A Part of "The Divine Project"

In a lecture I attended last week called “The Sound of Freedom: the Music of Liberation,” Dr. Jeremy Begbie explained that, “The divine project is to re-humanize, not de-humanize.” As we partake in the transforming work of Christ on this earth, we are to learn, teach, and act out our own humanity and cherish the humanity of others by imitating Christ. This is an embodied work; Christ took on flesh and “dwelt among us,” wearing the very humanity that He had/has given us.

It is a challenge to think through how our human embodiment, a partaking in Christ’s humanity, acting as his healing feet and hands, applies to our strangely disembodied, ever-changeable, presence in virtual communities. We encounter others online, but the encounter is not in the flesh; and when we don’t look directly into the Imago Dei eyes of another human being, it is quite easy—and maybe even tempting—to forget about the “divine project” of “re-humanizing.” In my last post, for instance, I wrote about the painfully cold, judgmental, and sometimes even cruel comments that were so casually strewn around the internet in response to the Brown and Garner verdicts and the #BlackLivesMatter movement.

In When I was a Child, I Read Books, Marilynne Robinson explains that, “Community, at least community larger than the immediate family, consists very largely of imaginative love for people we know or whom we know very slightly." On the Internet, we are continually and often, concurrently, encountering friends, acquaintances, and strangers; it can be hard to generate “imaginative love” for these people, to truly have community with them, when we are unable to look into their eyes, hear their voices, sit in the direct presence of their stories. Louis C.K. poignantly highlights this often cruel disconnect when explaining why he won’t let his children have cell phones. He claims that “these things are toxic…they don’t look at people when they talk to them…they don’t build empathy.” He then comically explains that when a child hurts someone to their face, it might even be ultimately painful for the offender as his or conscience is pricked; but when these comments are written online, it provides a false, dangerous high, a buzzy self-satisfied feeling.

As we are rapidly transitioning into a largely online culture, we must work to learn how to “re-humanize” ourselves and others even via an isolating screen. This has been on my mind quite a lot lately because of the amazing ongoing story of the ways in which photographer Brandon Stanton, the photographer behind Humans of New York, and his Facebook community of thousands, raised over one million dollars to enable students from Mott Hall Bridges Academy in Brownsville, Brooklyn to take a yearly visit to Harvard University. This project started from a simple encounter between Stanton and a thirteen-year-old boy named Vidal who told the photographer that his greatest hero is his school principle, Ms. Lopez, because, among other things, “she told each one of us that we matter.” Vidal is a profoundly sensitive and perceptive young teenager; in one interview, he explains that in the projects where he lives “some of the people around here aren’t friendly. I don’t think it’s a sadness or an anger that they feel, but a sort of emptiness.”

Stanton was so touched by Vidal’s story—and the impact that his principal has had on his life—that he went to Mott Hall Bridges Academy to find Ms. Lopez, who explained to him that the students at her school are always referred to as “scholars,” and that everyone at the school wears purple to remind them that they are royalty. Stanton has since photographed and interviewed Vidal’s mother, as well as many students and teachers at the school. All of these stories are both painful and beautiful; all of them are powerful and deeply human. For years, Brandon Stanton has walked around New York taking photos, coupling them with short quotes or stories directly from the mouths of those being photographed. There is something sacred about this connection between photograph, story, and viewer. There is a great deal of kindness, generosity, and a complete lack of judgment in Stanton’s bold, yet gentle, photography. He does not seem to see those he photographs as merely subjects, but as truly human, and because of this, he enables us to hear their voices. Many of these images and stories are breathtaking, quickly leading the viewer to tears or laughter and, in the case of Vidal’s story (and many others), to real empathy. This is not the first time Stanton and his followers (he currently has almost 12 million) have started a fund raiser, creating an almost embodied online community in order to rally around a “real” person whose story is briefly shared via their own words and their sacred eyes, eyes that might be either downcast or full of light. On Brandon Stanton’s Facebook page, there are, as Schaeffer says in the book of the same name, “no little people.”

When interviewed, Ms. Powell, one of the teachers from Mott Hall Bridges Academy, expressed her frequent discouragement as she asks herself: “How do you fill in the gaps created by the years of mis-education?”. She goes on to say: “Sometimes it feels so hopeless you want to give up. But I was up at 2 AM the other night, reading all the comments people were writing on the posts about Ms. Lopez, and I just kept scrolling and scrolling and scrolling, and it reminded me that I have a purpose and I need to keep going.” This brief story is an example of re-humanization, the ability of a community—even an online community of strangers—to work together in “imaginative love,” to bless other human beings by listening to their stories, by having conversations, even by raising funds to create opportunities for children that have often been underserved and ignored.

