Mae Runions

Not My will but Thine be Done

St. Faith’s Anglican Church, Vancouver, B.C., 1992

This banner was commissioned for Lent by Mary Alice Sutter and Blake Wright in memory of their loved ones.

My reflections in designing the banner focused on the grief of Jesus in Gethsemane. So starkly did the human and divine struggle with this event of cosmic significance: Christ the man was bearing the sins of the world. The overwhelming prospect of such aloneness and abandonment by God and humankind, the sheer terror of this daunting unknown, was suffering beyond human strength.

"Thy rebuke hath broken his heart; he is full of heaviness. He looked for some to have pity on him, but there was no man; neither found he any to comfort him." Ps. 69:20

The 17^th century poet George Herbert expressed it this way:

"...There are two vast spacious things

The which to measure it doth more behove

Yet few there are that sound them: Sin and Love

...Sin is that press and vice which forceth pain

to hunt his cruel food through every vein

...Love is that liquor sweet and most divine

Which my God feels as blood; but I as wine."

There are times when the love of God so astounds me that I know it is all I’ll ever need against earth’s pain, for myself and for my neighbor.