 This piece is part of the 2017 Exquisite Corpse Games http://exquisitecorpsegames.com, a blind artistic collaboration, in which each artist was randomly assigned the creation of a head, torso, or legs. The assembled pieces were unveiled at the Museum of Fine Arts in St. Pete, FL on Nov 2, 2018.
My piece, True Self, is the torso portion of the completed work. It was inspired by a quote by C.S. Lewis: What I call my ‘self’ now is hardly a person at all. It’s mainly a meeting place for various natural forces, desires and fears, etc., some of which come from my ancestors, and some from my education, some perhaps from devils. The self you were really intended to be is something that lives not from nature but from God.
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 O be still while
You are still alive, And all things live around you speaking (I do not hear) To your own being, Speaking by the Unknown That is in you and in themselves. -Thomas Merton  Cast all your cares on Him, because He cares for you.
-1 Peter 5:7  My frame was not hidden from You when I was made in the secret place,
When I was woven in the depths of the earth, Your eyes saw my unformed body; All the days ordained for me were written in Your book Before one of them came to be. Psalm 139:15-16  Compassion asks to go where it hurts, to enter into the places of pain, to share in brokenness, fear, confusion, and anguish. Compassion challenges us to cry out with those in misery, to mourn with those who are lonely, to weep with those in tears. Compassion requires us to be weak with the weak, vulnerable with the vulnerable, and powerless with the powerless. Compassion means full immersion in the condition of being human.
-Henri Nouwen  I sit in darkness. I sit in human silence.
I begin to hear the eloquent night. The world of this night resounds from heaven to hell with animal eloquence, with the savage innocence of a million unknown creatures. The enormous vitality of their music pounds and rings and throbs and echoes until it gets into everything, and swamps the whole world in its neutral madness. -Thomas Merton  My body's now a begging bowl
That's begging to get back begging to get back To my heart To the rhythm of my soul To the rhythm of my unconsciousness To the rhythm that yearns To be released from control. -U2, Moment of Surrender  Show me where it hurts, God said, and every cell in my body burst into tears before His tender eyes.
-Rabia of Basra  Now is the time to meet You, God,
Where the night is wonderful, Where the forest opens out under the moon And the living things sing terribly that only the present is eternal. -Thomas Merton  Each breath I drew let into me new terror, joy, overpowering sweetness. I was pierced through and through with the arrows of it. I was being unmade. I was no one.
-C.S. Lewis, Till We Have Faces  There in the ground His body lay, light of the world by darkness slain;
Then bursting forth in glorious day, up from the grave He rose again. And as He stands in victory, sin's curse has lost its grip on me. For I am His and He is mine, bought with the precious blood of Christ. -Keith Getty & Stewart Townend, In Christ Alone  There in the ground His body lay, light of the world by darkness slain;
Then bursting forth in Glorious Day, up from the grave He rose again. And as He stands in victory, sin's curse has lost its grip on me. For I am His and He is mine, bought with the precious blood of Christ. -Keith Getty & Stuart Townend, In Christ Alone  This is the difficult road of conversion, the conversion from loneliness into solitude. Instead of running away from our loneliness and trying to forget or sent it, we have to protect stand turn it into a fruitful solitude. To live a spiritual life we must first find the courage to enter into the desert of our loneliness and to change it by gentle and persistent efforts into a garden of solitude. -Henri Nouwen, Seeds of Hope  When the white stars talk together like sisters
And when the winter hills Raise their grand semblance in the freezing night, Somewhere one window Bleeds like the brown eye of an open force. Hills, stars White stars that stand above the eastern stable. Look down and offer Him. The dim adoring light of your belief. Whose small Heart bleeds with infinite fire. Shall not this Child (when we shall hear the bells of His amazing voice) conquer the winter of our hateful century? And when His Lady Mother leans upon the crib, Lo, with what rapiers Those two loves fence and flame their brilliancy! Here in this straw lie planned the fires That will melt all our sufferings: He is our Lamb, our Holocaust! And one by one the shepherds, with their snowy feet, Stamp and shake out their hats upon the stable dirt, And one by one kneel down to look upon their Life. -Thomas Merton, A Christmas Card  While you walk the water’s edge, turning over concepts I can’t envision, the honking buoy serves notice that at any time the wind may change, the reef-bell clatters its treble monotone, deaf as Cassandra to any note but warning. The ocean, cumbered by no business more