The Spiritual Mechanics of Labor and Rest (Black and White)

Description

Black and White,  #’s 1-75

The Spiritual Mechanics of Labor and Rest, is a handmade and hand printed linocut edition of 100 impressions from 2020. The image is 15″ x 24″ and is printed on archival paper, Zerkall Book Smooth 145 GSM, made in Germany and torn to size, 18″ x 27″. Numbers 1- 75 of the edition are printed with black ink on white paper, while numbers 76 – 100 will be printed with sepia ( dark brown) ink on cream colored paper. Here is a link to them.  

The Spiritual Mechanics... began as a way of building a repository or archive for many of the symbols that help me to understand my place and function in the world and the Kingdom of Heaven. It is, after a fashion, an info-graphic which serves a developing theology around the ancient kinship of labor to worship.

At the heart is a worldview which sees an holistic unity between what is spiritual and what is natural.  This is a crude image which is looking towards something that is deep and nuanced in its beauty and inherent goodness within the mind of God.  It is an echo of God saying of the earth and creation, “It is good.”  It is an echo of the Words of the Creator resident in every atom or particle in the universe.  It is an echo of John the Baptist saying, “change your hearts and minds, because the Kingdom of Heaven is at hand!”  It is an echo of Jesus saying “It is finished” on the cross.  Heaven is coming to earth and our labor here is not in vain.

The Spiritual Mechanics of Labor and Rest is also a prayer and an offering.  It is the noise my heart makes towards God, offering the smallest and most mundane moments of my days as He simultaneously offers them to me.  It both seeks to say and asks if it’s really true that labor spent shoveling dirt in a garden, roofing a house, or cutting a stone before God can be as significant a spiritual lever as the most noble words of the priest in the cathedral, or the pastor behind a pulpit, or the hands of the healer in a tent.