Edward Hicks’ paintings of the peaceable kingdom (inferred from the texts of the Book of Isaiah) intrigue me. In them, both the natural and political are depicted in peaceable terms. A little boy leads lions and leopards next to lambs and oxen and first peoples are spoken to by settlers with respect. Evidences abound daily that this peaceable kingdom remains primarily in what theologians refer to as the not yet.

Nature and Violence

A hippie dude I knew at the monastery where I lived for a year was troubled, even angry, about the fact that nature does what it does. When he was a little boy, he told me, he discovered in the backyard that the sow had eaten her newly born baby piglets. Nature includes evidences of both beauty and violence, creativity and destruction, intimacy and indifference. Tsunamis, parasites and stillborn animals have led me to often feel the same way about “God’s other book”. That is, I have not made my peace with these occurrences. My purpose in making art is not to necessarily solve or illustrate a particular theology or tell only one story of nature. My purpose in art is to feel the world without cheating. As an artist and writer, this means for me making objects and drawings that embody not only the beauty and intimacy but also the aggression and indifference in the natural world.

Politics and Aggression

"We talk about our feelings, we don't hit, hit, hit... we don't throw stones or even spit" is the line from one of Bill Jolliff's “Songs for Children.” American gender constructions - ideas of what it is to be male – are embedded in the assumption that men don't talk about their feelings, instead they hit. My personal story involves growing up in the American West as an athlete, who by virtue of my physicality and ability to hit hard, went to college on a football scholarship and then rejected an appointment to West Point. Following this, I worked on a ranch in Colorado, in a library in Pennsylvania, and then went to art school before returning to the desert and working with the elderly while in grad school. Mine is a story of being filled with images and notions, culturally constructed codes of behavior that were incongruent with peace. I’ve spent the last decade emptying them.

Having recently moved to Oregon, I am learning to fly fish. Peace that is like a river makes sense to me. It is dynamic, not static, possessing multiple depths and crosscurrents. Peace is a powerful force in and for the world. The peacemaking that is in my art is perhaps expressed in healing divisions - divisions between the spiritual and the material, nature and human nature, masculinity and femininity, and the boundary between one’s own body and the social body. A project I am currently working on engages immigration issues in Phoenix Arizona. My involvement is not because I think I have the answer so much as I hope that art can create a space of solidarity, and because I believe art can help us deepen the questions of borders and boundaries. The Center for Peace and Justice at George Fox University is a community I am very pleased to affiliate with. I feel both a sense of privilege and responsibility to broaden my peace testimony while living in the already anticipating the not yet. Meanwhile and until, I recall often how the monks were fond of quoting St. Seraphim of Sarov: "Acquire the spirit of peace, and then thousands around you will be saved."