We Rise

8”x10”

2020

Hand carved on linoleum block and hand printed, created as cover art for the Catholic Agitator.

Excerpt from October 2020 Los Angeles Catholic Agitator

“In Search of Good News”

“And while we must identify, face, challenge, and resist the systems that create disparities, so too must we find the “Good News” that surrounds us, the hope and potential in our world. But more than just celebrating, we must join the efforts to dream of a different way forward. We are called to reimagine altogether, to create what we yearn for out of what we have, to articulate the world that we demand for ourselves and others.

This envisioning requires honesty, community, inspiration, commitment, transformation, healing, patience, and hard work; but oh how wonderful that world will be! Despite our understandable exhaustion and overwhelmedness, we must remain focused and steadfast if we desire to manifest better, more sustainable, and more beautiful fruit in the future. In truth, moments of crisis often reveal our individual and societal capacity for transformation.

So, what do we need to cultivate? What do we want to bring along?

As the artwork demonstrates, we get to write a new story together, one that looks to the joys, the reasons for hope - no matter how small - that we see around us. A new story is being written from the ashes and flames. The city, the people, the mountains and plants stretch from the earth, the fishes and the birds rising: the Good News of the Gospel, of liberation, of change continuously enfleshed around us. We take our daily bread, harvested and baked by the hands of many, as our nourishment for the journey, and hold each other - lovingly, compassionately, and in accountability - as we seek to resist anything that inhibits liberation.

The needle and thread under the skyline represent the culture that's being woven. The artists and weavers and potters and musicians, the young and the old, who are creating revolution and putting love into action and dancing along the way. Sometimes it feels hard to maintain hope when we feel crushed by all of the devastation, but hope is necessary for our survival. We keep rising despite the storms.

Maya Angelou reminds us: "You may trod me in the very dirt but still, like dust, I'll rise." Though our world continues to harm so many, we unequivocally affirm the many truths of our faith: the poor will inherit the earth, the last shall most surely be first, Black lives matter! We believe the arc of the moral universe does in fact bend towards justice, if we make it, claim it, live it. And thanks to those courageously building the better world for all of us, one brick at a time, we shall overcome.”

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