Talitha Koum
By Hillary Mast
On March 27, Pope Francis delivered his extraordinary “urbi et orbi” message, proclaiming the hope of Jesus Christ and extending his blessing to the city of Rome and the whole world.
Overlooking an empty St. Peter’s Square, he said, “Embracing his cross means finding the courage to embrace all the hardships of the present time, abandoning for a moment our eagerness for power and possessions in order to make room for the creativity that only the Spirit is capable of inspiring.”
Many, if not most, of us in the Catholic Creatives community are facing hardships that we have never before encountered: being at stuck at home for weeks on end, loss of income, worrying about the possibility of contracting a novel coronavirus or unknowingly passing it to someone else—and most difficult, being unable to receive the sacraments regularly.
For Amy Heyse, a Catholic watercolor artist and art instructor in Ft. Collins, CO, this time has provided an opportunity to revisit a painting that was born out of a difficult time in her life.
Creating has long been a way to process what’s going on in her personal and prayer life, especially since becoming a mother. After she had her oldest daughter, now five, a therapist recommended she try to find time to pursue her interests.
Admittedly, finding time to dive into that creative process looked a lot different for Heyse when she became a wife and mother than when she was studying fine art and art education at Colorado State University. Back then, she could devote three or four hours of work to one project at a time. Now she’s lucky if she can manage 15 or 30 minutes.
“I know for me the act of painting and working on these paintings, which usually have to do with what I'm trying to work through in my prayer life, is just kind of a way for me to physically process what's going on in here,” she said.
Heyse recently posted a picture of her work in progress “Talitha Koum” using Catholic Creatives’ #throughfire tag, an invitation for creatives to digitally showcase projects taking shape while many of us stay at home under the looming cloud of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Talitha Koum by Amy Heyse
The watercolor painting features a bird’s eye view of a young woman in a red floral dress lying on a carpet of brilliant green foliage, her eyes closed and her palms upturned in an act of surrender. Over her eyes are two daisies in full bloom, tapering down her cheeks and ending in exposed roots over her chest. At the bend in her arms, the young woman’s bright red veins begin to transform into the roots of larger daisies in full bloom, running down her forearms and ending at the tips of her fingers. Glancing above the woman’s right shoulder, the viewer may notice the transformation of the woman's hair into the roots of weeds. Heyse says the weeds at the tips of the hair represent the tangle of anxious thoughts that tend to cloud her mind, but also signify where one’s roots are.
She said the inspiration for this particular piece actually began last Lent while praying in the adoration chapel. The title comes from Mark 5:41 when Jesus raised a girl from the dead, taking her by the hand and saying, “Talitha koum” which means, “Little girl, I say to you, arise!”
During her time in prayer before the Blessed Sacrament last year Heyse said she internally heard God ask her, “Why do you desire death?”
At first she was confused. Although she’s struggled with depression and anxiety, Heyse said she never considered herself suicidal. However, when she sat with that phrase in prayer she began to see how her negative self-talk and the “way that I react when I get overwhelmed” as parts in her life that really needed Christ’s love and healing.
“When I just sat there reflecting I had this really vivid vision in my imagination of my forearms kind of being split open and I could see and feel all this light and then these daisies grow in my arms and then I began threading them into a daisy crown and then I placed them on Jesus's head as a substitute for the Crown of Thorns,” she explained.
Heyse said the sketch was finished and the first few colors were put down when she set it aside months ago as her inspiration waned and life got busier. She didn’t work on it again until she was looking for a personal project while staying home during the coronavirus outbreak.
Even though she’s not currently struggling with the same “intense emotions” she dealt with last Lent, she said it’s been helpful to revisit this piece in order to reflect on the growth she’s experienced since she first began working on it.
Heyse knew she wanted to express her Lenten prayer encounter in a work of art, but whenever she tried to capture it in a painting or sketch, she said “I just couldn’t make it work.”
It wasn’t until she thought of the custom of placing coins over a corpse’s eyes that her “Talitha Koum” piece really began to take shape.
“When you're struggling, it can be really hard to see the silver lining,” she said. “It's only in hindsight, further on down the road, where you can look back and see the bigger picture of how you’ve grown and the things that God is still working on.”
Heyse encouraged others to create, “even if your final product doesn't turn out the way you want it to (because) you're still learning and you're still connecting when you're in the process of making and doing.”
Finding those “small pockets” of time for creating can be incredibly life-giving for the creator and those around them.
“We were created by a Creator to create,” she said, quoting a line from a talk by her friend and fellow artist, Liz Zelasko.
Heyse gave the example of how her two young daughters love to color and doodle without really caring how the final product looks. Recently her two year-old grabbed a piece of paper and filled it with happy faces before she rushed off to show her grandma who was calling on FaceTime.
“It brought her grandma a lot of joy because she was feeling down with all of this.”
When we don’t create because of a perfectionist mindset, she said, “we’re robbing other people of the joy that we can potentially share with them by sharing the fruits of our work.”
“We put way more pressure on ourselves as adults,” she said, pointing out that especially in the United States, we’re used to an “achievement mindset” of our worth being based on what we can produce.
“Kids don’t put those limitations on themselves and they don’t have those same ridiculous expectations that we do.”
She encouraged everyone to find something “creative” to do during this time, whether it’s cooking a meal, crocheting, or “filling a page with happy faces.”
“I think that now's a great time to find something,” she said, “because when you work on something creative … the process of doing it is just as important as the final product.”
You can find Amy on Instagram @amyheyseart
“Talitha Koum” and other beautiful prints by Amy are available in her Etsy shop: etsy.com/shop/amyheyseart/
Hillary Mast