(Cosmic) Surrender

In 2005 I went to visit my mom in Oklahoma and got there to find her in the hospital, with the sudden news that she had only a week or so to live. One night I stayed with her in the hospital all night, and in the morning I got up and left to go to her house. I was using her car, and I knew it was almost out of gas but I was distracted, and I drove the thing until it ran out, just near to my mother's neighborhood. And so I got out and started walking. The sun was just starting to come up, and I was trying to get my head around the reality of this sudden situation. A song by the Flaming Lips was running through my mind, the lyrics of which are "As the dawn began to break I had to surrender. The universe will have its way, too powerful to master."

I can't say that this painting is necessarilly about that specific event, but it is about those moments that I would assume most anyone encounters, when you have to recognize that your own will counts for nothing in some matter, and that there is really nothing to do but surrender. Whether you surrender to God, to nature, or just to the course of events, there are those moments when you realize that the best you can do for yourself and the situation is just to accept, and admit that you are powerless in the situation.

The big female figure here is again my depiction of Sophia, the wisdom or presence of God, that I've used before. In this she has the attributes of a few different Biblical characters. The sword and scales of justice are normally props of the Archangel Michael. The planets around her head are similar to the woman in Revelations who is crowned with seven stars, very likely representing the seven known planets of the time, or the seven heavens. And the cherub that she sits on recalls sections of the Psalms or of Ezekiel where God is pictured as riding on a Cherub.

(Although the ancient Jews had a prohibition against representational artwork the depiction of cherubs was apparently an exception, as scriptures inform us that several of their holy vessels were ornamented with cherubs. While there is no description of the early ideas of what a cherub looked like, archeology suggests that cherubs very much resembled what we would conceive of as a sphinx with wings. They generally acted as guardians and were said to surround the throne of God.)

The little guy at the bottom is waving a white flag in the typical show of surrender.

 

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(Paintings the feature the Sophia character are "The Thunder," "In The Beginning," "O Fortuna," "Crucifixion," and "(Cosmic) Surrender.")