When American-born novelist Gertrude Stein moved to Paris as a 29-year-old, she quickly became an important patron of the arts. Thanks to her inherited wealth and intellectual interests, Stein and her brother collected avant-garde art in her Parisian salon and regularly entertained famous artists and literary figures. Among the frequent guests was Pablo Picasso, with whom she developed a lifelong friendship.
In 1905, Stein commissioned Picasso to paint her portrait, reportedly sitting for it as many as 90 separate times. Picasso’s completed work delighted Stein but befuddled art critics. Those hoping for traditional perspective were treated to a dose of Cubism instead. The portrait depicts Stein in dark tones, her body leaning awkwardly forward in a chair. With an angular geometry to her expressionless face, she stares blankly past the viewer through disjointed eyes.
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Picasso’s response to critics was noteworthy: “Everybody says that she does not look like [the portrait], but that does not make any difference; [in time] she will.” Perhaps he meant to imply that a portrait’s function isn’t to convey exact resemblance so much as to provide the opportunity to imagine one’s complex interiority. But that’s only a guess. What seems evident from his retort is the suggestion that Stein wasn’t fully what she would yet become. There was more surprise to be revealed, in other words, in the evolutions of her life ahead.
This is true for all of us, of course. We’re constantly in the process of becoming something more than our lives present today. In fact, it would be absurd to think we stay the same, merely rolling along through life as finished products.
The protagonist in My Struggle, Karl Ove Knausgård’s autobiographical series of novels, questions whether it even makes sense to keep the same name over a lifetime, given how much our lives evolve. He proposes changing one’s first name with every new stage of life, to better reflect the new person we become. I’ve never changed my name from Peter, but the colorful Sister Corita Kent poster above my childhood bed impressed upon me this idea that life is an evolving work in progress: “To grow is to change, and to have changed often is to have grown much.”
As I track the movements of Jesus in the gospels, I’m struck by how many people pursue him for what they believe they might get from him, rather than who they might become through him. When the multitudes eat plentifully of the loaves and fishes he serves up, a number of them jump in boats the next day and head to Capernaum to see if he’ll fill their stomachs a second time. Jesus is ready for them: “You are looking for me not because you saw miraculous signs but because you ate all the food you wanted” (John 6:26).
Constantly angling to get something from Jesus continues to inform (or misinform) too many lives of faith. It’s this bad habit of ours that prompted Eugene Peterson to decry the use of prayer as a tool for “doing or getting [instead of] being and becoming.”
The power of becoming something new with the arrival of each new day is one of the recognized privileges of having Christ live in the lives of those who follow him, or what Dietrich Bonhoeffer once described in personal terms as “Jesus Christ incarnate, crucified, and glorified, entering my life and taking charge.” The spectacular idea that we no longer have to make up our lives by the minute—or live under the constraint of our own charm or wit—is one of the blessings of being shaped by God. “It’s not you who shape God,” the second-century Greek bishop Irenaeus writes. “It is God who shapes you. Let the clay be moist, lest you grow hard and lose the imprint of God’s fingers.” That’s an image worth recalling when your life feels static and you’re struggling to remember what God in Christ believes you’re capable of becoming.
