When I'm not singing the hymns with added melody lines or adding language or tweaking the liturgy for humorous effect, I'm drawing on my bulletin, and last week Jami drew on hers. Here you see both of our efforts: mine on the left and Jami's on the right.I drew an emblematic design centered on the cross given by the bulletin's cover. A female and male touch hands, with their heads centered on the cross's middle. Around them are the symbols of the four gospels - angel, lion, oxen, eagle (matt, mark, luke, john), symbolic animals mentioned in Ezekiel and Revelation. The female emerges out of the sea, symbolized by the whale or Leviathan; the male reaches down from the sky, surrounded by stars (the firmament). On the top I wrote the Hebrew YHW and on the bottom I wrote Tow hu voh bho hu. And it's in these last statements that my intricate design, containing many levels of symbolism, came into trouble. "Oh, so the female is unformed and needs the male to be made whole?" Jami said. I immediately realized the rhetorical nature of her question (statement?) and threw up my hands in surrender. No amount of biblical, mythological, liturgical, archaeological, form critical, or hermeneutical qualification and explanation would extricate me from my obvious dilemma.
Jami did a drawing of an owl and a pussycat, which I like. I think it should be our family coat of arms, along with a martini glass and a pork sandwich.
I continue to hope that I might create a set of Christian emblemata that are so recondite, convoluted, involved, erudite, spiritual, educational, erotic, cenobotic, hermetic yet accessible, that people's minds will reel around the images of the faith as on a mobius strip of wonder.
