I am a firm believer in the notion that beauty has always played – and always will play – a large role in saving the world. There’s nothing like colorful paint, expressive words, unique space, or calming music to link our heavily burdened hearts and help us to re-discover hope, optimism, and beauty beneath the surface of our fears and challenges. Creating beauty together in any form can induce feelings of contemplative, quiet peace within, while at the same time inspiring joyful friendship and warm smiles.
In recent years, I have come to enjoy the experience of painting murals at schools and parishes with the help of eager assistants who want to lend their hand at creating beauty, and have fun doing it! Once things get going after I have drawn the outline of the design in black paint or marker, I step away and let the volunteer painters choose their colors and fill in the shapes of this large-scale coloring book on the wall. I like to stay in the background and simply watch the painting evolve and enjoy the show.
A Scene from the Life of St. Joseph
The whole idea of community murals began at a shelter for homeless people called Joseph’s House here in Camden, New Jersey where I live. First, I drew six five-foot square “Scenes from the Life of St. Joseph”, re-imagined in modern-day Camden on the walls of the dorm area where eighty people sleep each night. Thirty-five retreatants from a local parish men’s retreat added the first splashes of color; and over the next several years, Catholic high school and college groups on service trips to Camden stopped by to paint for an hour or so. Gradually, those first paintings were completed and we moved into the dining room for a new series of food-themed Gospel imagery.
The Visitation of Mary and Elizabeth
When I shared the story with a Maryknoll priest friend who lived in Nairobi at the time, he invited me to do a similar thing at an AIDS relief center where he ministered. With the very enthusiastic help of six teenagers on winter break from school, we completed four murals in one week – two more than I had planned ahead of time! “The Visitation of Mary and Elizabeth” was the perfect subject matter for the waiting room in a clinic for pregnant women with HIV. My high school-aged helpers dove in with lots of joyful enthusiasm and even suggested we include the word love – which is “Upendo” in Swahili.
St. Joseph’s Indian School in Chamberlain, South Dakota was the next stop several months later when they invited me to visit as artist-in-residence for one week. Faculty, staff, counselors, and young students all joined in the week-long process and painted the walls of their brand new health and counseling center with a “Triptych of Native American Saints”. In the center we see Mary designed in the shape of a tipi with Jesus in her lap; St. Kateri Tekakwitha who was both Algonquin and Mohawk stands on the left; and Servant of God Nicholas Black Elk, the Lakota evangelizer on his way to sainthood, stands on the right atop Black Elk Peak in the Black Hills of South Dakota.
Triptych of Native American Saints
This visit was personally poignant for me at this time in history as more and more negative light is focused on the horrific treatment of Native North American people, especially children, in the “Christian” boarding schools and other Church-run institutions. Colorful paint and powerful symbols created by a wide variety of volunteers of different ages and cultures provided a gentle way for some ugly truths of the past to be brought into the open – without spoken words – and to move forward in little steps to a more positive, life-affirming future.
Several parishes have invited me in the past few years to design and oversee murals on their walls as well. The parish of St. Francis de Sales in New York City asked me to create a painting in their newly renovated basement hall. Since it was summer, school kids were free to come with their mothers, all of whom lent their hands in illustrating a quote from Servant of God and fellow New Yorker, Dorothy Day – the co-founder of the Catholic Worker movement. The quote reads: “If we could only learn that the only important thing is to love, and to show that love and express that love over and over, whether we feel it or not … not do anything but love, love, love.”
Dorothy Day quote
Since most of the kids were too small to work on the high spots of the main wall, we painted the word “LOVE” in the various native languages spoken by the parishioners: English, Italian, Spanish, French, Tagalog, Swahili, Mandarin Chinese, Portuguese, and Creole! – in reachable spots on the fifteen columns that filled the big open space of that large hall. During one break, some kids even taught the adults how to do the latest popular dance – the name of which I don’t recall because I am not a good dancer!
Another parish, St. John Neumann in Reston, Virginia commissioned a mural for the Religious Education wing of their parish center. I chose a lovely quote from St. Francis de Sales, who loved to highlight the gentle, maternal side of God: “We should hide our littleness in God’s greatness, and stay there like a little bird beneath its mother’s sheltering wings”. It was perfect given the location – where the pre-schoolers pass through every day. The parish specifically asked for the mural to happen during Code Blue week when they open the doors to homeless folks during bitterly cold winter nights. They were welcomed to join the parishioners to help paint.
St. Francis de Sales quote
Once again, people of all ages appeared over the course of three days to paint and chat and catch up with friends. Starting in the morning, through the afternoon with school kids, and into the evening with the parishioners who had been working all day, we painted birds and nests and eggs – and even a little worm resting on a light switch which was painted by a very proud and enthusiastic five-year-old!
There have been other community mural projects over recent years that have also brought me much joy and optimism, three of them in university settings: Hilbert College in Buffalo, New York; the University of Dayton in Ohio; and Viterbo University in LaCrosse, Wisconsin. I have several lined up for the months ahead, one of which is a return to where it all started: at Joseph’s House right here in Camden, New Jersey. Several years ago, due to necessary renovations to the shelter building, some walls had to be torn down – which included the paintings that were on them! It wasn’t a total loss, however, because they were photographed and digitally printed on large canvas panels the same size as the original paintings. And as I told the upset directors and staff: it was perfectly okay because the real JOY is in the journey, not the destination. Just think of all those high school and university students who not only learned about beauty, but actually helped to create it and share it with others who were in desperate need of its healing power. We are all in this together, moving forward with hope and confidence, connected by beauty to the Creator of all Beauty.
Visit Br. Mickey’s website for more about his art, books and other upcoming projects, and follow him on Facebook.
All images courtesy of Br. Mickey McGrath.
