Faces of God (A Long-Expected Chapbook)
In 2016, the nomination of Donald Trump to be the Republican Party's candidate for president rocked my world. I was a young 20-something who had been active in a very Christian sphere of conservative politics for several years. In my world, Donald Trump was a walking symbol of godless arrogance, immorality, misogyny, and conspicuous consumption. Seeing his brand of openly cruel and dishonest politics embraced by my community was a shock to my system, and one that opened me up to think critically and to ask questions I wouldn't have dared to ask only a few months before. As is the case for many of my other raised-Christian friends, Trump's takeover of the GOP became my ticket out of a religious framework that often spurned intellectual honesty, used fear to induce rigid doctrinal conformity, and undermined the full personhood of women at every turn.Although that process is more or less complete for me now and is no longer the biggest thing in any of my days, I try not to forget the long loneliness of that untangling period during which there were so few people I felt I could speak to openly about what was really happening in the rich internal life of my mind. I want to remember those days because I want to be the kind of person others passing through a similar experience will feel they can talk to.
In those days, I turned often to the arts as a medium by which to process and to express my thoughts. I wrote and published many poems, taught numerous poetry workshops, and explored certain themes repeatedly in illustration work. But perhaps the biggest project I tackled in this vein was a collection of ten illustrated poems I call the "Faces of God."
You see, when it comes right down to it, I have come to believe that the way humans talk about, think about, and imagine the divine has far-reaching social consequences that directly affect the lives and the legal rights of the less-powerful in our communities. Put differently: what we enshrine as the ultimate good shapes our choices, our values, and our relationships with our neighbors. For me personally, emancipation from a dehumanizing theology that mimics our planet’s unholy hierarchies required some different lenses through which to imagine God. The poems and paintings in the "Faces of God" collection are just a few of the lenses that helped me to grow out of a theology that was slowly destroying me.
Earlier this year, thanks to the financial support extended by my patrons over on Patreon, I was finally able to gather these pieces into a hard copy collection. "Faces of God" is a 28-page professionally-printed full-color chapbook with a brief foreword and some author's notes. It was first made available to my patrons as a component of their subscription, but I am having some extra copies printed up for others to enjoy and you can find them here.
Thanks for reading my thoughts, friends, and for all the kind messages, support, and love that keep me creating.
All the best,
Bryana
All the best,
Bryana