Love is the Movement and Valentine's Day

This was the first project I did in my college Ceramics 1 class. They were very time consuming. First I had to create the plates with a series of slabs (they aren't just flat pieces as they appear to be in these photos) using slip to attach all the pieces together. That was the easy part! The stencil was exponentially more frustrating/tedious/exhausting. After the basic plates were assembled I covered two of the plates with white slip and two with black slip (slip, also known as under glaze is basically colored clay.) Then I creating four identical star stencils and picked four basic colors. I was a little limited in my options but ended up with mostly primary colors. (Did you know that there are actually two sets of primary colors? The one we usually think about is for subtractive color combinations like mixing paint. Those are red, blue, and yellow. There's also additive color combinations like projected light which is red, blue, and green! So combining these together, I used all primary colors. :D) I proceeded to paint the stars on, warm colors on white, cool on black, trim where some of the glaze escaped under the stencil, repaint whatever background color was on if I scrapped too much off. Then came the Love is the Movement stencil. It too me so many hours to do those. Hours and hours and hours hunched over these four plates in the basement of the art department. Then came the first firing. It turned out that our white glaze was incredibly finicky and I ended up touching up all the glaze and refiring all of them several more times. I finally got to putting the over glaze on them, and refiring them several more times. The day came when my friend Tim came up to me with a grave face and led me into the kiln room. My blue plate had been fired too many times and a whole corner had broken off in the corner. I cried. I had spent so much time on these and then it had broken! But I persevered with the others and couldn't bring myself to throw out my broken plate. Finally I just had a couple spots on my yellow plates I wanted to touch up. So I did it and placed it into the bottom of the kiln. Well one of the seniors was working on large egg or stone shaped ceramic creations for her senior show and placed a very large one in the kiln. During the process of firing it exploded, covering my plate with broken fragments that stuck in the over glaze and stayed there. It was tragic. But all that to say, I think these plates have a lot more to them then just how much time was put into them and what all was done to make them look the way they do.

So there was the story about how these plates came into being and now I want to talk a little bit about the slogan, where it came from, and it's importance in current events. This is one of the slogans of the non profit organization To Write Love On Her Arms also known as TWLOHA. They raise awareness and provide help for people struggling with depression, self-abuse, addiction, and suicide. Here is a link to their webpage that explains what they do and where they come from: http://www.twloha.com/vision/ . As someone who has struggled with depression myself and watched people around me deal with self-abuse issues I am really passionate about what these people do. But the words Love is the Movement have a much broader application than just the slogan for an organization.

Today is Valentine's Day, right? Never been my favorite day. Well, not since you were required to bring a small paper valentine for everyone in your class and you made a cute little box to collect them all in. Since then I either passively rebel or just ignore Valentine's Day. So much so that I forgot about it probably a good six times yesterday, was reminded and promptly forgot again. I woke up this morning and it took me awhile to remember why there were hearts scattered all about my floor. I think mostly my rebellion is against the pretty standard idea that Valentine's Day is for couples only. Couples by no means have a monopoly of love. So why should they be the only one's to celebrate love? Single people: I can guarantee that there is someone out there that loves you. Family, friends, your roommate, your dog, and above all others, God. Let's start a movement where no person feels left out on Valentine's Day!

Finally, I think my community at Wheaton College could take this to heart, especially after the events that transpired during chapel this past Friday. There were a variety of at the very least insensitive and at the worst amazingly hurtful and racist comments made through Twitter. At Wheaton we try to hard to be perfect. Perfect grades, perfect appearance, perfect relationship with the person you ARE going to marry and have a perfect family with. If we have issues we try and suppress them and deal with them privately. I feel like this isn't a very Christian way to live our lives. We are sinful people. We all screw up. Denying this and trying to hide it is a lie. Things fester under the surface until they explode like with what happened on Friday. I think we need to respond to this incident with love. Love for those who were hurt, but also love for those who made the hurtful comments. If we responded with love we could be a much more authentic and welcoming community.

All of these plates are imperfect. Two of them are very messed up, one is broken, one is irreversibly dirty but after a year of reflecting on these plates, I can see the beauty in them. I have learned how to love them for what they are, and I think this is a lesson that can be applied to everything. Whether it's your single friend on Valentine's Day, people who are hurting, people whose culture or skin color differs from you, someone who have a different view of sexuality than you, or people who might have different theological doctrine than you, we can love them.

"Above all, keep loving one another earnestly, since love covers a multitude of sins." - 1 Peter 4:8

Love is the Movement.