I was the Artist in Residence for First Baptist Church, Dayton, Ohio in 2021. As part of that residency, I wrote several essays and did illustrations around Lent, that we posted on the church’s facebook page. I took the theme of Death and Grieving during Lent because I felt like the stories of Lent circle around death and grieving, culminating in the crucifixion and then Easter.

I created illustrations that included Death as a figure, haunting Jesus during that time, or at least lingering in the background. Death also haunts Lazarus, as he escapes Death and returns to his “normal” life. I felt like Death is the antagonist of the Easter story. He is the “Final Boss” to overcome, a fixture of humanity, inevitable, inescapable Death.

I wrote essays about the familiar stories we hear about every Lent, and put them through the lends of death and grieving. The Prodigal Son’s Father is not persuaded by Death that his son is lost. One fig tree is condemned to die; the other is given more care and nurture, and lives. Satan thinks he can use Death as a weapon to prod Jesus during his days in the desert. Also I wrote an essay about all the lost Last Suppers after COVID.

Originally, I just agreed to do one illustration a week, leading up to the Passion Week, and then 7 during Passion. But since then I’ve wanted to complete the set. Do 40 days of Lent with short essays and illustrations. But I hadn’t jumped on that yet.

However, Passion Week of 2024 came around and I felt compelled to do a painting about Jesus coming out to his disciples as the Son of God, something he attempted to do several times, but without the disciples really understanding what that meant.

I came out over Passion Week in 2009 to a Baptist Church in the Yukon. It was a very difficult and grueling week that ended in rejection and in the “death” of my formal ministry at that church. I was their Deacon of Worship at the time. My responsibility was to design and lead worship services once a month (with a few others taking the lead on other Sundays.) I was to lead the Easter Sunday Worship Service that week, but I was stripped of any authority. I came out to my church as an act of love, to let them know what I had realized about myself. I wanted my “family” to know what was happening in my life, and the new freedom and joy that I felt as a gay man. They rejected any interpretation of the scripture or of their faith, their beliefs, that might be inclusive and welcoming and affirming of queer people.

You can read the whole story on my blog, Talking Dog Resources, a site I created for other queer Christians to navigate the research into the Bible, the theology, linking all the resources I could find in 2009, so that others might follow my path and discover the great love of God for them, no matter their gender identity or sexual orientation or practice. There is so much space in the Bible for us. I learned the space is actually vast for interpretations that are NOT exclusive and condemning. The spaces between verses contain all the parts that aren’t talked about in many evangelical churches. But those spaces contain echoes of other verses of love and inclusion, and within the stories we have heard so many times, there is space for us to glimpse the humanity of the gospels, of the disciples, of Christ. Without losing the divinity of Christ or any authority to scripture.

Eastertide

In March of 2024, I created “Jesus Coming Out at the Last Supper”— a combination of the figures from Da Vinci’s Last Supper (their positions, at least the top half of the painting), the events of the Last Supper, and the events of my Last Suppers with many of my church members during 2009 Passion week when I came out during dinners in their homes.

Some wine gets spilled in coming out stories—- they are rarely neat and tidy. At least that wasn’t the case in 2009, and for many LGBTQ folks who came out before me. Today there is still a chance of chaos when people come out to their families—sometimes. It still happens.

The acrylic paintings then are my interpretations of different “sightings” of Jesus after he dies and comes back to life. The joy of Eastertide comes from the many “appearances” of Jesus, often suddenly, sometimes causing fear. These stories are, in a sense, happy ghost stories, as a genre, though Jesus is just as alive as Lazarus was when he came back. But they have all the tropes of ghost stories.

In each, I examine the space between the lines of scripture. The space for the human responses—-the joy, the love, the fear, the warmth that I think just didn’t survive a 2000 year edit:

I believe Mary hugged the gardener (Jesus) despite so many sermons which harp on Jesus telling her on Easter Morning—”don’t hold onto me” when later that evening, he would invite the disciples to touch his wounds.

I believe Jesus visited his Mother Mary, first, but that no one recorded it, because I want to believe he would visit his mom, and I know she’d have kept that private, given all the times the scriptures say about her “and she kept that to herself and pondered it in her heart.”

I show the moment of fear when Jesus steps into a locked room with his disciples to show him his wounds—a moment no other painting I could find shows. I chose to do the story of Emmaus in the style, first, of Mary Englebright. To showcase the positivity of the story, and to use some icons to say something about the two men Jesus met on the road to Emmaus, who shared a house together, and invited him to eat. I also illustrate Emmaus with my friends, Ellen and Delia, and that hospitality that the two from Emmaus showed Jesus. Ellen and Delia were two of the first people I came out to (who were not on a gay dating site, that is) and their warmth and acceptance helped set me up for success two years before I would come out to my church and face the backlash.

I plan on doing at least 4 more acrylic paintings covering the Feast of Fish on the Shore (a diptych), the Ascension, and Pentecost. I have been slowed a bit by illness and a lack of money for canvases.

Perhaps, one day, I can do the 50 days of Eastertide and the 40 days of Lent into an illustrated devotional for the season. Maybe some of those days after Easter would be watercolor illustrations, and some of the days of Lent would be acrylics.

I would do them to open the spaces in the stories for everyone else to come in. I have been able to talk about issues of inclusivity and marginalization and queerness within my essays for a general audience and that would be nice to complete them as a way to look 90 days of struggle and joy in the lives of the people in the Gospel, to kayak alongside us in our 90 days of struggles and joys.

(If you are interested in the originals, please DM me and we can talk more about prices. Buyers should be ready to cover shipping and handling.)

Bear with me as I get new works up.