Near black under a caramel rim. The gold sits hardest against this one.
Helping Churches Worship Beautifully Is What We Do.
Helping Churches Worship Beautifully Is What We Do.
The hospital room at two in the morning. The funeral for someone with no family left to come. October is the one month the year sets aside to say so out loud.
Both tall belly, both hand thrown in Minnesota, with the medallion pressed into the clay rather than printed onto it. It will not peel, fade, or wash off in the parish hall dishwasher. The glaze breaks differently every trip through the kiln, so no two come out matching.
Near black under a caramel rim. The gold sits hardest against this one.
Deep crimson under a cream rim that falls down into it. No two fall the same way.
At this contrast the rose reads almost like a struck coin. Quiet until it is in your hand.
Crimson and cream, about as close to Reformation red as a glaze gets. The one most people reach for first.
The Crusader’s Cup carries two marks, one on each face. The Jerusalem Cross faces out while it sits on the desk. The Chi Rho faces whoever is drinking from it.
One large cross with four small ones set in its quarters. Five crosses, and the Church has never quite settled on which reading is the right one, which is part of why it has lasted.
Five wounds: the spear in the side, and the four in the hands and feet. Or Christ with the four Evangelists around him. Or the Gospel carried out to the four corners of the earth. It became the arms of the Kingdom of Jerusalem after 1099, which is where the cup gets its name.
Not a P with an X through it. Chi and Rho are the first two letters of Christos, laid one over the other so the whole name sits in a single mark. Roman soldiers carried it on their standards in the fourth century, which is roughly when a private sign became a public one.
Alpha stands to the left and Omega to the right, the first and last letters of the Greek alphabet, because he said that is what he was. The crown is the part most people walk straight past. It is not there to dress up the letters. It is there to say who they belong to.
In 1530 Luther was shut inside the fortress at Coburg while the Diet of Augsburg went on without him. He wrote to his friend Lazarus Spengler and took his own seal apart piece by piece.
A black cross, because faith in the Crucified is what saves, and because it mortifies and it hurts. Set in a heart that stays the color it already was, because the cross does not kill. It keeps alive. The heart on a white rose, because faith gives joy and peace, and white rather than red because white is the color of the spirits and of the angels. A sky blue field behind it, because that joy is only the beginning of the joy still to come. And a gold ring closed around all of it, because blessedness in heaven has no end and gold outlasts every other good thing.
A novelty mug is funny in the parish office for about a week. These carry marks the Church has been using for seventeen hundred years, at the exact height a hand closes around them. They still say the same thing.
Nobody applauds the drive home from the hospital. Nobody sees the sermon written twice because the first one was not honest enough. Priests and pastors carry a great deal that never gets named out loud, and most of them would be uncomfortable if it were.
October is Pastor Appreciation Month. The cups go up on the 1st, and Reformation Sunday closes it out on the 25th. They come off the wheel in small runs, so the list hears first. That is the difference between choosing your glaze and taking what is left.