Jewish philosopher Martin Buber claimed that “all real life is meeting…all actual life is encounter.” With Humans of New York, Brandon Stanton has created opportunities for us to have “real” encounters with the humanizing story of another. And, as Buber also notes, any time we allow ourselves to have a real encounter with another human being, it is impossible not to be changed ourselves.

Guided By Our Sense of Beauty

The subjects of Noémie Goudal’s Observatories photographs aren’t real. Look closely at the architecture. Notice the grid of seams. They're made of print-outs. Goudal says she places the structures “as if they were a story being told. The viewer knows it’s fiction; he can see the paper, he can see it’s a construction. But still gets into it. It’s telling a narrative.”

This is the kind of narrative, it might go without saying, that is meant to be evocative, not informative. It opens up possibilities. The real answer to the question "What happened?" isn't relevant.

So what is it about the images that changes when we see that the buildings aren’t real?

I feel invested in this question because Goudal’s sense of narrative resonates with the way we craft narratives out of our own lives. We are expected to do this in hindsight, but we also do it as we occupy each moment. The stories we’ve lived continue to unfold in the present, and when we live with them in mind, however nuanced they may be, however lightly we may manage to hold them—isn’t it possible that we’re not telling ourselves the truth?

In The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Milan Kundera writes that "novelistic" does not mean "unrealistic" or "untrue to life." We find motifs in our lives—for example: a woman enjoys an intimate Beethoven concert, her first experience of culture. Several weeks later she meets a man in a restaurant while Beethoven is playing on the radio and she decides to run away with him to the city. The stories we form about our own lives can hinge on larger or more complex things than hearing Beethoven, but the effect is the same:

“Guided by his sense of beauty, an individual transforms a fortuitous occurrence into a motif, which then assumes a permanent place in the composition of the individual's life....Without realizing it, the individual composes his life according to the laws of beauty even in times of great distress,” Kundera writes.

This kind of meaning is real, even if it is something we construct. Anyone who denies this, says Kundera, "deprives his life of a dimension of beauty."

Noticing the seams in Noémie Goudal's Observatories doesn't change the images. The buildings are still real, even if they are not what we expect. Goudal built them, and they occupied that landscape, and we can look at the photographs now and they're beautiful. Whether or not it’s true may depend on the kind of truth you’re looking for. But in this kind of narrative, a correct answer isn’t the point.

Unfinished Work

“The sad thing is they could try to finish it/But I don't think they will do it.”—The Alan Parsons Project

When Antoni Gaudí began work on the La Sagrada Família Basilica in 1883, he knew he would never complete the project himself. He took his time on the Gothic and Art Nouveau structure, supposedly commenting “my client isn’t in a hurry.” Construction continues today and the plan is to have it completed in 2026 to mark the century since Gaudí’s death. On the album Gaudí, the Alan Parsons Project laces through its tracks a sense of loss for what’s left unfinished with lines like, “Follow the light of truth as far as our eyes can see/How should we know where that may be? How should we know?”

I lost two artists from my life this past year. One, a dear Facebook friend, and the other, my well-loved mom. My grief for them is accented by a feeling of loss for their unfinished works. Elizabeth was working on a memoir. I was among a dozen or so friends who received her drafts as she completed them. I looked forward to holding her book in my hands and tracing her steps through the weaving of her work and words. I wanted to see which of her paintings she’d match with each chapter, recalling particular periods of her life. One I hoped she’d include was a creative depiction of mud pies that she considered pairing with her story of how, as a five-year-old, she decorated mud pies with what she found in her garden; feathers and flowers, then stored them to dry under her bed. This was an early memory in the life of an artist who opened a window for me to a world that was vibrant in color and fluid in motion. I could never put into words exactly what her work expressed for me, but seeing it come through my newsfeed on a daily basis removed the “film of familiarity,” as Coleridge said, and I began to see art, and often life, differently. As I miss her, I ache to see these works finished. Parsons’ words are a lament, “The sands of time won't wait and it may be too late.”

My mom painted with oils, acrylics and, my favorite, colored pencils. Wildlife was her muse. She painted horses, dogs, koalas, giraffes. But she often challenged herself by painting a Pacific coast, or a copy of an Ansel Adams. She generously painted and gave away family portraits or pet portraits for friends who asked. Just a week or so before she died, she told me she wanted to make paintings of photographs my son had taken of an owl and great egret. She had also been contemplating moving toward abstract art. I will now never see the world interpreted through her abstract perspective. These works have become “Secrets for keeping that won't see the light.” There’s also the element that as part of her “creation” she has left me, in a sense, unfinished.

Who knows where the road may lead us, only a fool would say Who knows what's been lost along the way Look for the promised land in all of the dreams we share How will we know when we are there? How will we know? Only a fool would say.

Christ’s words from the cross, It is finished, are consolation and sharp contrast to life's incompleteness. And while we can't know much of its mysteries, can anything be unfinished in eternity?

