I Go Before You Always: The Words We Carry With Us

I have always loved words. Not necessarily in and of themselves, but in crafted bundles. Sentences, stanzas, songs. A word is just a word. It communicates something. But a group of words can be a little painting, a sketch.

If my brain were a purse, it would be full of word trinkets that I pull out the way my grandmother could reach into hers and produce a Kleenex, pencil, paperclip—whatever I needed at that moment.

Sometimes a painting starts because a certain string of words has inspired it. But more often, I finish a painting, stare at it for a while, and one of those little word trinkets comes to the forefront of my mind. That becomes its title.

I try not to overthink it. I let whatever stowaway phrase, lyric, or verse wants to attach itself to the piece do so.

I’ve always loved the Catholic hymn Be Not Afraid. I can remember so clearly hearing Susan Sarandon, playing Sister Helen Prejean, sing it during the climactic scene of Dead Man Walking. I was a teenager when the movie came out. I’d rented it from Blockbuster and watched it in the VCR on my best friend’s couch. I cried through the words.

I already knew the song from church, but here they were being applied to a very guilty man walking toward his death:

Be not afraid.
I go before you always.

God could be in suburban church and on death row?

The “me” God goes before could be a teenage girl writing in bubble letters on the cover of a yellow diary—or a convicted felon in his last five minutes on earth?

The words hit then, and they still hit now. Every time I hear them.

When it came time to name this painting, I Go Before You Always came to mind forcefully and quickly.

If the Holy Spirit could be a dove, certainly it could also be a Great Blue Heron.

The figure is offering the bird, but the bird is also leading her. God within. God all around. Before me. From me. Around me. Above me. Below me.

The painting gives form to that hope.

My paintings are never direct illustrations of the phrases that name them, but I love when they are in conversation with them.

I learned recently that Be Not Afraid was written by a Jesuit in the 1970s, during a time when Catholic worship was changing dramatically after Vatican II and there was a need for new, accessible liturgical music. It’s wild to think that the music I think of as “traditional” was once new—perhaps even a little foreign to the people hearing it for the first time.

But maybe God is always finding new ways to remind us that we are surrounded by loving presence: in the most trivial moments and the most profound, in our abundance and in our despair.

Maybe part of be not afraid is the idea that we don’t have to see the whole way forward. We don’t even have to make the way entirely ourselves.

God goes before us. And so, in their own way, do the people who loved us before we ever arrived—the grandmothers with their bottomless purses, the people whose words and ways we carry without always realizing it.

Maybe none of us is walking into completely uncharted territory.