I’m tired of following the rules. That is one reason why I chose to get myself a tattoo as a 49^th birthday gift. It reminds me that my body belongs to me, and I get to choose how I inhabit this body. It is a risk to permanently emblazon a symbol on one’s body…but I’m relatively confident that this symbol, and its meaning, will stay relevant. So what does it mean? I ran a photo of the tattoo through AI and this is what google has to say:

“The image shows a tattoo inspired by the designs of Charles Rennie Mackintosh, a Scottish architect and designer associated with the Art Nouveau movement. The tattoo features a stylized rose motif, a signature element in Mackintosh’s work, enclosed within a geometric frame. This design is likely based on Mackintosh’s architectural drawings, furniture designs, or decorative panels, which often incorporate stylized floral and geometric forms. Mackintosh’s work is characterized by its clean lines, subtle curves, and the integration of organic and geometric shapes.”

I love architectural motifs. They are clean and structured. They remind me of the incredible creativity of humankind, and the ways we choose to structure our lives. But it is the combination of architectural and organic motifs that caught my attention with this symbol. It made me think of my favourite quote from the Old Testament scholar Walter Brueggemann, who said:

“The power of God is a wild card amid the social schemes we devise, suggesting that newness can come in unexpected ways…God had a purpose other than our arrangements and an inexplicable capacity to change what cannot be changed”

Human beings devise a lot of schemes and structures. So much of our reality is socially constructed – that is, we as human beings choose how we will function in life, how we will relate to other people and to God. Our theology is also a construction – it is a wild guess about what God has done, is doing, and will do. Sometimes, we are bound by our created structures – we draw thick lines that separate us from each other. We build structures that determine the worth of individuals and groups. We build structures that are impermeable, unchanging, stark. I’m thinking about how we determine social roles and responsibilities – we carefully build binaries and place people in boxes. In the current economic and political climate, we see how our human-made structures fail – they are not flexible or nimble enough to sustain us in dark days.

Enter the power of God – which comes not as a fixed and unchanging structure but as a wild and organic gracefulness. Hence the tattoo. A highly structured, manmade environment (the boxes) is interrupted by a fluid and natural grace (the flower). God does not operate according to our structures but introduces curves and beauty into our forced and permanent creations. As much as we think we have built something important and worthy, we are always interrupted by Grace. The good news is that we do not have to be confined by the rules we have invented. We are always free, in conversation with the Divine, to revise our plans in favour of God’s wild grace.

We are ultimately not bound to human invention, but only to the wildness of the Holy Spirit. So the unbudging, geometric boxes are infiltrated by new life that comes in the form of flowers and imperfections and possibility.  Nature has its own structure, of course, as does God’s movement in the world. But it is not confined to straight lines.

We don’t have to be stuck in the boxes we have created. God invites us into pattern that is more free and more beautiful. In these days of global despair, it is helpful to be reminded that God’s ways are not our ways. After all, Jesus Christ was like a stunning rose that bloomed and broke the structures of human oppression and captivity.

I want to be reminded, every day, in my own body, that God has arrangements other than what I have planned and devised. What seems permanent and unchangeable can be altered, transformed. Thus, there is hope.