La Sagrada Família the war is won the battle's over La Sagrada Família for the lion and the lamb La Sagrada Família we thank the lord the danger's over La Sagrada Família behold the mighty hand La Sagrada Família the night is gone the waiting's over La Sagrada Família there's peace throughout the land.

Flames upon Their Head

When J.R.R. Tolkien writes, "Sub-creator, the refracted light through whom is splintered from a single White to many hues" and refers to a future time when "poets shall have flames upon their head," I wonder why this time can't be now. I've always believed this time to be now.

The connotation of splintered light (men, women, and artists) can be interpreted as hierarchical: the art of humanity subservient to God’s holy creation. Because we are made in God's image we can create, but our creations are "lesser." Our art and stories and poems are "lesser." Compared to God, we are just children playing out and about.

This interpretation can be dangerous. Maybe I’m a stickler for words, but this can infect how you think about yourself as an artist. Tolkien was arguing against materialists, evolution, and modernity, even more than he was contending against the myth-hater C.S. Lewis, who once called myths lies.

I want something more than just play. I need something more than just lesser light. Stories and poetry and music and art are all something more. Rather than lesser lights they are illuminating truths. They are "the elves that wrought on cunning forges in the mind, and light and dark on secret looms entwined."

As a writer, I believe in what Madeleine L'Engle says, "God is constantly creating, in us, through us, with us, and to co-create with God is our human calling.” A Creator is only a Co-Creator when he or she asks. The request must be made.

Struggling with the question of purpose allows us to examine our own role as artists and writers. I feel an immense sense of gratitude to those who commit themselves to this craft of love, who search, and grapple, and struggle. The time is now for the poets with flames upon their heads. It is you. Beginning with the first word, note, brush stroke. Even just starting with a prayer.

All art is wonderfully derivative

In 1969, California-based artist John Baldessari and his friend George Nicolaidis took a stroll through the city. While walking, Baldessari shot photographs of Nicolaidis pointing at things. On the surface the objects seemed random and rather ordinary, but they were items both the photographer and the one pointing found interesting. The film was developed and 35mm slides were distributed to fourteen amateur painters whose work Baldessari had seen at regional art fairs. The painters were instructed to faithfully copy the photographs. Baldessari then added captions identifying the painters' names. The fourteen works were exhibited in Los Angeles and New York under a series titled The Commissioned Paintings (1970).

So here's my question: Who is the artist? Is it Nicolaidis who pointed? Is it Baldessari who snapped the pictures? Is it the fourteen amateur artists who painted? Or are we the artist for assigning meaning (or disdain) to these works?

I am not suggesting this is great art, but I am asserting that creativity is inescapably collaborative. This is true even when we work alone. Even when we work alone we are in constant dialogue with others: Those that came before us, those that are part of our present culture, even those who will follow. The works is ours, but at the same time it is not.

All art is wonderfully derivative. All art is wonderfully unoriginal. All art is wonderfully borrowed.

So let me borrow from Dietrich Bonhoeffer: "Let he who is not in community beware of being alone."

Art is universal

“Art is universal,” wrote James Jackson Jarves. “It unites mankind in common brotherhood. . . . art is the connecting link in the chain of great minds. Through its language, thought appeals to thought, and sympathy echoes feeling.”

Jarves, a 19th century writer and art critic, beautifully captured the sentiments that ran through my mind while I was deep in the halls of the Chicago Art Institute. Of all the amazing works in that museum—works that span hundreds and thousands of years and come from every continent of the globe—I was struck most by a small, green, comparatively unimpressive plate in a hall of Chinese pottery. It was “Foliate Dish with Bovine Gazing at a Crescent Moon,” and my first reaction was to laugh. It’s a strange motif. A cow looking at the moon sounds absurd, like something out of a nursery rhyme.

My second reaction was absolute amazement. That plain, light-green dish seemed suddenly like the most amazing thing in the museum. Think of the implications of that plate! A man—a real man, who lived in real life, in a real house—looked at a farm animal in a field in China hundreds and hundreds of years ago. And he was so inspired by that cow that he went home and made a dish with its picture on it.

Think about it! It’s amazing! A real-life man saw a real-life cow, and that man put that cow on a dish, and now we can see it more than a thousand years later! That man had a name, and a home, and a family, and an appreciation for small, everyday sights like a cow in a field. He could never have fathomed that we would go see his plate in a museum on the other side of the world. He could never have known that a tourist from Lakeland, Florida would ever see his dish and feel a sudden kinship with him. The cow on the plate looks like any one of the cows that loll around the fields around my hometown, and it was captured in clay more than a millennium ago! What a wonderful thing!

