I spent last year teaching ethics at a community college in rural East Tennessee. I divided the semester not chronologically, but philosophically. The first half of the class posed the question, “How should I act?” The second half asked, “How should I be?” The division is one between ethics of conduct and ethics of virtue. Like most ethicists, my students were consumed with a need for a definitive answer as to which approach is the correct one, which is the best to follow.

What I tried my best to explain was that the ethical project is similar to building a house.

There is an ethic that makes up the floor of your house, the ground upon which you walk. Then, there are the ethics that are the walls of your house that protect you from the wind, and those that form your roof and shelter you from the rain. Building this house is a lifelong project shaped by lived experiences as well as the life of the mind.

For me, as the daughter of a Lutheran minister, the ground upon which I walk was built in my father’s confirmation class when I memorized Martin Luther’s Small Catechism. In it, Luther addresses baptism, Holy Communion, prayer, and other aspects of Christian ritual and devotion. He asks question after question about each of the subjects he addresses. In the section on baptism he begins by asking, “What is baptism?” moves through a series of pragmatic questions, then eventually comes to my favorite question, “How can water do such great things?” The answer he provides to the latter question is this: “Certainly not just water, but the word of God in and with the water does these things, along with the faith which trusts this word of God in the water.”

The image of God moving through, in, and with water moved me into another stage of faith.

It was transformative. I emerged from the understanding of God I had as a child, as a long bearded, grey haired, high in the sky old man to a more transcendent understanding of God as being faith and trust transformed in something as ever-present as water. This is the foundation of my house.

The first wall to my house was built by an experience in my sophomore year of high school. I was at home alone one night when the phone rang. On the other end was only incoherent sobbing, then a click. A few minutes later the phone rang again. This time a few details emerged: the infant daughter of a congregant had fallen in a swimming pool and drowned, the family was at the emergency room, and my father was needed.

When he arrived at the hospital the girl’s mother had collapsed, inconsolable in the hospital hallway. The little girl could not be revived. Later than night, when she was alone with the child, her mother brought with her a cup of water, dipped her fingers into it, and made the sign of the cross on the child’s forehead. Later, she said that she wanted to baptize her herself, that as the child’s mother she wanted to anoint her. 

Hearing this story after experiencing a very small part of the chaos of that night shifted my understanding of the sacramental from one limited to Martin Luther’s high German scholasticism to the immediate fluorescence of a hospital hallway.

The way in which I visually imagined God in my mind as I read Scripture, sang hymns, or prayed was transformed.

As a seminarian, I spent two years thinking about where that initial child-like understanding of God as an old man floating impersonally in the sky came from. I didn’t need to look too far, the image was everywhere: in Sunday school lesson books, on posters hanging in church fellowship halls, in children’s Bibles. Out of this exploration of the visual vocabulary of the church came a new, personal mandate: I seek to transform the visual vocabulary of Christian churches through my art.

As I became interested in baptismal certificates, I wanted to create a piece of art that tells stories—of Jesus’s baptism, of his meeting with children, and of the raising of Jairus’s daughter. My grandmother’s baptismal certificate, which is framed in my apartment, is one of the most precious item in my possession. I wanted to make something equally precious for the baptisms that happen in the churches that I serve. The finished product is a simple certificate, with just a few words and a place for witnesses to sign, that can be presented at a baptismal font, or shared in solemnity in the fluorescence of a hospital hallway.

The marriage certificate I created is also simple. It reads only: “This certifies that _____________ and _____________, children of God, have been united in love before God and a great cloud of witnesses.” My understanding of baptism informed the making of the wedding certificate as well. The Supreme Court ruling this summer is an immeasurably important civil rights ruling. But it is not the federal government or a denominational body that makes a marriage holy—it is love, and I wanted this piece of art to reflect that truth.

The “great cloud of witnesses” comes from Hebrews 12:1-2 in which the writer says that because we are surrounded by theses witnesses, the saints of all ages past and to come, we should “run with perseverance the race marked out for us, fixing our eyes on Jesus, the pioneer and perfecter of our faith.”

In referencing Hebrews, I want the certificate to be a reminder that there is a whole cannon of saints standing on the side of a couple in love.

Too often, the voices surrounding a same sex couple are vile, laying claim to a revised history of Christianity. This revised history has written out the voices of saints like Bernard of Clairvaux or Hildegard von Bingen, both of whom used the language of same gendered love to express their personal relationship with Jesus.

The words of the certificate are set within two images, one of Jesus at the Wedding at Cana and the other of Ruth and Naomi. Both images disrupt the hegemonic view of marriage that so many Christian churches claim. The story of Ruth and Naomi is especially important. The words spoken by Ruth to her mother-in-law Naomi are often included in Christian marriage ceremonies: “Wherever you go, I will go; And wherever you live, I will live; Your people shall be my people, and your God, my God.” (Ruth 1: 16). These are holy words that bound two women together in the wake of a famine in the middle of a desert.

Like baptism, marriage is a covenant that happens in the most unlikely of places and is all the more holier for it.

Image via Mary Button