I had the opportunity to write a series of letters to people who have greatly influenced my theological learning and world view. The first is the artist Meinrad Craigshead, who was introduced to me by the magnificent Dr. Turpin. Meinrad's painting Sounds of the Rio Grande hangs on the wall above my desk where I can see it everyday.
Dear Meinrad,
Please forgive the informal greeting, but I feel as if I know you. Your life and art are intertwined with my own. I have been exploring my own life-limiting embedded theologies, those that are foundational to my complicity with structural and cultural violence. Your art often depicts violence and is grounded in the feminine divine so I thought of you when recently, I was asked to create a kind of (non)violent manifesto. But I must admit, my faith in (non)violence is shaken. Instead of making my goal (non)violence, I am seeking ways to exist within violent systems that honor the interdependent web of existence while simultaneously recognizing that life involves violence.
I agree with Dr. Julie Todd that we are “always discussing violence because the entire context for social movements and social struggle is violence.” I also resonate with Jensen’s idea that “any hatred felt long enough no longer feels like hatred..[i]t feels like economics, religion, just the way things are.”
You knew at just seven years old that the hegemonic view of God as male was not your experience and spent the remainder of your life centered on God as the Great Mother. Only recently has the feminine divine helped me articulate a deeper and richer description of my faith. Charlotte Perkins Gilman argued that “had women’s experience of birth-giving been the source of religion instead of men’s experience of hunting and killing, then a very different religion would result.” In 1923, she wrote:
Birth based religion… would tell no story of old sins, of anguish
and despair, of passionate pleading for forgiveness for the mischief
we have made, but would offer always the sunrise of fresh hope:
“Here is a new baby. Begin again!”...[T]hat great Power would
have been apprehended as the Life-giver, the Teacher, the Provider,
the Protector- not the proud, angry, jealous, vengeful deity men have
imagined. She would have seen a God of Service, not a God of Battles.
Riane Eisler describes reality as “the great cosmic womb,” suggesting that if the central religious symbol was not a man dying on the cross, but woman giving birth, then “love of life and not fear of death” could lead us away from “the competitive way to the partnership way.”
Your spiritual connection to the Bosque in Albuquerque is one that I also share. I recently discovered that your home in New Mexico was mere miles from mine. I, too, went to the Bosque every single day with a beloved dog. It is a place where I feel most holy and whole. You “recognize God everywhere” and that “God cannot be reduced to anything in creation, including the church itself.” This shared connection to the divine in land and animals reminds me that “[w]e’ve been taught that the spirit is outside our bodies or above our heads somewhere up in the sky...we’re supposed to forget that every cell in our bodies, every bone and bird and worm has spirit in it.” Jensen recognizes that, “[h]uman supremacism and human exceptionalism are central issues in discussions of violence.” Your art represents this vitalistic view of the world, where all things hold value. We both reject anthropocentrism. As John Millspaugh said, “[j]ust as this planet is not the physical center of the universe, our species is not the center of this planet.”
Thank you for sharing your experiences with Goddesses. I love how your images are grounded in theologies of renewal yet do not deny that life, like birth, is violent. As I continue to wrestle with my own ideas of divinity, I want to remember that “if we train ourselves to stomach the eternal torment of our fellow human beings, then we are also training ourselves to worship hatred, violence, cruelty, domination, and torture. Who, then, is the real object of our worship?” You have helped raise my consciousness of the ways in which birth-based theologies are more life affirming than the heremonic theologies of my youth. In your art, it becomes clear why the Hebrew word for womb is the root word for compassion.
With love and appreciation,
Beth
Meinrad Craighead has spent her life exploring in art the human-divine relationship, particularly in images of God as the Great Mother. Her work portrays in vivid color both an active visual dialogue with God and a keen sense of the brooding, watching, beckoning power she finds in the land around her, in the sky above, the earth below, in the animals, in our dreams. One critic called her art “vast landscapes of interconnectedness.” Another wrote: “Her detailed pieces teem with images and concepts from Catholic spirituality and ancient mythologies, blended in visceral lunges or relentless flows. All art for Meinrad is prayer, a continual supplication for vision.”
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