c. 2008 Religion News Service

MERIDIANVILLE, Ala. _ Artist Berenice Rarig plays with anything at hand. Words. Bones. Coffee filters.

But her husband’s 1863 family Bible?

The Australia-based missionary came across the Bible one day as she was trying to figure out how to start a conversation with fellow students and professors at the Curtin University of Technology in Perth, where she says most consider Christianity as outdated a practice as indigenous rain dances.

Rarig held the old Bible in her hand, its leather cover worn from generations of her husband’s family’s hands, its pages hallowed by supporting 150 years of believers’ prayers. How could she make this book precious to her secular friends? How could she demonstrate the wholeness of her faith?

She opened the Bible to the beginning, where illuminated letters started the first book, Genesis, where God brings order out of chaos.

Her hands grasped the gilt-edge pages.

And pulled.

Rarig still remembers the pain of pulling apart that old Bible. Was that any way for a missionary to act?

The Rarigs are church planters for Mission to the World, an arm of the Presbyterian Church in America. Stephen Rarig has planted churches and helped start a seminary and she, as the daughter of Salvation Army officers, grew up in Australia, England and Jackson, Miss.

Rarig, a doctoral candidate in fine arts, says explaining her own artistic approach to ministry to Christians is sometimes as difficult as explaining the gospel to atheists.

But in both cases, she starts from the same place.

“With love,” she said as she sat in her sister’s kitchen in Meridianville. “I go where they are and start with what they understand.”

Rarig knew her fellow artists would appreciate the value of a family heirloom. And they would understand how much it would cost her to deconstruct it. Rarig determined to turn something that was beautiful in her eyes into something beautiful in theirs.

Rarig tore the book of Genesis into one-inch squares. She wove the squares into scarlet silk fibers, making a 20-foot cloth that floats with words and glows with light.

When she put it into the hands of her professor, the professor, an expert in textiles, spread the cloth with a gentle wonder.

“I would never in a million years open a Bible,” she told Rarig. “But because you have presented it this way, I want to read what is on every square.”

Looking for ways to present the gospel to those who question its validity has deepened Rarig’s own faith. Time and again, she has returned from class to study her Bible and talk to her husband about what they believe. Time and again, either through her conceptual art or her own performance art, she has figured out a way to lovingly turn post-modern philosophy on its head.

One of her performance art characters, Dr. Frieda Puess, takes the nihilism of modernist thought to absurd conclusions. Another, Icara Oubliette, wears a bird cage in her hair peopled with wishbones: a cathedral for one.

She has also displayed an eight-foot tower made of about 50,000 wishbones, and a piece she calls “Emulation: Flightless Human,” a human-sized skeleton constructed of the bones of the flightless emu and perched on a bird’s swing.

In her lecture, Oubliette explains she has figured out how to cheat fate: She pulls a wishbone only with herself. She ignores the fact that she also always gets the losing end as well.

Rarig found herself returning to the gentle curves of a wishbone, the bone of flight for a bird, after attending a mission conference in Atlanta where a young African woman rode an elevator to the 50th floor, and then cast herself over a railing into the atrium below.

The memory of that suicide is behind Rarig’s meditations on the ways human beings attempt unprotected flight.

“I love to plant ideas in people’s heads,” Rarig said. “My own Protestant tradition tends to withdraw from those who have different views and erect walls. But grace, rather than stepping back from those who have differing views, steps toward, and finds ways to include.”

(Kay Campbell writes for The Huntsville Times in Huntsville, Ala.)

KRE/RB END CAMPBELL700 words

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