032- Red Mess
I played with these colors for hours—first more yellow, then more orange, and then more reds, darker reds, reds mixed with blues, reds mixed with yellows. While painting the reds, unnamed emotions began to rise up, emotions that filled the air around my mother’s German family in Chicago, Illinois during WW II.
I learned to walk, talk, feed myself and sing through The War Years, 1939 through 1945. By VE Day on May 8th of 1945 and VJ Day on September 2nd, 1945, was I had subliminally associated the pictures of decimated, skeletal men in Life Magazine and the idea of War with the darker feelings and anxious emotions that I had sensed in my parents, grandparents, aunts and uncles during the war years. Throughout the war years, I lived securely. I was loved by an intact family, well fed, clothed daily with clean garments, and nurtured on Mother Goose’s rhymes and traditional holiday celebrations. But I also sensed the diverse unsettling tensions and conflicts of our nation, world and the family I loved to the core of my being.
Letters traveled across the Atlantic between my grandmother and her German cousins. She sent them packages with food. She worried about them. My grownups weren’t happy. My mother was often tight lipped. When we traveled, the trains and stations were filled with soldiers and sailors. I grew up feeling the thrilling patriotism of a nation courageously united against evil and unnamed, unexpressed fear. Nameless fear.
Our family men didn’t go to war. They wanted to enlist, but all had babies, all had wartime jobs, all lived in city wards where younger men filled the draft quotas. Later, I heard that all had wanted to sign up, but the family women banded together and refused to sign permission for them. Was my grandma relieved that her sons were not sent across the sea to kill her German family? When German cousins wanted to flee to America, my family wouldn’t sign for them—in feared they might be Nazis. When two young cousins in the German army were captured and sent to a camp for prisoners of war in nearby Wisconsin, my family chose not to visit them—once again, in fear of Nazism. My grandma’s grandma had a Jewish name. Was she Jewish? If so, no trace lingers in our DNA or family traditions; I don’t yet know.
In my earliest years, I knew that people were hurting and dying and bad things were happening. I grew up sensing horror and fear without out anyone teaching me about it or touching me. Later, much later, I read that sensitive children will pick up on distant happenings through invisible antennae, through the pores of their souls. Mixed into the glorious light of my carefully protected childhood innocence and joys, I sensed sufferings I could not decipher.
How many, I wonder, in this pain strapped world, suffer from sorrows that are not their own? How many, who find a loving God hard to understand, can finally relate to Jesus as man of sorrows? When innocence is exposed to evil, what then? Hardness? Denial? or Healing? We so often need the redemptive flow of cleansing available through Jesus’ innocent blood for more sins than our own. For those who know it, Jesus’ capacity to cleanse a soul from evil’s contamination and to restore the purity of broken trust and faith is a supernatural miracle. When, by faith, His love washes over intractable guilt, shame, pain and the tragedies of life on earth, when He reaches down to cleanse all the pain-soaked child hearts that have been darkened by the sins of human beings agains their own kind, miracles happen. Without divine hope and strength for courage to face the pain and to forgive, without receiving the reality of redeeming love that broke Jesus’ heart on the cross, how dare we touch, how can we bear the world’s sorrow, the tragedy of every innocent death since Cain killed Able? War is horrible.
I’ve measureless gratitude and joy for the love of God. But at times a heavy weight presses on my heart, for I can identify with those who live in darkness with no experience of Jesus’ forgiving restorative love flowing through their veins. I don’t understand how people can endure, love, and keep vulnerable without the Holy Spirit. God’s love alone—in my heart and through others— makes His promises of forgiveness, hope, joy and eventual, eternal justice real to me. Without Jesus to bridge the gap between us and God, the Bible promises would be dead words. I know that Jesus said repeatedly that He died to send the Holy Spirit to earth—and that by faith the blood of Jesus cleanses me from all that would separate me from God’s love. Is this the red mess? The cleansing fire of God’s bloody sacrificial love upon our messy tragically unredeemed human trees? Upon me? Upon my own family? Is this what I painted? It sounds dramatic, but it is what thoughts emerged from considering this picture I describe as a red mess.
