sometimes i process my spirituality by illustrating it
I may have mentioned a time or two that 2023 was pretty chaotic.
Interestingly, The Bible Project (an org I highly recommend) chose 2023 to do a whole series of podcast episodes (and also a video) on the biblical “chaos dragon,” so at least I had some imagery to work with in my head.
One of their asides mentioned the story of Jesus walking on the water as a picture of the mastery He has over the forces of chaos in this world. I like that—and it’s not exactly how I describe what’s going on in that story in my chapter about that in Follower. I think Jesus was letting His hair down, but you’ll have to wait to see what I mean. When I share that chapter with you (which I will, soon), you can let me know if you think I should add—with attributions of course—some of that chaos-mastery element in there, too.
The last time I met with my spiritual director before the new year, some of the chaos that I thought had been put to rest earlier in the year was churning up again, and I said to her, “I’m really praying that God will just take care of the dragons without my having to do anything about it. But failing that, I hope I can get to the point where I can dance with Him on their heads.”
To be honest, I’m still kind of waiting to find out which of the two it will be, but I like the dancing-on-the-dragons’-heads imagery a lot, so I’ve been doodling it lately.
For some reason it’s little-girl Jenn in both of these. I’m not sure why that seems necessary, but it does.
Also, interestingly (maybe), last year I was completely obsessed with pourable acrylics—which is a kind of chaotic way of making art, especially as I do it, since I never could figure out how to get the effects people effortlessly demonstrate on Instagram reels. I have these two pieces that, for whatever reason, I decided to call Behemoth and Leviathan respectively. If no one buys them in their current iteration at the Jenn Store, I might just paint little-girl Jenn and Jesus dancing on those, too.
In the top right corner of Behemoth, there are these figures that remind me of “Watchers.” Feel free to snag these before I paint them some more if you want.