Update from the Bronx!

Just to update my readers on what I've been up to...I've become a missionary with LAMP Ministries. I'm committed for a year but if I/ we discern that I'm called to stay longer I could- you commit a year at a time. LAMP Ministries serves the materially poor in the NYC area, with a focus on evangelization.

I am very blessed for God to have been brought me here, it's good to see God providing for me seeing as how this past year I really didn't know what I was going to be doing after college. I came across LAMP in my research toward the very end of this past school year. I think God sort of likes to not let me know exactly what is going on until I really need to know in order to keep me dependent on Him. I've been reflecting on God's love for the poor before coming here and as I've been here...and I've come to somewhat of a better understanding of it. God is drawn toward the poor because they naturally tend to be more aware of their own need. We are all poor before God; we are all totally dependent on Him for all we have and all we are. It is to those who are aware of their need- those who are humble-those who are under no illusion that they have it all together by their own power- who are able to receive God. I'll write more about this later I'm sure but I just wanted to mention it here to tie it into an increased awareness I've been gaining of my own poverty and my dependence on God. In my poverty I don't understand exactly where my life is going or where God is taking me, which forces me to hold on tight and trust that he knows my needs better than even I do and desires to provide for me all I need. Even when I think back to where Christ revealed Himself to me in a deeper way, it was when I was broken down and deeply conscious of my own need for love, and longing for this love- that I found Christ providing His very self to satisfy my need. And then during times when I was at my weakest- when I was most conscious of my poverty and need, it was then that Christ most tangibly became my strength. A big thing with LAMP is being with the poor, in realizing that we too, though we are not materially poor, are all poor before the LORD. It is this posture of being with that helps us to relate to the materially poor as our brothers and sisters.

I'm enjoying being in New York City. The female missionaries I live with and myself were invited over for dinner last night at our pastor's rectory. Father is from Nigeria and I asked him how he ended up in New York. He got into it and was explaining how he wanted to come to New York City because "that's where all the action is!"

Please pray for me as I continue to get settled into this phase of my life.

Pope Benedict on God & Art

This was posted today on youtube:

Sister Maximilian Marie Garretson on Authentic Catholic Womanhood

Holiness= being your integral self.

As I have been discerning I feel God has been trying to communicate to me that what He desires is for me to be true to who I am. Sounds simple enough, right? But in reality it has been quite a challenge...and He's still breaking me down and planting a desire within my heart to be possessed by Him entirely. Holiness will happen when I let my desire for intimacy with Christ trump my desire to be in control. Controlling and manipulating God doesn't work, so why try? But part of me is still stubbornly trying to control, part of me is holding back from surrendering entirely to Him. Part of me doesn't trust God, part of me doesn't trust that His will for my life will satisfy my desires. I pray that God will win me over more and more and reveal to me more deeply how He is worthy of trust, that He is after all "for" me.

Danielle Rose is beautiful. This song really communicates the wisdom she has aquired, surely through her own wrestling with God, that holiness- intimacy with God- is about being fully alive in your own skin.

Marians of the Immaculate on the MoEs

Follow this link to read an article about the Missionaries of the Eucharist posted on the website of the Marians of the Immaculate. The Marians of the Immaculate promote the Divine Mercy message and devotion. It was a highlight of our walk to visit them at the Divine Mercy shrine in Stockbridge, MA.

2011 Walkers

Here's an introductory video of 6 of the 8 people I walked around New England this summer with sharing the beauty of the Faith.

Seeking the Image of God in the Human Person

(Originally posted on the blog of the Missionaries of the Eucharist)

A special aspect of the time that I've spent with the Missionaries of the Eucharist is being able to share in the lives of many different people, even if only for a short time.  Here are some sketches from life of some of the people I have been able to spend time with.  Some of them are fellow missionaries, some of them friends of the missionaries- members of host families and others who have spent time with us.  I feel that a special privilege I have as an artist is that when I am able spend time with someone through drawing them, it is a unique opportunity to reflect on the dignity and beauty of the human person and seek to perceive the image of God in people.

Blessed John Paul II's Theology of the Body has really had an impact on me as an artist.  Pope John Paul II really emphasizes in his teaching that the person, made in the image of God, is revealed through the body and therefore the human body communicates into the visible world the mystery of God more powerfully than anything else in the created order.  In his General Audience of February 20th he stated that:

The body, and it alone, is capable of making visible what is invisible: the spiritual and the divine. It was created to transfer into the visible reality of the world the mystery hidden since time immemorial in God, and thus be a sign of it.

 Along these lines, in his Letter to Artists Pope John Paul II writes that "Art must make perceptible, and as far as possible attractive, the world of the spirit, of the invisible, of God."

For this reason I feel it my responsibility and privilege as an artist to go deeper into the mystery of the human person, whose spiritual mystery is expressed visibly through the body.  For going deeper into the subject of the mystery of the human person one reflects on the mystery of God.

-Shana