A Sanctuary

11″ x 10″ x 11″

Many have entered the silence of a church, synagogue or mosque to lift their burdens when there was nowhere else in the world to go. They are places of shelter when storms have unraveled every stitch of meaning from their lives.

They are also the place where many of us were blessed as infants, joined in marriage, and from which we will be buried. Sacred places are frontier places where the mystery of life is touched.

For the past month or two I’ve been reading John O’Donahue’s book entitled “Beauty.”

“In all our talk about the institutional church in the West, in our anger and disappointment at its theological blindness and abuse of power and person, we have fatally forgotten the harvest of healing presence that dwells in the house of God. In our desperate search for meaning and healing, we rush through our towns and cities on our way to work, therapy or doctors. We pass by these huge sanctuaries of absolute presence, totally oblivious of the divine welcome that awaits us …” Page 161

This piece of a church on its head is my effort to express O’Donohue’s sentiments in clay. I was influence by a photo of a building impaled on its steeple that appeared years ago in the New York Times’ coverage of an exhibition at the Denver Museum of Art.