Redemption

When I was a girl, my grandparents had a studio. The batiks my grandmommy had made hung there, and there a darkroom for developing film, and there was a pottery wheel and a small kiln. My granddaddy was over six feet tall, and I think the wheel stood as tall as me. I remember climbing into the metal seat. I'm pretty sure the pedal was on the ground. I want to remember that he pressed the pedal while I worked with the clay, but I don't have any real memory of that. I may have just clambered around on it, enjoying being tall for once.

My grandparents had all kinds of pottery in their house: raku vases and wood fired plates and platters, and an assortment of mugs and small drinking cups, too. I soon learned the joy of wandering through galleries and pottery shows and admiring the array of shapes, textures and glazes.

So this summer when I had the opportunity to take a beginner's pottery class at the community college, I signed up.

You start with a round ball of clay that hasn't been worked too much already and then you have a choice. You can hand build piece, or you can go to a wheel.

Working at a wheel means you have to center the clay on the wheel. Experienced potters make centering the clay look easy. It's not. A variance of a fraction of an inch will start the clay vibrating and, unless you can force it into submission, at some point, you just have to scrape it off and put it in the scrap bag where it can be rolled into a new ball later.

The same thing happens in quilting when you think no one will notice that 1/8 of an inch variance in your pieces and then your flying geese have their wings clipped when they're pieced. Or in knitting when you neglect to knit up a swatch and wind up with a sweater too big, or too small. The first lesson is do the work! There are no shortcuts. (That said, there are kind instructors who center your clay so you can create something that day!)

My first completed piece had a very wobbly edge and a belly, but my second piece had a nice lip. I took what I made and wrapped it in light plastic sheeting and left it on a shelf after the first class.

Then it was time to unwrap the piece and use my tools to trim and sand the piece and sign it. My great-aunt used to sign her pieces "Mary Clio" in script but I decided "Christina" was too many letters and chose to sign my first and last initials.

I made two more pieces. The one on the right had very thick walls but the fourth began to look like something.

When I came back the next week the pieces had gone through a bisque firing that makes the pieces porous and ready for glaze. That's when your imagination gets to work because none of the glazes look the way they will when they have been fired. You have an idea from other finished pieces but the color of the clay and whether you layer the glazes will affect the end result. With no small amount of trepidation, I glazed my pieces and crossed my fingers.

Then I witnessed something incredible. All of the faults in those pieces were erased in that second firing and the pieces were transformed! They were real and they were beautiful.

These were no longer balls of clay, untouched and lacking shape or depth. They were no longer merely a beginner's clumsy attempts.  The wobbly edge on my first piece became wave like. The second piece may hold the ashes from the palms burned for Ash Wednesday next year. The bowl with the thick walls has a nearly even stripe around it and the last bowl glistens under its solid black glaze. Looking at these pieces at any point in time in their creation, I never imagined what they would become. It was beyond my understanding to know.

One of my daughters tells me I always bring the conversation back to God talk, and I'll plead guilty, but seeing these pieces reminded me how little I know about the reach of God's activity in our world; it is beyond my understanding too.And yet, I'm invited into life, to try and stumble and try again, confident God will bring redemption and transformation.