I saw the face of God the other day.
I was in a stranger’s home, where my new work often takes me, and was taken by an unframed painting hanging in the foyer. After dealing with several matters of business, I could not help but ask.
Me: I hate to pry, but who did that painting?
Proud Mother: My daughter.
Me: It is lovely, very moving, actually.
Proud Mother: That one over there was the first painting she ever did. (She pointed toward the dining room)
I am a father. I have seen the ‘firsts’ of a lot of things. My daughter is a good artist, and her first attempts look just like that: efforts that show promise, but lack the presence of an educated and trained talent. This painting showed nothing, and I mean nothing, of being a first, except the first masterpiece. I then heard how this young artist had never as much as drawn a stick figure (beyond childhood), nor shown any interest in art until her senior year in high school. Her family had moved her to North Carolina from New York the summer before her senior year and she reacted as one might expect. To make matters worse, not only had she been ‘forced’ to leave her friends and classmates, because of the North Carolina educational requirements, she had to take two art classes, one a junior class and the other a sophomore introductory art class. After a brief introduction to the use of canvas and paint, she had responded to her first assignment with a painting, a painting that now held me captive. Her muse had been a photo taken of her cradling her cat. She had decided to paint the self portrait and replace the cat with an infant child.
I wish you could see the work as it is now permanently burned upon the canvas of my mind. I wish I could post a photo of it for you to see. I wish that my ability to write could come even within a universe of describing what I saw hanging on the wall in that home. I wish you could feel the chills running up your skin as I did. I wish that every human could see the wonder and awe of the creative moment that she managed to capture. It is pure beauty. I long to describe what I saw, but alas I cannot. I will simply honor the wonder and miracle of that moment when the efforts of a young woman captured for me and gifted me in that moment of time with a glimpse of the Divine.
I saw the face of God the other day.