urgent than keeping open old accounts that never balanced, goes on shuffling its millenniums of quartz, granite, and basalt. It behaves toward the permutations of novelty-- driftwood and shipwreck, last night’s beer cans, spilt oil, the coughed-up residue of plastic—with random impartiality, playing catch or tag or touch-last like a terrier, turning the same thing over and over, over and over. For the ocean, nothing is beneath consideration. The houses of so many mussels and periwinkles have been abandoned here, it’s hopeless to know which to salvage. Instead I keep a lookout for beach glass— amber of Budweiser, chrysoprase of Almadén and Gallo, lapis by way of (no getting around it, I’m afraid) Phillips’ Milk of Magnesia, with now and then a rare translucent turquoise or blurred amethyst of no known origin. The process goes on forever: they came from sand, they go back to gravel, along with the treasuries of Murano, the buttressed astonishments of Chartres, which even now are readying for being turned over and over as gravely and gradually as an intellect engaged in the hazardous redefinition of structures no one has yet looked at. -Amy Clampitt, Beach Glass  Christ has no body now on earth but yours, no hands but yours, no feet but yours. Yours are the eyes through which is to look out Christ's compassion to the world; Yours are the feet with which He is to go about doing good; Yours are the hands with which He is to bless men now. -Teresa of Avila, Christ Has No Body  You, all-accomplishing Word of the Father
are the light of the primordial daybreak over the spheres. You, the foreknowing mind of divinity, foresaw all your works as You willed them, Your prescience hidden in the heart of your power, Your power like a wheel around the world, whose circling never began and never slides to an end. -Hildegard of Bingen  In these bodies we will live,
In these bodies we will die Where you invest your love You invest your life Awake my soul..... Awake my soul..... Awake my soul..... For you were made to meet your Maker. -Mumford & Sons, Awake My Soul  My body is a cage
We take what we're given Just because you've forgotten Doesn't mean you're forgiven I'm living in an age That screams my name at night But when I get to the doorway There's no one in sight Set my spirit free Set my spirit free Set my body free -Arcade Fire, My Body is a Cage  Just these two words He spoke changed my life,
"Enjoy Me." What a burden I thought I was to carry - a crucifix, as did He. Love once said to me, "I know a song, would you like to hear it?" And laughter came from every brick in the street and every pore in the sky. After a night of prayer, He changed my life when He sang, "Enjoy Me." -St. Teresa of Avila  Ashes of paper, ashes of a world Wandering, when fire is done: We argue with the drops of rain! Until One comes Who walks unseen Even in elements we have destroyed. Deeper than any nerve He enters flesh and bone. Planting His truth, He puts our substance on. Air, earth and rain rework the frame that fire has ruined. What was dead is waiting for His Flame. Sparks of His Spirit spend their seeds & hide To grow like irises, born before summertime. -Thomas Merton  In all those dark moments, of God,
grant that I may understand that it is You who are painfully parting the fibers of my being in order to penetrate to the very marrow of my substance. -Pierre Tielhard de Chardin  Although I can see him still -
The freckled man who goes To a gray place on a hill In gray Connemara clothes At dawn to cast his flies - It's long since I began To call up to the eyes This wise and simple man. All day I'd looked in the face What I had hoped it would be To write for my own race And the reality: The living men that I hate, The dead man that I loved, The craven man in his seat, The insolent unreproved - And no knave brought to book Who has won a drunken cheer - The witty man and his joke Aimed at the commonest ear, The clever man who cries The catch cries of the clown, The beating down of the wise And great Art beaten down. Maybe a twelve-month since Suddenly I began, In scorn of this audience, Imagining a man, And his sun-freckled face And gray Connemara cloth Climbing up to a place Where stone is dark with froth, And the down turn of his wrist When the flies drop in the stream - And man who does not exist, A man who is but a dream; And cried, "Before I am old I shall have written him one Poem maybe as cold And passionate as the dawn." -William Butler Yeats  I am, you anxious one. Do you not hear me
rush to claim you with each eager sense? Now my feelings have found wings, and, circling, Whitely fly about your countenance. Here my spirit in its dress of stillness stands before you -oh do you not see? In your glance does not my Maytime prayer grow to ripeness as upon a tree? Dreamer, it is I who an your dream. But would you awake, I am your will, and master of all splendor, and I grow to a sphere, like stars poised high and still, with time's singular city stretched below. -Ranier Maria Rilke |
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