Maybe I’m not making my point. Maybe, from your perspective, I sound like a crazy person raving about a weird dish and the fact that it has a cow on it. I don’t know. But I do know that, for a while, I felt a deep friendship with a long-dead Chinese potter whose plate was in a glass case a thousand years after he made it. I knew what Jarves meant when he wrote that “Distinctions of tongue or boundary lines disappear before the power of truths, which, like the rainbow, charm by the beauty of variegated hues, or, combined with light, illumine the universe.” I knew what he meant when he referenced a chain of minds connected by art—in my case, I experienced a chain of gazes. A cow gazed at the moon, a man gazed at the cow, a woman gazed at the man through a window in time opened by a small green plate.

Art is a remarkable thing . . . even when it takes the form of a rather unremarkable dish. The chain of minds Jarves references is accessible everywhere! You just have to look.

(Painting by Jamie Wyeth)

Elegy to the Spanish Republic

The differences between revolution in art and revolution in politics are enormous....Revolution in art lies not in the will to destroy but in the revelation of what has already been destroyed. Art kills only the dead. – Harold Rosenberg

Look at prints of art masterpieces too long and you forget how potent the real pieces are, with the power to wreak havoc on a soul. So I was caught off guard when I rounded a corner at the Denver Art Museum last summer and confronted a dark angel in Robert Motherwell’s perfect visual for evil, one of the more than 150 paintings he titled “Elegy to the Spanish Republic,” a protest against European Fascism.

The stark, absorbing blackness of the huge forms; the slightly arched contours and suggestion of wings bearing tidings of bondage and destruction; the scratchy outlines, hinting at both disintegration and restless movement; the meekness of the sky-white background in contrast: evil at its finest hour in an ever-forward thrust to take center stage. Museums place benches in front of paintings for the kind of undoing moment I had at that point.

Motherwell called his procession of variations on the theme that spanned his entire career, “a funeral song for something one cared about.” He was dogged in his conviction that “the world could, after all, regress,” and he’s right, for though Fascism had been exposed when the artist began painting his Elegies after the war, that spirit that forces arbitrary value on human life is alive and well in its many forms. Do I possess enough of the Original to pray in front of an abortion clinic not just once or twice, but 150 times, sing that radical funeral song for the unborn? What if the musings of bioethicist Ezekiel Emanuel in Why I Hope to Die at 75 became the “logical” framework for public policy that restricted life at the far end? We better all sit down on that bench. Without heavy doses of the Original, how easily we can become mere reproductions.

The Portraits Look Back

Fayum mummy portraits

 Greco-Romans in Egypt during the first few centuries after Christ commissioned artists to paint their portraits, often in encaustic, on wood panels that were then affixed to their mummified bodies. These mummy portraits, though painted after death, depicted living subjects, their closed eyes re-opened (and in some cases, mightily enlarged) by the artist’s brush. Comparative studies suggest that, while the paintings are somewhat stylized, they bore a strong resemblance to the people they represented. The old were depicted as old, the young as young, and a facial reconstruction of at least one mummy is a dead ringer for the man in the portrait. The Fayum mummy portraits, in other words, are fairly accurate pictures of people who lived nearly two millennia ago, painted in a style that could pass for contemporary.

The most striking thing about them? They look like us.

There’s only so much enthusiasm I can muster for landscapes and still life, though I realize some people can stare for hours at a lovely field or some artfully posed pieces of fruit. Only portraits hold my attention that way, and I think I know why. When you gaze at a portrait, the portrait looks back at you.

The most haunting artifacts of the ancient world are the human forms cast from hollows in Pompeii’s volcanic rock. The victims of Vesuvius, trapped in molten amber, emerge as rounded fetal abstractions, anthropomorphic depictions of raw emotion. Those hunched, cocooning forms preserve not just a horrific moment in time but also a universal feeling of helplessness in the face of death.

If the death portraits of Pompeii speak through abstraction, the power of the mummy portraits of Fayum comes from their particularity. They didn’t catch their subjects unaware in a moment of time. They depict people as they were in life, a host of individuals making eye contact over the span of centuries. These paintings preserve not just the form of the ancient men and women, but also their gaze.

When I put myself into the place of the Fayum artists, it’s hard to imagine them thinking in terms of “doing art for the ages.” Their work seems to have been part of the ritual surrounding funeral preparation. They were craftsmen adjusting set visual rubrics to resemble as closely as possible the features of the deceased. Like the embalmers and the makers of death masks, they had more in common with today’s mortuary cosmetician than with a painter exhibiting work in a gallery. And yet, uncannily preserved by the dry Egyptian climate, their work turned out to be for the ages after all. We do not know their names, yet they gave their subjects a kind of immortality.

The Birth of Innocence

This painting is titled The birth of innocence.

It is rich with color. Placed alongside artist Julien Spianti's other paintings, this scene appears expansive and bright. It is part of a series called Memento Vivi, which includes paintings with titles such as sin of repetition and sin of trust. These scenes are close to grayscale, and they don’t reach the edges of the canvas, as if part of each moment has been lost to memory.

