by Heather Cate

The artwork below is a painting that Church of the Good Shepherd’s (Lynchburg, VA) creative arts director, Marci Perez, did for Lent. 

Here is her artist statement about it: 

"Lent brings us on the well-worn path of our church calendar journey to the edge of the wilderness, the dry desolate place where we are invited to set down our excesses and instead take the hand of our humble, wounded and faithful Friend. Like the traveler walking out of a forest, we emerge from the abundant seasons of Christmas and Epiphany, of feasting and light and holy alleluias, where we have been nourished and blessed. 

Now we face the valley of dry bones.

But we do not go alone. 

Our companion Jesus walks with us, but beyond this, he has already gone before us; he has charted out the winding path through the steep canyons of this wilderness we face, even to the darkest and loneliest corners of our souls.

So for these forty days, we embrace the slow, familiar-yet-strange practices of fasting and repentance to follow the pilgrim’s tread through a season of “memento mori”—to know and feel again our body’s frailty, our human transience and mortality. To know that while we are fearfully and wonderfully created, we are also but dust. 

We take on this pilgrimage again and again to experience not just in our minds but more deeply in our bodies the strange holy truth of strength formed from weakness, life birthed through death, as Jesus has embodied for us.

For the path of Lent first climbs the wilderness not to the glory of Zion, but to Golgotha, the place of the Skull."

Marci has done some beautiful art for Advent and Lent! She often prints them for each member to have and meditate on during service, and then we can take them home and hang them somewhere we see often to draw our minds back to Jesus. If you'd like to reach out to her, her email is: arts@goodshepherdlynchburg.com

Heather Cate is the Administrator for Church of the Good Shepherd in Lynchburg, VA.