Author: Michael Shelby Suberlak
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Epiphany
Light is the theme of the day. I love the way fire looks in the grey half light of a winter afternoon around the Puget Sound where I’m from. These grey days with their low clouds can feel oppressive. Bleak winter days can seem to go on forever, making our load seem heavier, doubling our…
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The Horror of Being Embodied
I’m not sure how to do this. It feels out of place for me to put material about my physical health journey in the same venue as where I deal with art. But again, the concept of this website is to bring all those parts together into one place. As a mother of four, entering…
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What Blossoms in a Children’s Graveyard
We visited the cemetery today, as is our custom, since November is the month of the Holy Souls, and this week is the Octave, and you get an indulgence for going there to pray for the dead. I don’t think I would much want to go—I’m pretty lethargic these days; can’t seem to clean the…
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Stellamaris Sits
Today I did something new: I asked my daughter, Stellamaris, to sit for a portrait. It was a modest, quick little thing. A pencil sketch. It’s not like I haven’t made plenty of portraits of her—of all my kids. Many hours my pencil has chased my little ones while they play, dashed off sleeping baby…
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Art and Salvation?
When I was in graduate school at the Pennsylvania Academy, a cheeky philosophy student from Temple University said to me: “Art is great and everything, but it won’t save your soul.” Well, I believed him at the time, but I beg to differ now. In his papal Letter to Artists, the late St. John Paul…
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The Stations of Acceptance
It’s easy to look back with sighs of regret, as a mother “in the weeds,” as a person in midlife, having made life’s commitment at last, at the unfinished work; work that has been eclipsed by the demands of your dependents, and cannot be attended to again for some months or years, if ever. What…
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A Little Piece of my Heart
I made this little oil painting while I was pregnant with my son. Perhaps I was pondering the sure evidence of the love of God growing within me as I conceived it.
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The Words of My Teachers : An Invisible Treasury
There was always that hint of self-doubt within my mind as a teacher, especially when faced with a student who is having trouble. ‘Do I really have the answers here?’ Yet, in faith, I would open my mouth, and without knowing how, the needed wisdom would come tumbling out like a magic coin to save…
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Girls Just Wanna Have Fun
“Without love, everything is painful, everything is tiring, everything is burdensome. The Cross, taken up hesitantly, is crushing; taken smilingly, by free will, and with love, it will carry you much more than you carry it. Love makes time eternal by giving a divine value to everything.” —I Believe in Love: A personal retreat based…
Michael Shelby Suberlak 