My Greatest Fear: Being the World’s Most Aware (Abalone)

There is a woman who sits outside of the abortion clinic near my house. She has a sign that says “Abortion Kills Children”. And she sits there all day and shames the people going in and out. She is, in a sense, raising awareness. And her sign is correct. But would her life be better used in taking the awareness she has and applying it by volunteering at a crisis center or adoption/counseling hotline? Eight hours a day on the sidewalk and four more hours a day on her knees, fervently pleading for God to move…when all she has to do is put her sign down and move herself.

Her motives are good – she just got stuck on awareness.

When I moved to South Africa in 2004, I had no idea how severe the AIDS crisis was, not to mention the malaria problem and the starvation issue…and over the next few years the world was educated along with me as we learned about the incredible scope of the problem together. Artists and celebrities began to champion the cause of Africa, we bought shirts that donated the profits to Africa, we signed petitions, we even donated money when American Idol took up the cause…we were aware!

Then, a new movement started to rise up. Ever heard of “going green”? All of the sudden, everything was about being green, going green, and doing green (which may or may not be a drug). Africa resumed its position as the world’s alm-seeker and we moved on, figuring that all of our recently-acquired awareness surely helped make the world a better place for Africans.

Did it? Nope.

Tens of thousands of African children will die today, simply because they are hungry and there is no food. 6000 will die from a preventable, treatable disease caused by a little virus known as HIV. 3000 will die because a mosquito carrying malaria bit them.

This is not about activism. It is merely a plea for activity. We spend 90% of our lives becoming more aware and only 10% in any form of activity. Think about. Crunch the numbers. We are a 90/10 people. We ingest unbelievable amounts of information from books, television, radio, and the internet. We get more and more education every year, the baseline standard ever rising. We join causes on Facebook and wear t-shirts proclaiming that some form of awareness will topple the world's injustices. And we never really lift a finger to change anything.

So where do we go? Maybe, we start by praying differently. What if, instead of saying, “God please meet the needs of world’s broken and dying” we prayed, “God use me to meet the needs of the world’s broken and dying.”

We have all of the awareness we need. We now need to be a people that acts upon it.

On earth as it is in heaven...

Art: Throbbing Hearts

In 1984 Ross Bleckner began a body of work incorporating ghostly semitransparent imagery set against dark, spatially illusionistic fields. Through a proliferation of floating urnlike vessels, trophies, garlands, and flowers, the artist created a morbid fin-de-siècle dream space. The memorial symbols in these works have been widely perceived as a response to the AIDS epidemic and its profound impact on the art world. Bleckner’s subsequent motifs are even more elegiac and directly related to the ravages of AIDS—starry skies; the architecture of basilicas; markings resembling Kaposi’s sarcoma and immunodeficient cells; and a constant suggestion of a glowing, otherworldly light.

Throbbing Hearts maintains the melancholy quality of all Bleckner’s work. The passages of luminous red pigment floating on a silvery gray field suggest the pulsing hearts of the painting’s title. Like other iconic forms in the artist’s work, the heart—traditionally considered the bodily seat of love and faith—is richly evocative. Bleckner’s hearts may be considered metonymic allusions to individual beings. “I have always thought of painting as skin, in a sense holding things back, ’in place,’ existing tensely over that that it represses,” Bleckner said in a 1988 interview. “The painter then X-rays parts that the skin covers and uncovers them. The metaphor is obviously figurative (skin protecting the fragility of that that it conceals) but I want the result to be abstract: it transforms itself in the making from the idea of an organ (like a throbbing close to the chest) into an idea about just throbbing.”

From the Guggenheim Collection.