Psalm 31:9-16

“Art is wound turned into light.”  —Braque

Abandonment, affliction, suffering, sorrow, grief, guilt, desolation, despair, depression. To be a human being is to be vulnerable at times to the anguish of one or more of these states of being. For some people, myself included, a limited number of days and nights have held the extremity of these feelings. For many others, the cry uttered in this Psalm is a near-permanent condition.

The sufferers of these emotional states express a language of soul that becomes a repeated theme when one views images of this extremity of anguish. We “hear” the cry, though it makes no sound. The hands placed over the face speaks of the condition of an interior wound that agonizingly communicates the feeling of being cast off, adrift, alone, with no Other from whom to draw comfort. The Psalmist cries from these depths, and centuries of readers have felt in these words the reverberations of their own laments.

In the same way that the Psalmist renders a “telling” of the truth in Psalm 31, I also chose to arrange the expressions and images in a way that I find to be healing and meaningful. By repetition and arrangement of the images around a central motif, this mandala seeks to transform the experience of an “eye wasted away from grief” into a place where the soul can be brought to rest in the central image of the uplifted hands. I offer this mandala to all who have felt the keen wound of loss. Essentially, this composition is an attempt toward a visual expression that echoes the complaint, the form, and ultimately the praise of this Psalm.

                                                                                 —Rachelle Oppenhuizen

Numbers 21:4-9

—Lori Van Doornik