Art

Maundy Thursday

April 1, 2021 - By Natalie Buske Thomas

Another Lenten season ends. As we head toward Easter weekend, my blog will feature Easter related oil paintings and short videos of live music events. On Monday, I’ll pick up where we left off in the blog series “Stories that Inspire my Art“.

In recognition of Maundy Thursday, the above oil painting features the feast from my larger painting “Jesus at the Table“. Below, my kids and I are singing with the church choir “The Feast Divine”. My oldest daughter and I were the entire soprano section. As you can see, this is a very small church choir.

In the above song “The Feast Divine”, the lyrics that speak to me the most are about the bread of humility and the cup of nobility… one and the same. There are no class divisions in spiritual enlightenment. Powerful statements about class division are just as relevant today as long ago. I’m also moved by the phrase “Christ Himself, sacrificed”.

Before I wrap this blog post up… a little something bizarre to share…

Those of you who’ve followed me for a while know that I share literally hundreds of videos. I clip them to fit short time lengths on a regular basis… sometimes daily. Weird unexplained ghosting or stray images that have been cut (split/spliced and edited out/deleted from the file) seldom pop up. I can probably think of only a couple of times this has happened in the past decade, meaning thousands of clips (because I’m counting my personal family videos as well). Anyway, so this is rare…

I edited this oil painting video (at top of blog post) to start with the feast, but somehow a fraction of a second, a deleted clip of Jesus appears! Well… serendipitous, a minor tech miracle… whatever we want to make of it, that’s what happened! If you look closely, you’ll see Him appear as a very fast blip before the video starts.

These things (that come to each of us in different forms) can be explained away as coincidence, but I prefer to think of them as “God winks” (not my phrase, someone told me this a long time ago). Just one of those strange things that happen, that give us pause… dare we hope that a divine presence cares about our trivial little lives? Yes, let us dare!