Another Crucifixion
(From my Book: Art & Synchronicity as Daytime Dreams)

The true coincidence emerged while I was painting one of Christ’s arms—the right one—positioning it slightly higher than the other. If viewed as a clock, the left arm would point to 3 o’clock and the right arm to 10 o’clock. I had drawn it this way, and while I was actively painting the right arm, I was listening to the audiobook of Thomas Harris’s The Silence of the Lambs, chapter 25. In the book, during one of Clarice Starling’s tense visits to Hannibal Lecter’s cell, Lecter shares his macabre idea for a “crucifixion watch.” He shows her a detailed anatomical drawing (the size of a dinner napkin) featuring Jesus (although he replaced Jesus’ head with Clarice’s) nailed to the cross on the watch face, noting that the Patent Office rejected his patent but suggested copyrighting the artistic design. In traditional crucifixion imagery the figure’s arms remain static at the three and nine positions, with feet at six. Lecter’s version for his watch breaks convention: Jesus’s arms move dynamically like hour and minute hands—much like those on Disney character watches—to actually tell the time, while the feet stay fixed at six o’clock and a small second hand spins within the halo. 
 
When Starling observes that fine anatomical details would be lost when scaled down to watch size, Lecter agrees but envisions it working well for larger clocks. As they discuss whether the design needs a patent, Starling explains that he would likely use pre-patented quartz movements anyway; patents generally cover unique mechanical inventions, while copyright protects artistic or design elements. When Lecter questions her legal insight, Clarice mentions that she had some law training/courses, though it is not required for her FBI work. The parallel between my arm placement and the watch-hand concept in the book created a profound sense of synchronicity, though I only fully understood and appreciated its significance ten years later, when the hidden connection finally revealed itself like thunder emerging from the weave of time.
 
In the late 1990s, two fellow artists and I were selected from thousands of submissions to be represented by a prestigious art Gallery in San Francisco. The solicitation had been artfully presented as a gallery exhibition, but in reality, the gallery was seeking new talent to showcase artwork through a groundbreaking new format: online display on the internet.
 
My paintings were also exhibited not only in one of the most beautiful galleries I have ever seen—located on the pier next to the old baseball stadium in San Francisco—but also in upscale venues such as high-end hair salons in the city.
 
I had a longtime friend in San Francisco, a successful patent lawyer. We had met in college, where our friendship began because I had a knack for interpreting the metaphors in poems he wrote. This connection grew into a friendship that lasted more than 20 years. One day he spotted my work in one of the salons in the city. Two years later, while I was picking up my canvases after the gallery’s representation ended, he met me and purchased the painting titled Another Crucifixion.
 
Strangely enough, about a year after he bought the painting, it fell off the wall and a deep scratch ran through the middle of it. For years afterward, we talked about me flying out to San Francisco to restore it and return it to its original condition. Unfortunately, our friendship ended before that ever happened.
 
This patent lawyer’s approach to art became deeply instructive for me. Through his poetry, I came to understand the nature of a highly skilled lawyer. He possessed a genuine artistic talent, yet he deliberately crafted his poems so that the words flowed beautifully while being stripped of any real meaning or metaphorical depth. It was a kind of verbal sleight-of-hand—elegant wording that ultimately signified nothing.
 
I realized this is exactly how the best lawyers operate: they take powerful documents like laws created by governments and, through crafty interpretation, render them meaningless or twisted into “mush.” The more skilled the wordsmith, the more effective the lawyer.
 
This insight helped me understand why our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ had to make his sacrifice. As the rightful King, He needed to cut through the legalistic corruption and misinterpretations that lawyers and scribes had layered onto the Torah from the Mosaic Law. Jesus taught by simple yet powerful metaphors that could not be easily manipulated and fulfilled the old covenant (laws) that had been corrupted by excessive, deceptive and ritual-filled verbiage. In its place, He established a new, simple covenant: believe that God can change His covenant and create a new one through His Son’s sacrifice and follow only two simple commandments—love God with all your heart, and love your neighbor as yourself.
 
Tragically, even the simple metaphors our savior used as teaching material (such as the bread and wine representing His body and blood—“This is my body broken for you; this is my blood shed for you”) were later turned into centuries of theological complexity and chaos by centuries of destructive wordsmiths turning beautiful metaphor of bread and wine into ritualistic, garbage. It took 1,500 years and the Protestant Reformation to push back against that accumulated “wordcraft” and return to the original simplicity.
 
In the end, my friend’s ownership of this painting (by a touch of the Holy Spirit) was to metaphorically damaged with a unsightly scratch—much the same he had done to his own exquisite poems, turning them into something empty and deceptive in the same way, lawyers had turned the profound intent of the Mosaic Law and then the U.S. Constitution and rendered them hollow and meaningless.
 
These two historic documents—the Mosaic Law and the U.S. Constitution—once gathered vast populations of “wandering sheep (lambs)” and transformed them into cohesive, structured, productive, and God-fearing societies. Yet they have been turned upside down and profaned by what can only be described as one of the most dangerous professions when practiced by ungodly “foxes” who pursue nothing but money and power. From the depths of my soul, I cry out to you all: Shame on you! Will you suck the bitter-sweet orange of this fleeting life, draining it of its hollow pleasures, or will you instead reach for the living “power-aid” of God and allow His grace to change your corroded rust into pure and radiant silver instead?