But Birth of innocence is a departure in content as well as style: Spianti is showing us two moments in time.

The couple is also the subject of another painting, a dark moment in an unfinished room:

But when the boy comes in, the scene opens up.

Why is he here? And that title: birth of innocence? Innocence is what we lose. We fall. Even the explanation of redemption and rebirth somehow doesn’t explain to me the boy’s posture of tenderness. The gentle dip of his shoulder. If this is some kind of redemption, why has he entered into a past moment?

In an essay titled “The Limit,” Christian Wiman writes, "There are wounds we won’t get over. There are things that happen to us that, no matter how hard we try to forget, no matter with what fortitude we face them, what mix of religion and therapy we swallow, what finished and durable forms of art we turn them into, are going to go on happening inside of us for as long as our brains are alive."

Twelve years later, he wrote in My Bright Abyss, "every intellectual growth [must] remain rooted in that early experience of ultimate insight, ultimate unknowingness.... What sort of understanding could be emptier than one that diminishes or erases the moments that made understanding essential in the first place?"

It is both paintings together that make Birth of innocence so strikingly rich. The couple exists in a moment that remains unchanged except to layer it in time, to be entered into and opened up.

It is not an act of hopelessness to say that we carry our experiences with us always. There are hurts that will go on happening inside of us even while there is healing, too. Redemption is not the same as restoration. Redemption undoes no pain, reduces nothing. It expands us. It is a deepening, opening always more and more.

I think this is a metaphor.

In the winter quarter of my junior year of college, I convinced my roommates to run away from school. It was 1973 and I was nineteen years old. We drove from Bowling Green, Ohio to Chicago, and after three days of feeding our stomachs with deep-dish pizza and 3.2 beer it seemed right to feed our souls with a trip to the Art Institute of Chicago. We wandered from one gallery to the next, when we stumbled upon a special exhibit featuring the works of contemporary artists. On a far wall was a massive painting of the head of an attractive woman. It was by the American artist, Chuck Close and it was unlike anything I had ever seen.

The painting was highly detailed. I would later learn that most of Close's work from this period was painted in a style called Photorealism. I walked closer. The woman who looked attractive from a distance began to change. Her lips were cracked. Her skin was a bit wrinkled and greasy. I could see open pores, and split ends, and caked makeup. I kept walking closer. I stood in front of the wall-sized painting. Everything was now massive —the cracked lips, the wrinkles, the open pores, the split ends. But I also noticed something else. It was an unexpected beauty. A complexity, and a depth, and a sense of design.

I turned to one of my roommates and said, "I think this is a metaphor."

Becoming Two-Eyed

When your eye is healthy, your whole body is full of light. ~ St. Luke 11:34

 In accurately rendered Orthodox icons of the Mystical Supper of Christ, both eyes of each of the human subjects present are viewable to the observer. Except one, for Judas the traitor is painted in full profile, a single eye exposed. This is a common iconographic technique, to depict evil persons or the demonic obliquely, sometimes smaller and darker, their faces usually obscured. The use of this artistic form serves as powerful theology in the Church to symbolize spiritual and psychic absence — the half self — the body language version of the inner choice to succumb to spiritual disintegration.

Weak and double-minded though the eleven still were on that fateful night the Lord broke bread in their midst, the hearts of these men were ultimately captivated by Christ, a state never rendered more beautifully than in the ardent bending of St. John’s ear toward the locus of the divine pulse. Judas alone moves outside the symmetry of the circle, his one-eyed view and compulsive, grasping movements signaling a departure from the others’ resolve, to bring themselves calmly and fully to the table, as it were, waiting on Christ.

The tilt of our countenance can say it all, and the eyes really are windows to the soul. The Old French root of our word countenance means to contain. We are each image bearers. But we do not yet participate in the full “weight of glory” that grounds one in absolute boldness to face God directly, a state of heart requiring utter integrity to admit just how broken we really are. Yet in icons, even those in three-quarter profile are considered saints. Christ God, above all things, make us two-eyed.

What Is Art?

“What thoughtful man has not been perplexed by problems relating to art?” — Leo Tolstoy

A friend recently shared the above photo on Facebook when she visited the Tate Museum in London. The picture of Phyllida Barlow’s sculpture elicited strong opinions and lively conversation about what we consider art. Tolstoy tried to answer this question in “What Is Art?”his essay that stretched into the length of a book. Rather than how art relates to beauty, the feelings it evokes, or any of the other ways we might try to define art, maybe the best answer to the question is an indirect one: art is best appreciated when shared with others.

