Some months ago, I asked my mom to make Stations of the Cross for the church. Her reaction was speechlessness. She and I both knew she hadn’t done anything artistic in years … and that was precisely the reason I asked her to do the stations.
When I was a child I thought of my mom as an artist. She probably thought she was just crafty, but there wasn’t a house in the neighborhood that didn’t have in it something she had made. She was also a perfectionist. On multiple occasions I had to rescue her work from the trash.
We are, ultimately, a product of both our parents. My dad gave me my love of the written word and my mom, I think, gave me her “eye.” While I have never been able to draw or paint like she could, doing those things takes an “eye,” an ability to see the world differently. And I see that “eye” in action with my photography. Photography, to me, is like visual poetry.
She also passed on her obsessive perfectionism. (Trust me, you may have read the preceding paragraph once, but I have read and reread it at least twenty times and rewritten it several more.)
When Pastor Debbie said that she wanted Stations of the Cross for the church, at first I thought I would make them. I thought of doing something abstract with photography and using aspects of nature to represent the various stages of Christ’s journey to the Cross. But I couldn’t get that to work in a way that would be easy for others to decipher.
The more I thought about how I would go about making Stations of the Cross, the more I knew that the best person to do that was my mom. She would know exactly how to go about it. All I had to do was convince her to undertake a huge job.
As I said earlier, she was speechless when I asked, but then she came around. Over the next few months, I pushed and encouraged her because I knew that she could do something amazing and beautiful.
Finally, last night, the finished Stations of the Cross arrived. It had taken my mom months to finish. She had sacrificed her most recent paycheck to pay for shipping and packaging materials. Though I offered to send her money, she refused.
Unwrapping each station last night was like opening the doors to some sort of Lenten Advent Calendar. The box the stations came in smelled of wood, raw wood, like the kind you smell in a hardware store. And I was immediately taken back to childhood when my mom was tole painting.
The first station I unwrapped was of Christ dying on the cross. My mom had chosen pictures from a book to decoupage on a wooden plaque. Then she had gold leafed Jesus’ halo and hand painted the roman numerals. The gold leafing, in particular, was painstakingly perfect.
It was amazing, but the true beauty of what she had done only became more apparent with each station unwrapped. Fourteen stations. Fourteen portraits of Christ’s journey. Each beautifully rendered. But what came through even more that any artistic skill was my mom’s love.
She had undertaken this project because she loved me.
She had sacrificed time and all the money she had because she loved me.
And that love showed.
I don’t get to see my mom very often. I haven’t been to New York, where she lives, in seventeen years. For reasons beyond her control, she missed out on a large chunk of my childhood.
I know she probably feels sometimes like she doesn’t know me very well.
But what she did with those stations proves that she really does know me. She knows exactly what is important in my life. And making those stations allowed her to be a part of my life and be a part of this journey.
