Biography
Clara Sims is a first-year Masters of Divinity student at Yale Divinity School and is enrolled in the Andover Newton diploma program as she discerns ordination in the United Church of Christ. Clara was born and raised in Los Lunas, New Mexico, and she spent the last several years there engaged in grassroots advocacy work with organizations engaging the climate crisis and environmental injustice. With an undergraduate degree in History and Religious Studies, Clara continues to explore how our shared histories, narratives, and symbols can be creatively engaged and re-interpreted to meet our moment of climate crisis.
Paper Abstract
"Creation Crucified: Our Salvation in-Process'" is an art piece that I have produced combined with a written theological reflection / artist's statement. The image itself is done in pencil on a large paper canvas. The primary aspect of creation represented therein are North American bird species, with Pelican Christ as the focal point in association with the ecological devastation of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill. My hope in creating an image of "creation crucified" was to capture a fragment of the reality of our collective ecological crisis and collapse. This fragment is a gesture of failure and faith – created as a way to participate myself, and invite others to participate, in our collective "salvation in process," by witnessing this moment of planetary crisis. Through both the image and text, I hope to evoke the response that we can, and must, shatter the illusions (and delusions) of human separateness and invulnerability, and live instead into the reality of our non-negotiable, visible and invisible, interdependencies. As theologians, and artists, I believe we can most meaningfully shatter these destructive stories from the bedrocks of our own theologies, formed in the specific places where our particular loves and particular griefs reside. For this reason, this image could not help but mirror the landscapes of my own heart: the mountains and forests and river valleys of New Mexico and southern Colorado. In this way, both the conscious and subconscious decisions made in producing the image are a meditation on our relationship to place, and how it forms and informs all our actions of advocacy, love, joy, and planetary grief.