The responses to my friend’s post were varied. Most were “perplexed,”as Tolstoy said, about a pile of lumber being considered art. But one person considered it from a different perspective pointing out shapes, movement, shades of color, and the many lines inherent in the sculpture. This was the kind of input I was hoping for — someone who could help me see the pile in a different way. I think she tapped into the artist’s thoughts because Barlow stated that two of her inspirations were the river outside the museum and the “tomb-like”galleries. Indeed, in the river and huge open gallery spaces, there is movement, light and shadow, color and shapes. My friend said children were able to vote on the artwork in the museum. I’d love to know what they had to say about Barlow’s work. I’m pretty sure their view would sound something like the lines in Dean Young’s poem, “If I had to pick between shadows/and essences, I’d pick shadows./They’re better dancers.”

Looking at art with other people exposes us to a range of thought different from our own. I remember a book club discussion that completely changed my take on a scene that, with my own interpretation, made me disappointed in a book I otherwise liked. When our discussion leader compared the passage to a John Donne poem, the rich meaning and significance of the character’s actions became clear to me.

In his book Faith, Hope and Poetry, Malcolm Guite refers to the effect a particular speech in The Tempest has on its audience as “widening ripples”in their minds. It builds upon layers of meaning. Thinking through other people’s viewpoints expands our ideas about what art is and “widens ripples”in our understanding about the forms art takes. This leads us to appreciate aspects of art that we may not have considered on our own.

Art discussions bring us together. That doesn’t mean we'll agree on what art is, but it fulfills what Tolstoy called art’s essence “to mingle souls with another."

(Photo by Harriet Montgomery)

I too am a jackass

My favorite nativity painting is this piece by Piero della Francesca. It was completed around 1483, long after the larger inventory of the artist's catalog. It is painted with oils on a panel of wood and, like Piero's other works, it shows the artist's meticulous attention to perspective and composition. The painting is currently on display at the National Gallery in London but many believe the artist intended to have it hang in his family chapel near his tomb.

I love every part of this painting: the singing angels, the silent magpie, the fragile child, the contemplative virgin, the pensive ox, the storytelling shepherds—even the strangely casual portrait of Joseph who nonchalantly crosses his legs as he rests on a saddle. But my favorite part of the painting is the jackass in the center. He was once just an ordinary jackass, but today, with exuberant joy and unexpected privilege, he sings with angels!

And I think of my own life. And I realize that I too am a jackass who, by the grace of God, gets to sing with angels. And I like that.

But Sunday morning becomes Monday. So what will I do with that song?

How do you tell yourself the story you're in?

How do you tell yourself the story you're in? “Literature differs from life,”says James Wood, “in that life is amorphously full of detail, and rarely directs us toward it, whereas literature teaches us to notice.”In time, the amorphous details will fall into place, or else we’ll forget them. We will be able to frame our life in narrative. The purpose of our pain will be revealed. But until then?

Photographer Uta Barth says “people are slightly puzzled by how to relate to [her] work, because it doesn't give them any of the things that a traditional photograph would give them.”What the photographs offer is basic: light. Light shining onto a wall through a window. Light that is usually the background, or an accent, cropped so that this periphery is now our focus. Her photos are clean and well-composed. The plays of light she captures are familiar. Initially, it seems too ordinary.

Barth makes her viewers aware of the act of seeing. It is the initial confusion, the “questioning and reorientation" that is "the point of entry and discovery....The 'meaning' is generated in the process of 'sorting things out.'"

I find myself now noticing the way light falls on my carpet, the way it composes itself on my wall, shifts and fades throughout the evening. This is more useful to me than encouragements that eventually, I will look back on my life and it will be a grand story. Will this longing be fulfilled? Will I outgrow it? Maybe I don’t need an answer. I can notice the amorphous details without explaining them. I am at a point of entry, and right now, that’s meaning enough.

(Photos by Uta Barth)

Seeing into the Life of Things, Perspective and "The Sacrament of the Lord's Supper"

While with an eye made quiet by the power Of harmony, and the deep power of joy, We see into the life of things.                                              -  William Wordsworth

I’ll never forget the feelings I had the first time I saw Salvador Dali’s “The Sacrament of the Lord’s Supper”in the stair well of the West Wing of the National Gallery. Replete with my advanced degrees in theology and clear in my worked out apologetics, I, like many others, castigated it for its arrogant docetism, its sarcastic orderliness, its in-your-face anti-intellectualism. There was Jesus with a see-through body, the groveling disciples all bowed in perfect symmetry, the Father with no head. What a horror. What a travesty of the true beauty of the incarnation.

The painting was criticized by as widely disparate authors as Francis Schaeffer and Paul Tillich. Schaeffer accused it of providing a “mystical meaning for life…, a vault into”—in classic Schaefferian language—“an area of nonreason to give [Dali] the hope of meaning”. Tillich, more prosaically, called it “simply junk” in part because of its portrayal of Jesus as a “sentimental but very good athlete on an American baseball team” and a technique that was “a beautifying naturalism of the worst kind” (Michael Novak, “Misunderstood Masterpiece", America).

