Following His Own Light

 If you count the one-eared donkey,  my  wooden manger scene  has only four figures. Rather than swaddled, the baby Jesus stretches his arms and legs in his bed of hay  as if doing a yoga stretch. The  donkey  has a red ink stain where the artist decided to make a cut but never did. A  large black dot marks the spot where the artist had intended to whittle an eye. Joseph is sporting a hefty beard, accentuated by deep grooves that make him look older than reported in the gospels. Mary has her eyes closed with wooden hands clasped in prayer. Like most figures that are whittled,  the pieces  are  angular and elongated. I run my hands over the notches in Mary’s veil that cover a  Rapunzel-like braid.

 The artist,  a man named John Tigner, was short and a little stocky with  a quick smile. As a black man in segregated Chicago, he had endured years of racism. I knew  John years ago when I worked as a grant writer at Cathedral Shelter, a  Chicago nonprofit that  housed people in recovery from drug use. At the time, it was unique since children could live with their adult parents while they learned to manage their mental illness and get sober.

John worked as a volunteer in Cathedral Shelter’s  thrift store, which nowadays has the elevated status of resale shop. To work his shift,  John took  two buses daily from the south side. He had a developmental disability that caused him to mumble at times. But I got the gist. John’s materials came from the street: a scrap of wood became Adam and Eve banished from the Garden of Eden; a broom handle became the Holy Family. He was a whittler, using only a knife to notch and carve his work. I don’t remember exactly how I came to possess John’s manger scene. But I am lucky to have it.

In 1997, his work was displayed in an exhibit of outsider art at the Chicago Cultural Center. Like other outsider artists,  John   had no formal training. He did not follow methods  or conventions. Rather, John  followed his own light.

Every year at this time, I remember what a gentle soul John was. He was devoted to the mission of helping families recover from years of drug use, getting that second chance in life that some of us are lucky enough to get. He was humble and kind. And  more than anything, John’s art reflected  his oversized heart.