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November 2025 | Christ the King: Power & Servanthood

Spiritual Autobiography
Ministry Call
Resumé

Other Materials:
Church Service
Writing
Creative Pilgrimage
Book of Hebrews

Beauty: The Invisible Embrace
by John O'Donohue
Available at Inkwell Management

This Here Flesh
by Cole Arthur Riley
Available at Penguin Random House


From Monstress to Ministry

Hebrews, Beauty, and the Body as Teacher



This month’s work asked for a different kind of attention. For November, I carried three texts with me—Hebrews, Cole Arthur Riley’s This Here Flesh, and John O’Donohue’s Beauty: The Invisible Embrace. They became companions rather than assignments, each shaping how I thought about power, servanthood, and the work of my hands as I moved through the days.

November needed room to take root. Hebrews opened new paths each time I returned to it, while This Here Flesh asked for a depth of attention that refused to be hurried. O’Donohue’s language of beauty as restoration helped me see how making can return people to themselves and how these texts might speak to one another.

For weeks the readings orbited each other without quite touching; I could feel their shared center but could not yet name it. Clarity came when I remembered the first manifesto* I wrote in art school, the document that held me through rejection and gave shape to Monstress Productions. The work I made under that name became my first sustained exploration of themes that still ground my practice: identity, consumer culture, activism, and the desire to help others heal with the tools the Creator has placed in their hands.

The copy of my old manifesto I keep in my wallet to this day (I have to reprint it every coupLE of years, but still)


Monstress began as my attempt to claim space when institutions refused to make room for me. I named myself, I claimed my Otherness — or what I thought was my difference at the time. It was never a closed chapter or a failed experiment; it remains an active part of my practice, albeit on the back burner these days. Those early projects taught me that small, handmade interventions can shift how someone inhabits their life. The Portrait Products revealed how care can take material form. The annual valentines showed that art can act as distributed affection. The Here & Now kit demonstrated that presence can be designed for. The Ennui-Free project invited people to notice the days that held even a trace of light. This mode of making still informs how creativity becomes service for me.




My early practice cannot be equated with the profound disenfranchisement many communities endure, yet it let me feel the contour of exclusion’s edge. That awareness shaped how Riley’s writing landed within me. Her reflections on embodiment and dignity—the right to inhabit one’s full presence in a world that has tried to diminish it—asked for a quiet, focused attention. In recognizing the distance between our experiences, I also saw a shared instinct: to protect space, repair damage, and resist the forces that narrow human possibility.

Hebrews brought that instinct into the language of priesthood and service. Christ as High Priest moves toward the world’s wounds rather than away from them, holding together authority and intimacy, power and mercy. Under that gaze, my old insistence on autonomy began to look incomplete; what once held me together now calls me toward a practice offered more deliberately to others.

To step into that with integrity, I must begin again. I must enter ministry with the posture of an apprentice: willing to be unsteady, willing to learn aloud, and willing to let unfamiliar work reshape me. I expect mistakes and awkwardness; that is part of beginning. I am not entering ministry from mastery but as someone who wants to be shaped by service. If the High Priest sets the pattern by offering his own life for the healing of others, then vulnerability—not polish—must guide my steps.

This understanding reframes my studio practice as well. The manifesto I am rewriting is not an abandonment of Monstress but its evolution. The early work met the needs of its moment; the new manifesto speaks to what is needed now. It affirms my commitment to reclaimed materials, embodied worship, and a refusal to participate in systems of exclusion. It ties my creative life to Hebrews’ call to servanthood, to O’Donohue’s vision of beauty as a homecoming of the human spirit, and to Riley’s insistence that liberation must be lived in the body.

This is my creative pilgrimage for November: a return to the earliest truths of my work, a renewed embrace of apprenticeship, and a deepening rule of making shaped by justice, humility, and the labor of the hands. I am preparing for a more deliberate phase of my studio life, guided by the example of the Tekton, the artisan-builder Christ, whose life embodies the truth Hebrews names: authority rooted in service, not dominance. The path is not tidy, but it is clear enough to walk.