Dali himself, having embraced Catholicism in 1949 and broken completely philosophically with the Surrealists, apparently felt that he was simply portraying the Lord’s supper—emphatically not the Last Supper—as the miraculous thing that it is: a sacrament, a mysterious meeting of the transcendent God with every day mortals. The transparent Christ demonstrates the “real presence”, though unseen, of the Son of God. The headless Father fulfills the Scripture “You cannot see my face, for man shall not see me and live” (Ex 33:20, ESV).

So now I view the painting differently, but not really. I’m afraid most who see this painting will not have any idea of the painter’s intention. They will simply see a headless God, and think, “Yep. This is a pretty good portrayal of the Christianity I know—ignorant and slavishly medieval.”They will see the blue sky where the Father’s “heart”would be and think, “Just like I think. The church is just a bunch of cold-hearted creeps with no compassion for anyone not like them.” And they’ll see an irrelevant Christ, blond-haired and blue eyed, hand cocked like a faux pistol, and think, “This surfer dude is pretty cool but, man, is he out of touch.”

The painting now has its own life, and that life has a hard time depicting the reality of the suffering, magisterial, triune God to those without eyes to see.

Worried about your camel?

In the city of Padua stands a church; it's called the Scrovegni Chapel. From the outside the church is not much to look at but the inside is another matter altogether. Every interior wall of the chapel is covered with richly colored frescos. The frescos are the work of the Florentine master Giotto di Bondone. Together they tell the story of Christ.

The most famous fresco in the chapel is The Kiss of Judas, but my favorite is The Adoration of the Magi. I stare at the painting. I think of the magi on his knees, deeply worshiping as he kisses the feet of the baby Jesus. I think of the other two magi, clutching their gifts as they patiently wait their turns. I think of Mary and Joseph taking it all in, marveling that men would travel so far for an infant so small. And then there's the young attendant at the far left. Do you see him?

The invisible has become visible.

The infinite has become finite.

The Word has become flesh.

The resplendent miracle of God is in the arms of a virgin, yet it all goes unnoticed for a man worried about his camel.

Beauty and Saving the World

 Beauty will save the world.  - Fyodor Dostoyevsky

In the Orthodox Church, from Easter to the Ascension, an ethereal hymn is sung while the faithful partake of Eucharist. The brief lyrics implore all who will, to receive the Body of Christ, drink of the Fountain of Immortality. Assuming this transformation of bread and wine into God-flesh and fluid to be mystically true, one can only wonder why an earthquake doesn’t rupture the flooring or angels crack the rafters wide as we small and salvaged ones string forward like ducks to water to ingest Life itself. I’m reduced to a whisper as I sing, as the beauty, the “high art” of this hymn enmeshed with Eucharist, incrementally saves me.

My composer friend Don Newby explains that technically, the musical setting of this hymn feels the way it does on the human psyche partly because its composer has introduced suspensions—non-chord tones—into the line of music at strategic places to create tension, which is then each time given over to release. To the emotions and unconscious mind, these suspensions and subsequent releases feel familiar, mirroring human experience with its constant tensions and releases, dejection and joy, wretchedness and nobility. The music reflects life’s troubled splendor.

Yet I wonder, is my perception of the hymn’s beauty subjective, or is there something inherent in this piece, as in any work considered high art, that appeals to a common human urgency, consciously recognized or not, which is longing for unity with God. Given exposure to the “Body of Christ” hymn, would an un-churched teenager immersed from infancy in rap music find his throat constricted too, because the need within him for salvific beauty is the same as mine, who was weaned on Bach and sacrament?

Art theorists suggest that true art must ask the Big Questions, and sometimes seek to answer them. “Art should start a fire,” says artist Wes Hurd. If, as human beings, the thing most needed is inner brokenness made whole, sobriety of spirit wrought from turmoil, shouldn’t that be enough to ignite that fire?

Artists Anonymous

A friend recently told me of a ninety-three year old woman she met at an art show in Denver. The woman has painted her entire life and never had an exhibition. She is happy with what she has made and doesn’t care that she hasn’t had a show.

My wife and I recently watched Jem Cohen’s Museum Hours, a quiet film about the relationship of art to life. Set mostly in the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna, the movie gazes at and muses on paintings from the European masters. The musings are voice-over narration from a security guard at the museum named Johann—at one point, he stands off to the side while a guide lectures guests at length on Bruegel. Later, as we pan across paintings on the wall, he tells us that many of the paintings are the work of artists who went unrecognized and unrewarded while alive, while others were celebrated. “They hang here side by side,” he says. He then asks if we can tell the difference between them.

