The First Petition

O Creator, the One who gave birth to the universe, you are the sacred source of our being.

Our Father who art in heaven,

Heaven is translated in Aramaic as the universe. Creating a visual representation of the first petition involved a process of layering. Using photographs taken by NASA’s Hubble Telescope as a guide, I stretched raw white silk on a frame. Hand dying and then painting the silk, I created an artistic representation using the color descriptions provided by NASA. “Crab Nebula” images in a mosaic style a six light year wide expanding remnant of a star’s supernova explosion.

Hildegard of Bingen, a Benedictine Abbess (1098-1179), defined prayer eight centuries ago as “breathing in and breathing out the one breath of the universe.” As I visualized a star’s expansion and explosion within the Crab Nebula I felt the breath of the universe.

The Crab Nebula is located in the Milky Way Galaxy in the constellation Taurus. The colors within the nebula represent the differing elements in a star’s supernova.