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Emily from Our Town, acrylic on cardboard, 2018
In a 1938 metatheatrical play Our Town by an American novelist and playwright Thornton Wilder, an extremely interesting dialogue be- tween Emily, one of the characters, and the stage manager takes place. Emily returns to earth to relive one day, her twelfth birthday. She watches with joy at being able to see her parents and some of the peo- ple of her childhood. Her joy, however, quickly turns to sorrow when she realizes how little people appreciate the simple joys of life. The memory proves too painful for her, and she turns toward the stage manager and asks: “Do any human beings ever realize life while they live it, every, every minute?” At first, he responds, “No,” but after a moment he adds, “saints and poets, maybe—they do some.”
Myrrhbearer, acrylic on canvas, 2023
A Myrrh Bearing Woman brings her spices to the tomb to honor the body of Jesus, trembling and astonished. And with myrrh, she wants to show that she does not compromise with the body’s decay and that the final purpose of the body is not its decay but life. This treatment of the Lord’s body with myrrh shows us that love and tenderness is the only way to face death. Death hurts love, and love reacts in this way, so it seems that in the end, with the resurrection, love will win and not separation, which death seeks. As we heard in the Gospel passage, the myrrh-bearing women going to the Lord’s tomb were preoccupied with a question: “Who will move the stone for us so that we can anoint the Lord’s body with myrrh?” Somehow, however, they found the stone moved. That the stone was moved tells us that death does not have the final word in history, in the life of the world, but life does, God does—this is the great message of the Lord’s Resurrection.
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