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Starting to fool around with the candidate’s faces just a little.

I’ve wanted to do this for months; I’ve been saving clips here & there from magazines & so forth. There’s been no shortage of inspiration, only of time & attention.

The fun in caricature, for me, isn’t first in send-up but in study. It’s in discovery of a face, a personality, by drawing. (In the case of Obama, a face with all sorts of obvious visual appeal.) Much as I envy great cartoonists their work, I’d really rather essay little things on paper like this for my own interests, though I have no hope of mastering the subject, than be on call as cartoonists are to appropriate public figures’ features for their audiences’ consumption.

I maintain that the most important truth of the gospel for our times is simply this: that God saved the world, not by abolishing or transforming the human condition but by taking it on.

— Edward T. Oakes in a 2005 article in Studies: An Irish Quarterly Review.

And despite the apparent priorities of the ministry of Christ, Jesus is moved by His mother’s maternal boldness to respond to the need. And, as is always true of His miracles, His intervention results in an excess of Grace. His miracles are always “more than enough.” There is never mere “efficiency” in Grace: the Trinitarian radiance of Love can never be characterized as “just enough.” There are always leftovers in the aftermath of the Power of God. There is too much wine. There are twelve baskets of bread. There is 153 fish in a net. There are aliens, Canaanites and Samaritans who are accidentally healed, despite historical strictures. There are Messianic secrets that are always broken. Animals speak, the rocks cry out, entire storms are soothed into Peace.

From a post of a little more than a week ago on the Orthodox blog Second Terrace.