c. 2006 Religion News Service

GRAND RAPIDS, Mich. _ She grew up at the foot of the Sandia Mountains of New Mexico, photographing friends and flowers with a Brownie camera.

“I was very close to the earth, and I loved nature,” recalls Sister Orlanda Leyba, a photographer and Dominican nun. “I was always the one taking pictures of everybody.”

She hasn’t stopped snapping since.

Today, Leyba’s photos of purple coneflowers and waterlilies grace a gallery in the Dominican Center at Marywood here, the historic motherhouse where she took her first vows more than 40 years ago.

Along with two other Dominican sisters whose works are also on display, Leyba considers her art a way to proclaim the power and beauty of God.

“My photography is a sacred thing I do,” says Leyba, 65, a teacher at Divine Child High School in Dearborn, Mich. “I find such connection with God through the lens.”

For Leyba, Sister Jude Bloch and Sister Lucianne Siers, the arts are one way to fulfill their calling as Dominicans, a worldwide community of sisters, priests and brothers known as the Order of Preachers.

“My little designs, I think of them as joyful preaching,” says Bloch, a graphic artist from Grand Rapids. “Art touches the soul, touches the senses, touches things people value like joy, peace, presence. Sometimes the spoken word doesn’t do that.”

The three women are among dozens in the 300-member Grand Rapids Dominican congregation who express their spirituality in painting, sculpture, poetry and music.

The sisters’ works will be on display through the end of February at the gallery. A January conference of sisters from around the country prompted the display featuring their own members, said Sister Nancy Brousseau, director of the Dominican Center.

“It’s just a good time to see how important art and writing is in our preaching ministry,” Brousseau said.

Some sisters are members of the Dominican Institute for the Arts (http://www.diaonline.org), an international association that aims to “encourage the creative efforts of the Holy Spirit in every person.” The group has identified more than 325 Dominican artists, including musicians, actors, weavers and filmmakers.

At annual gatherings, the DIA confers an award of excellence named after Fra Angelico, a Dominican Renaissance painter known for his paintings of Christ’s life and frescoes adorning monastic cells in Florence, Italy.

His example looms large in the history of the Dominican order, founded in 1206 by St. Dominic de Guzman in devotion to prayer, poverty and preaching.

Dominican sisters serve as teachers, health care workers and in social service. They say the arts seamlessly serve the common Dominican mission: “To contemplate and to give to others the fruit of our contemplation.”

“Part of the history of Dominican life isn’t just to pray with words,” said Siers, a sculptor from Brooklyn, N.Y. “It’s the enfleshing of the imagination in our spirituality.”

The Marywood exhibit features Siers’ powerful alabaster sculptures, Leyba’s pastoral photographs and Bloch’s fanciful graphic designs.

All three have other vocations. Bloch is a chaplain at a retirement home and spiritual director at the Dominican Center. Siers directs the Religious Orders Partnership, a justice advocacy organization at the United Nations.

The women say their artworks are central to their ministries.

“It’s preaching through service,” Bloch, 57, said of her graphic designs for nonprofit organizations. Her work includes colorful church bulletins and calendar art.

Then there are the tiny, brightly colored pictures she calls “intestinal drawings or doodles.” The mini-paintings with their playful, squiggly lines often resemble intestines, butterflies, snails or amoebas.

It all stems from seventh grade, when a teacher at her school suggested students do something with their hands while she read to them. Bloch doodled.

She continued to do so at retreats and meetings after entering the Dominican order in 1966. “I’ve been known to doodle through every conference I’m at,” she said with a laugh. “They help me to center and focus.”

Her doodlings distill ideas she is hearing into images that are spiritual, topical or “just fun.”

Siers creates weightier works from chunks of Michigan or Colorado alabaster. Her smooth, graceful sculptures often depict women in various postures _ preaching, holding a baby, dancing _ with names such as “Birthing Mother” and “Reaching the Sky, Mother.”

“For me, it’s the only way I can express something, in stone,” said Siers, 56. “The deepest level I can do is carving it in a rock.”

She carved her anguish after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, which she narrowly escaped by missing a Manhattan subway ride.

“The next day, it was the only way I could deal with my emotions,” she said of her sculpture. “It was my image of people pulling bodies out of the rubble, with the deepest compassion.”

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For Leyba, faith finds form in delicately detailed photographs.

She zooms in on the purple gills of a mushroom or the breathtaking beauty of a white cactus flower that blooms but one day a year. The latter sits on her windowsill in Inkster, home base for her life of teaching high schoolers and preaching through her digital Canon camera.

“It has been my way of finding the sacredness of nature and sharing that with others,” Leyba said. “Everywhere I go I will take a second look at something and find the beauty in that.”

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That includes pictures of trips to Detroit soup kitchens, where she takes students to volunteer three times a week.

She has been relishing nature’s beauty since she was a child in the village of Penasco, N.M. She had no thought of becoming a nun until college, when the idea came to her “out of a clear blue sky.”

Having been taught by Dominican sisters in grade school, she followed the thought to Grand Rapids and took her first vows in 1963. She takes a camera wherever she goes, often capturing close-ups of creation’s most intimate details.

“You see the awesomeness of God in a dandelion,” she says. “You get up close and see the million variations and distinctions. It’s like God is in them.”

In a flower or a butterfly, she sees God staring at her _ and aims to reveal it in her photos.

“Hopefully,” she said, “people can see some of what I see and (that will) lead them to the grandeur of God.”

(Charles Honey writes for the Grand Rapids Press in Grand Rapids, Mich.)

KRE/PH END HONEY