Man at his best, like water,

Serves as he goes along:

Like water he seeks his own level,

the common level of life.

Tao Te Ching

     The first germ of an idea arrived for a birdbath-font when a friend told me that his backyard birdbath had become a battleground for blue jays and robins. Every morning they fought over the freely supplied water. It made me wonder if those birds, just like the Methodists and Baptists, realized they are part of the same family, and if survival of the fittest applies to bathing as well as the food chain. Suddenly the impolite juxtaposition of the sacred and profane appealed to my sick sense of humor. But fruity birdbaths are not in my repertoire. The quest to find a noble birdbath ended when I spied a short, octagonal-shaped birdbath at a junk store. There it sat, a piece of genuine yard art, among its concrete cousins like swans and a droopy St. Francis. But the thing was also a font, by embodying the eight-sided symbol for regeneration and resurrection. Its design was rather nice, very solid and classical, rather sure of itself. So I bought it to be my model, and it sat around musing on my patio for months.
     For the bowl of the birdbath, I needed something about the baptism of Christ. A Piero della Francesca painting came to mind. This mid 1500's painting has a solid, calm, centered presence that echoes the unadorned shape of the birdbath. The painting is quite mysterious—there is an uncanny sense of presence and calm here, yet it feels liminal, as if some struggle is about to start. Art historians say the serene composition is due to Piero's study of mathematics. The picture is chock full of symbolic details—the body of Jesus centers the picture with a luminous grace. He is purely present and independent, and reconciles the two groups of figures in the background, one of which is active, the other still. The S-curved river stops at his feet, hinting of a legend that says the Jordan quit flowing when he was baptized. Sprinkled around are detailed plants, each of which has a medicinal, healing purpose. Some argue that the painting is a parable of the Council of Florence, which convened during Piero’s lifetime as an attempt to reconcile the east and west churches.
     As I learned about the painting’s meaning, and about the baptismal unification formula ("As many of you as were baptized into Christ have clothed yourselves with Christ. There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus." Galatians 3:27-18), the theme of reconciliation slowly became the central to the sculpture. It began to demand the reconciliation of two poems I'd written earlier. One, an angry poem, evoked the image of a buzzard and road kill as a portent against parsing God's love along the lines of sexual preference. Another poem I wrote around the same time, evoked doves and the joyful visitation of the Spirit. It seemed that a skuzzy buzzard would help balance the sappiness of a birdbath with doves. As I was trying to reconcile the two poems into one, out of the blue we have a threat of war with Iraq. The piece had to be about hawks and doves. But would Jesus baptize a hawk?? What does he say about loving our enemies? Are we called as agents of reconciliation for birds, poems, for liberals and conservatives? Predator or pacifist, I guess we are all in the birdbath together (but some of us splash too much).
     I finally began the clay construction. I ran out of time to polish off the rough clay, and made the quick decision to just leave the base as is, to commemorate a verse that popped into my head, "Jesus is the author and finisher of our faith..." (Heb. 12:2)
It was well after the first firing and the underpainting of the Piero that the odd pair of gloves was added to the sculpture. The piece had gone numb, like communities sometimes do. In such cases, it can help to toss something absurd into the mix, and see what gets reconnected. The long white gloves are an image from the first poem, and they became demanding, insisting to be on the birdbath. It was tricky to introduce a wet clay element onto a form already hard and fired, but the technique worked. In the poem the gloves "invite me in" to the illusion of utopia. Nice, but exclusive. Yet the gloves are lovely and gentle and they are placed in a eucharistic gesture, palms up. Perhaps they are like "holy waste", an extravagance that symbolizes the abundance of heart in the face of denial. The "Driveway Visitation" poem offered its berries, which the dove had nibbled on. Are the berries nourishment or a fake lure for birds? Are they holly or pyracantha berries, which make birds drunk? Or perhaps a hint at John the Baptist’s admonition Pharisees and Sadducees coming for baptism to "Bear fruit worthy of repentance." (Matt. 3:8) No doubt about it, the gloves and the berries are incongruous. I am unsure what they mean, but they disrupt the flow of things, as grace does.
     The poems allude to two passages associated with baptism. John the Baptist at Jesus’ baptism invoked the “prepare ye the way” passage from Isaiah 40. "In whom I am well pleased" is heard at Jesus' baptism, his transfiguration, and possibly originates in Isaiah 42:1—the "Servant Song". By placing this passage at baptism, we can be encouraged—God may be well pleased when we are just preparing, when we're "not done yet."

I. Isaiah's Road Kill