Sullivan - Windows into the soul: art as spiritual expression

I remember well the last time I saw Abbie. She was sitting at a table in the church basement covered in paint from her hands to her elbows. Painting her latest creation in clay, she was the image of eighteen-year-old perfection: blond, glistening hair falling down in curls that made faithless boys believe, a large smile with perfect, white, shimmering teeth, and a passion for life that intoxicated everyone around. She assaulted life with a love that her contemporaries savored and adults admired. She was athletic yet graceful, beautiful yet ordinary. She was heading to college in the fall and she couldn't wait to expand her horizons in God's great world.

That last time I saw her she was so mesmerized by painting that she didn't notice the mess she was making. Paint in her hair, on the table, and all over her clothes, she was in her element. Creating, dreaming, and playing all rolled into one, she was an incredible mass of energy and fire that captured everyone in the room. Others were saying, Look out, Abbie, you're getting paint in your hair, or, Abbie, don't get the glaze on the table. But Abbie just kept going. She was glazing her sculpture and nothing was interfering with her quest to get it just right, to express something deep within, something so many of her friends had already forgotten and which so many adults spend lifetimes trying to capture every now and then. She was catching the creativity of Andy Warhol in color and whim, and the spiritual connectedness of Michelangelo and da Vinci. She was in the basement of a church expressing her deepest thoughts, hopes, and dreams, and she loved it. The person within was finding her way into the world.

One week later on a Friday afternoon, the phone rang. My wife answered and in an instant my world stopped. Even before she spoke, I felt the air in my lungs escaping, the blood in my veins rushing, my eyes swelling with tears. There's been an accident, she said. Abbie was dead. Abbie and her best friend, Molly, had been killed in a freak boating accident. Two girls left school for seniors' day off and died just seventeen years into life. A whole town began to cry.

Everyone who has experienced the unexpected death of a loved one knows the feelings of the next days. Horror mixes with anger, shock blends with fright, and sadness shakes with fear. Floods of tears, nervous chatter, uncontrollable energy, and inexhaustible exhaustion mix together in a horrible combination of gut-wrenching angst.

I was tortured by these feelings. While I let others see my pain and inability to cope with the loss, I didn't let themor even myselfinto my sadness. I was so captured by the grief of others that I didn't take the time to feel my own despair.

For many nights after the girls' deaths I sobbed into my pillow. I knew the tears were bringing me closer to the loss that death inflicts on us but I really had no idea how very depressed I was. I had stuffed the deaths of Abbie and Molly down deep and had expected the loss to lie fallow in the recesses of my soul. But the more I pushed the deaths away, the more intensely the darkness pervaded my soul. I had no idea how, but I knew I had to claw my way out of a growing dark abyss.

For several years, I had sculpted and dabbled in art. I knew that signs, symbols, and metaphors of art could free the soul. Art helped me to explore places within that I had never imagined or acknowledgedcreative places where the person in me burst out in new songs with words and phrases only I knew but with melodies that others seemed to understand. Being creative with art allowed me to let go of inhibitions and embrace a radical love of God's creation and my place in it as a beloved creature.