The ones who remained anonymous and yet labored on are the ones who fascinate me. I think of Joseph Grand, the hapless writer in Camus’The Plague. Grand works hard every day at combatting the disease, but when he goes home in the evening he works on his novel—actually, he obsessively rewrites the first sentence of his novel, trying to perfect it before he moves on to the next. He tells the protagonist Dr. Rieux that he dreams of a day when editors will read his perfect sentence, stand up shaking their heads in appreciation and say, “hats off, gentlemen.” Yet, knowing how unlikely this is, he labors on in obscurity trying to write the perfect sentence. Rieux calls him the story’s true hero because he has a little goodness and an ideal. His ideal is simply that the work itself is important and worth doing well whether or not anyone ever stands in admiration.

Many of my friends are writers, and artists, and musicians—often all three at once—but I have friends who do various other kinds of creative work. One friend designs and sews funky children’s clothes. Many teacher friends are constantly seeking creative ways to reach their students. A couple of chef friends of mine create delicious and fun dishes. Just like me, they want recognition for what they do well; recognition is not their goal however, not the people I have in mind. They labor on at their creative work for the joy of a thing done well.

If you knew you would never receive recognition for your creative work, would you still do it?

(Drawing by M. C. Escher)

The Eye Made Quiet: Symmetry, Uniqueness and "The Last Supper"

While with an eye made quiet by the power Of harmony, and the deep power of joy, We see into the life of things.

~ William Wordsworth

I love the symmetry I find in life, and I love its representations. The jangled, disordered musings of Jackson Pollock for all their beauty and interesting “patterns” have never been mine. Give me Leonardo da Vinci and “The Last Supper” every time.

And yet, and yet. My love for symmetry cries out for verification. In a world where uniqueness dominates, how can I so highly value the conformity of symmetry? Even God in His majestic creative power has built a diversity into the world that regularly surprises us, breaks our molds, our patterns. Am I opposing our King to hold balance and reflection in such high regard?

Of course the question is silly. God has built beautiful, orderly patterns into everything around us without violating the principle of the uniqueness of beauty. The sun comes up with such regularity we can time and explain the sunrise in staggering detail. And of course such regularities are, like Heraclitus noted long ago about the river, always the same and always changing. One gets both the diversity of unique beauty and the unity of regular science in every sunrise.

And so Leonardo’s masterpiece. Of course Jesus is dead center with six apostles to his left and six to his right. Despite what Dan Brown says, he points with the upturned left hand to the bread and with the downturned right to the cup. Even the apostles are grouped in threes, with Peter, Judas and John—the central characters perhaps in the apostles’ side of the drama, which is drawn from John 13:21ff.—forming the threesome to Jesus’ right. Of course the four panels to the left and right of the group, the three windows in the back, the paneled ceiling, the table with its pairs of legs intersecting the lines on the floor with perfect harmony, give the picture an atmosphere that is remarkably stable and symmetrical in every detail.

And yet, there is Peter’s knife—presumably the one with which he cuts off Malchus’s ear (John 18:10)—clearly in his hand, but being held at an awkward angle, an instrument of disorder. For its use, he will be rebuked by the Master. And there is Judas’s bag of money, clutched tightly in his right hand, while with his left he reaches for the bread of life, however tentatively. Woe to the world for stumbling blocks!

How these details, so small and insignificant in the painting as a whole, give color and life to it! But how meaningless they would be, if not in the context of the order Leonardo has given us, where things do not fall apart and the center does hold.

Man of Sorrows

The painting you are looking at was completed in 1860 by the 19th-century Scottish artist William Dyce. It is called "Man of Sorrows." I think it's an odd painting, though on the surface it does not seem that odd. Without the title we might think it is a painting of Jesus in the wilderness or perhaps in the Garden of Gethsemane. But the title tells us something different. The phrase “Man of Sorrows” comes from Isaiah 53:3 ("He was despised and rejected by men, a man of sorrows, and familiar with suffering. Like one from whom men hide their faces he was despised, and we esteemed him not.")

An internet search of this phrase shows us that “Man of Sorrows” paintings were commonplace during the Middle Ages. They were portraits of the scourged and wounded Jesus at the point of his humiliation, displaying the marks of crucifixion on his hands and side. Dyce's painting, however, looks nothing like this. Instead it depicts a unwounded Christ sitting on a rock. And yet, it is a portrait of a Christ who is clearly saddened. So how are we to interpret this painting?

It appears that part of the interpretation of this painting lies in our understanding that the landscape Dyce is depicting is not 1st-century Palestine. The landscape Dyce is depicting is the countryside of 19th-century Scotland. Christ arrives, but he is ignored. He is scourged, but not by whips and beatings. Instead, for Dyce he is scourged by indifference and apathy. He is the “unesteemed” Man of Sorrows. So I look at that painting and I’m ready to move on. But then I imagine for a moment: What if the landscape depicted by Dyce was not the countryside of 19th-century Scotland? What if it was someplace from the 21st century? What if it was my city? What if it was my neighborhood? What if it was my home?