A Litany of Making
Before naming this litany, I acknowledge that proclamation is part of my practice. I have carried a Pocket Manifesto in my wallet since my days at Cranbrook Academy of Art, a small reminder of what grounded me when I first learned to fight back with my work. I keep it with me still, and I suspect I will need to make a new one for this next season of apprenticeship. Speaking a rule aloud—in the studio or in prayer—becomes a way of inhabiting the truth I seek to live. What follows is not separate from the essay but its natural extension: the language of conviction becoming the rhythm of work.

The Revised Monstress Manifesto
First Issued December 2025Repeat each morning you choose to make anything at all. Speak what is true.

 If I lose the fire, I stop.
Work without conviction cannot heal, question, or serve.

The person I welcome is my equal.
I honor their intelligence, experience, and agency.

I work in solidarity with those institutions have excluded.
I keep myself decentered. I examine the systems I move through and ask how my work might loosen, rather than reinforce, structures that privilege me. I pray to remain teachable and welcome discomfort as a sign that I am learning what I once could not see.

I remember whose labor, suffering, and brilliance built the structures we inhabit.
I refuse to replicate patterns of erasure.

I make from what the world has already discarded.
Found, reclaimed, repaired, and repurposed materials ground my practice. I reject conspicuous consumption so I can see the value that remains in all things, not only in what is newly made or culturally celebrated. Worth is inherent; it does not depend on shine or scarcity.

I choose embodied worship. 
The work of my hands becomes prayer, drawing me toward the Lord. Shared making becomes community.

I refuse narratives that glorify consumption. 
Satisfaction is cultivated, not bought. Bread is to be broken and shared, not hoarded.

I design with people, not at them. 
My work invites participation, critique, and connection.

I fight the fights I am built for. 
My creative labor is resistance and repair, guided first by the tools I inherited rather than the ones I purchase.

I begin again as an apprentice. 
I take risks, make mistakes, and learn in full view.

I walk the path of the Tekton. 
I honor the Christ the Maker whose authority was rooted in service.

I believe, and I act like I believe.

Appendix: 

*The Original Monstress Manifesto (Abridged)
First issued May 1999; Reissued January 2002

Repeat every morning you are a designer or an artist.
State the (personally) obvious.
By obvious I mean the most profoundly true, most terribly important statements you can summon. Certainly this cannot happen every day but I will consider it a viable daily goal in designing...

IF I AM WITHOUT PASSION, I WILL FIND A DIFFERENT JOB.
Why torture myself and others with treacle? Remember the viewer has as much intelligence as I do. With all that latent elitism I pretend not to have cultivated, I need to remember the audience is assuredly capable of understanding. Why say I should be accessible to our viewers when I should be looking for ways to access the viewer, as an equal, on his or her terms?

Remember people choose what they believe.
There is a lot of in the world trying to convince everyone otherwise. I work restore Historical Memory by assuring the viewer that she can evaluate, that he has a past he can draw upon.

Remind the audience of its power with respect and humility.
Remember any person in my audience could be in my place tomorrow. Invite evaluation and interaction. Design with and for the audience.

Remember Utopia, Perfection, Completion are possible only from within our selves.
No selling empty dreams of perfection and endless desire to people who have much better things to be doing. The point is that we can find peace and completion on our own without mass consumption or such crap. That is the only Utopia possible in this life, the way I see it. We choose to pursue satisfaction at the mall — or to realize it is very much within our very being.

CHANGE THE WORLD.
Pick your battle and fight it. Use the training you have gotten from your entire life, not just that you received from school. Use the tools you were born with before you go to the ones you bought.

Believe and believe.

Next Month:


DECEMBER | Advent & Christmas: Hope and Incarnation


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