I once visited Georgia friends in their country home. About forty yards away from their new Cape Cod house, a grove of trees cast cooling shadows over their land—a blessing in the Southern heat.
The older trees in the grove once stood on a Civil War Battlefield. My friend took me into the woods to show me where several trees had taken bullets fired to wound and kill men. We had to look closely. She said that the land felt restless when she and her husband first began to build there. At night they would hear strange moans and eerie sounds. The Holy Spirit told her to pray for His peace to come and settle upon the land. By the time of my visit, my friends no longer heard unnatural sounds in the night and the land felt at rest.
If you look closely at this painting, you can see three long guns with trees growing from their barrels. Each of these more modern gunstocks was once cut, smoothed and polished from a living tree. I drew the three guns while revising Three Rifles, an essay elsewhere on this website. Much later, I made a giclee print of the rifles and painted the trees over the guns. (One, gun is actually a shotgun, not a rifle). While painting, I started thinking about my friend’s woods.
I put reddish hues in the painting while thinking of the residues of rusting metal and rotting wood that most likely lie buried under my friend’s stand of trees. And then I added more touches of red when I thought of the human blood that once stained the ground as men suffered and died.
My painting took on layers of meaning. Once the land was restless; now it is at peace. Life, in both the natural and the spiritual has prevailed. In the natural world, trees cleanse the atmosphere, nurture life and encourage ecological peace and harmony. In the spiritual realms, my friend’s prayers, her repentance for the bloodshed and suffering on their land and her faith for God’s presence to come and cover the sins of the past eventually brought peace. Certainly, our own prayers of repentance and faith will nurture our spirits and in time will turn our restless places to peace too.
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