United States.  We flew out to Phoenix and wound through Arizona, New Mexico and Colorado before flying out from Denver.  There were a lot of memorable sights and experiences, some of which you’ll be hearing about in about in future weeks, but one thing that emerged from the trip for me was a newfound admiration for Georgia O’Keeffe.

I’d seen some of her artwork, especially the ever present flowers and bull skulls, but hadn’t really thought much about her before this trip.  Then we got to Santa Fe and while Holden took the kids to the pool one day I went to the Georgia O’Keeffe museum.  I went in as sort of a cultural obligation and came out just a little bit obsessed. 

            I started my tour of the museum by watching a short film that told a story of her life using glimpses of her from youth to old age and snippets of letters she’d written to lay out some of the experiences that drove her as an artist.  As a young woman, she quit her first art school because she felt stifled by her teachers’ insistence that she learn by copying the masters rather than seeking her own inspiration.  She began experimenting with forms and creating what seemed to be abstractions but were often actual items seen so close and surprising that you saw them in completely new ways.  She was so saddened and surprised by how she and her paintings were sexualized that she escaped to New Mexico, wanting to be away from everything and almost everyone.  She talked about New Mexico as her spiritual home, the place she didn’t know was missing until she’d found it. 

And in a letter she wrote explaining why crosses showed up so often in her art, she wrote that she “see[s] crosses everywhere.  It is as if the Church has laid her veil over all of New Mexico.”

            This portrait of her was so intriguing that it completely changed the way I looked at her art when I left the dark little theater.  With these new glimpses of Georgia O’Keeffe the woman, I stepped out into the gallery to take in her art and looked at it with newfound interest and understanding and sympathy and comraderie.  Many of the paintings were of her mountainous surroundings at Ghost Ranch, the New Mexico retreat where she stayed most often in her semi-self-exile. 

            When my family made our own unscheduled and, as it turned out, very off-the-beaten-track pilgrimage to Ghost Ranch, the scenery felt familiar because of her paintings.  But of the vivid spectacular mountains all around the property, there was one in particular that stood out immediately.  It was Pedernal Mountain, the flat-topped mountain that frequently shows up in her landscape paintings, the one that most captured her imagination and became almost a fixation for her. 

          “Pedernal is my private mountain,” she wrote a friend in a letter.  “God told me if I painted it often enough I could have it.”  Of course, Georgia O’Keefe never owned Pedernal – it was well outside the acreage that she acquired.  But by studying it, sketching and painting it, and lovingly working and reworking, creating and recreating it, it became a piece of her.  I’m guessing that what made it hers was not her perfection of her drawing and painting of the mountain but the process of spending time loving it and taking it in.

            With that background, I offer you our reading from Jeremiah.  This book happens to be what the group of us doing the Bible Challenge are reading right now.  Just a few days ago we had this very reading. 

And the book of Jeremiah is a rough book.  The people of God are going every which way except towards God.  The people have forgotten their history with God and have traded their God in for lesser gods.  The poor prophet Jeremiah is threatened right and left by hostile audiences, and responds with his own divinely-inspired threats.  The book is full of strange metaphors like dirty loin cloths representing the ruined intimate relationship between God and the people. And it’s full of prophecies of doom for the people.

            But in the midst of it we get this metaphor of God the potter working with the people like clay.  At first glimpse it feels a little threatening with all its talk about the Lord breaking down and destroying.   We hear that the potter stands ready to smash the disappointing clay and start over again.

            But then I remember Georgia O’Keeffe and her beloved Pedernal Mountain that she never stopped observing and sketching and painting.  And it helps me to see Jeremiah’s metaphor differently.  I think we are God’s Pedernal Mountain, each one of us individually and all of us collectively. 

I can imagine God, like Georgia O’Keeffe in her creating mode, up to the elbows in mess, clothes covered with dried clay dust, fingernails crusted with clay, arms dripping with mud.  I can imagine God hard at work, not giving up when the clay isn’t cooperating.  Not a tyrant following a specific blueprint that is undone by a single mistake.  But an artist, pressing here, caressing there, in a continual process of creation.  Working with us, rekneading when an air bubble or an imperfection is discovered, forming and reforming to make the most of us.   Tending each piece with care and love until we become something unique in God’s hands. 

Until each one of us knows we belong to God.  Until each one of us points to God in the midst of whatever landscape we find ourselves.  Until each one of us discovers our spiritual home, the place we may not even have known was missing until we found it.  Amen.