Lately, on a relaxed Saturday, after a pleasant brunch at a restaurant, we headed to Granville Island in Vancouver for an afternoon walk. We stopped by an art school, Arts Umbrella. There, I walked around the hall seeing the art displayed on the walls by the art students. While looking at them, I came to a halt over one painting—the painting of a tree that was broken and being separated, barely held by tiny red strings that were on the verge of breaking apart. Then, in the background, there was a ship that had lost its way, looking confused, not knowing where it needed to go. Seeing the artwork, lots of thoughts ran through my mind. Why is the tree being separated? Where is this ship heading to?
I then read the description written by artist Mira Erozlu. Coming from an immigrant family, her parents were from Chios, a region that experienced conflict between Greeks and Turks. Through her art piece, she expressed a deep feeling of sadness and loneliness stemming from her family's struggle to preserve their culture, language, and connection to a home that had fundamentally changed. The painting not only captured her personal journey but also reflected the shared tragedy of refugees worldwide who search for a place where they can find both peace and belonging.
Across from the Art School, we visited another gallery hosted by Federation of Canadian Artists. There, I encountered a painting titled "Fire and Ice" by Myriam Laberge. Through bold contrasting warm and cool colors, the piece depicted a world torn apart by fire and ice—two opposing, dualistic forces. These two paintings prompted me to reflect deeply on our world today and its pervasive dualism: the political divide between right and left, the economic gap between rich and poor, and the separation between heaven and earth, between secular and sacred. As these forces of dualism collide against each other, all making claims to the truth with no concern for each other, the world has become a place of convoluted and twisted truths, tearing our world apart as dualism deepens everywhere and anywhere in the world.
Lately, I revisited a story of King Solomon who discerned a case where two women were making the same truth claims. Both women on the left and the right were making claims to one child, saying they both were the real mothers. In the midst of a twisted truth claim and blurring reality, Solomon, in the wisdom of God, cut right through the heart of the issue by calling for a sword to divide the child in half. As the real mother cried out to just give the child away, Solomon halted the order and gave the child to the mother who cared for the child to live and not die. Solomon embodied the wisdom of God in the vocation of his life in discerning what was real and true and doing what was right. In the end, because of the wisdom of God embodied in the ruling of Solomon, the author of 1 Kings writes, "People ate and drank, and were happy" (1 Kings 4:20).
As we were leaving the Arts Umbrella, I saw another painting. Right next to the painting of a broken tree, I saw this beautiful painting drawn by a Korean artist Mina Hwang. She drew a painting on three separate canvases telling the Korean traditional story of Seolnal, the New Year's Day, when families come together for a time of sharing joy. In the painting, the presence of light, the symbol of love and belonging, flowing through separate distinct canvases, travels across three canvases, telling the world of the power of love that is so strong that it connects and brings us all close to one another despite the presence of strong division and separation in the world as symbolized by the distances between each canvas. The light then is connected to a heavenly moon, where two rabbits are pounding on the moon's surface, making rice cakes—the traditional story of Korean New Year's Day that tells why the moon has many craters.
As I was looking at this painting, I was wondering and pondering again, isn't this what we all yearn and long for? The life here on earth that is connected to a beautiful heavenly story—the truest story of all stories, the story of the grand story of redemptive history—expressed in the praxis of the vocation of our lives as we embody the wisdom of God in the works of our hands, bringing the world together for meaningful integration that heals the deep wounds and divide of the world until redemption comes.
That afternoon the three paintings were all telling the same story of what our vocations are meant to be, in the world of messy middle: the sign and signpost of the world where truest truths will rule in the presence of the truest tree of life, under which people will come to eat, drink, and be happy in the presence of the one who embodies realities of all realities and truths of all truths, the day when heaven and earth will be one again as it was meant to be.