Day 7 - The Mess of Forgiveness

The Two Fridas

Frida Kahlo

Oil on canvas, 1939

Museo de Arte Moderno , Mexico City, Mexico.

The image of Frida Kahlo is everywhere. It is on T-shirts and mugs, shower curtains and stationery. In 2018, Liz Jones wrote in the Guardian newspaper; "When you see reproductions of her self-portraits on everything ... the personal meaning behind her work is diminished and her persona gets diluted into a mass-produced design concept". We lose something in the familiarity.

This is not an easy picture, is it? It is visceral and messy. All that blood on a pure, white dress. Frida Kahlo has painted herself twice - in different clothes, in different states but they are both her. On the right she is in traditional Tehuana costume with a whole heart. She is holding a small miniature of her husband Diego Rivera as a child. In 1939 they were divorcing after he had an affair with Frida’s sister. She apparently said that two horrific accidents happened in her life; the first involved a streetcar that left her with lifelong injuries and the second was Diego Rivera. On the left she is Western dress with a cut open, bleeding heart. She is trying to clamp a vein to stop the blood flowing. There are layers of hurt and pain here; betrayal, the inner battle between two cultural identities and the numerous surgeries she endured. There is the person she was, and perhaps she wants to be, and the changed person she discovers herself to be. Behind both figures the sky is stormy, perhaps expressing the turmoil within.

We are so familiar with the story of the prodigal son that we forget that it is painful and messy (Luke 15:11-32). There is the son wanting his inheritance while his father was still alive. He went to live in a faraway land but never quite fitted in - at least not enough to be able to access any networks of help. Does the older son ever join the party? Who gets to inherit the farm in the end? How does the prodigal feel about himself? Does he ever feel like a son again? We try to tidy up the unresolved endings like a clamp on a still bleeding vein.

Friends, we should be careful about forcing tidy formulas about forgiveness onto complex situations. Indeed, the father in Jesus’ parable doesn’t say that he forgives his son. Instead, he clothes and feeds him - he shows his continued care in practical ways. The father is simply delighted that he is alive. Maybe that is enough for now. Maybe the rest takes time. Maybe the pain on all sides has to be acknowledged. The hope in this picture is that the two Fridas are holding hands, and the throbbing vein of life connects them. If we hope for better relationships, then connection matters. If we hope to know ourselves better, perhaps forgive ourselves, then we cannot ignore who we have been and who we are now. We have numerous ‘selves’ and they are all us.

We pray that as we live with unresolved mess and pain that God loves us and embraces us and will wait alongside us.

Suzanne Nockels