Art

Entering The Easter Joy of Our Lord

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Peter Farago, The Resurrection

 

A prayer appointed for the closing moments of the Good Friday liturgy provides words with which we commit ourselves to God, and pray for the grace of a holy life. We pray this prayer “with all who have departed this world and have died in the peace of Christ.” The liturgy provides this prayer so that, having made our commitment, and request for grace, “we may be accounted worthy to enter into the fullness of the joy of our Lord.”

Through Baptism, through dying and rising again in Christ, we have already entered into the joy of our Lord. This is the joy that our Lord so freely shares with all who are open to receiving it. A notable aspect of the first disciples’ response to encountering the Risen Lord, was joy. He brought joy to those who had despaired, or doubted, or even had given up hope. He brought joy to Peter who had denied him three times. He brings the same joy to us.

To experience the joy of the Lord, we don’t need to wait until we pass beyond this life, through the veil, into what lies before us. What we await is the fullness of joy when, finally, we behold him, unburdened from the cares and allure of this world as these occupy our attention now. In Jesus’ Resurrection, and through our participation in his Risen Life, we see further dimensions of the New Creation that already is.

Through Grace, joy is now ours. Rightly, and by faith, we anticipate entering the fullness of the joy of the Lord. As a Robert Lentz icon of Thomas Aquinas reminds us, joy is more than a feeling; for “joy is the noblest human act.”

 

Good Friday 2025

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Stanley Spencer, The Cruicifixion (1958)

 

(I am offering here my Good Friday homily for this year, based on one previously shared)

In the passion reading we have just heard, we are reminded of the dark spectacle of what human cruelty can accomplish. With Jesus, it was a vain attempt to obliterate the most beautiful human being who ever lived. Thank God, we have no photographs of the horrifying things that were done to him, but only paintings. But consider this paradox: the beauty of art has provided a way for us to a reflect on one of the darkest examples of human violence.

Paintings of our Lord’s Passion seem divided into two broad groups. There are those concerned to portray the grim reality of Roman execution. And, there are those inclined to explore and express the inner redemptive significance of what happened.

At the center of any portrayal of the Crucifixion of Jesus is an inescapable fact ~ it was an act of political and judicial violence, where the forces of earthly injustice pretended to act in the name of human truth. The corollary to this is how Jesus’ subsequent Resurrection restored heavenly justice in the name of divine truth. Paintings of Jesus’ Crucifixion, and those of his Resurrection, usually give attention to his wounded body, even though his wounds then appear transformed on the Third Day. After all, this is one way the disciples recognize him after his death. How the death-marked body of Jesus looked after his resurrection, also provides a preview of his appearance at the end of time.

Charles Wesley’s Advent hymn, “Lo! he comes, with clouds descending” offers words that also apply to Good Friday.

“Every eye shall now behold him,
robed in dreadful majesty;
those who set at nought and sold him,
pierced and nailed him to the tree,
deeply wailing, deeply wailing…
shall the true Messiah see.

Those dear tokens of his passion
still his dazzling body bears,
cause of endless exultation
to his ransomed worshippers;
with what rapture, with what rapture
gaze we on those glorious scars!”

It is natural to imagine how the people directly responsible for Jesus’ death, from Judas and the high priests, to Herod and Pilate, might be overcome with grief at the triumphal Second Coming of the Lord. Those who pierced him might feel themselves pierced by awakened guilt and remorse. Indeed, for every one of us, seeing the fruit of our mischief and misdeeds can provoke us to tears.

But I think Wesley was getting at more than repentance and contrition. Surely, seeing the full beauty of the glory of our Lord, with his wounds transfigured, will also summon our tears — but with tears of joy. Wesley, prayerfully and with sensitivity, has given voice to the profound power of beauty. Especially when it is discerned in the most unexpected of places – in the face and body of the crucified One. Love… the most profound love beyond human imagining, is manifest in the face and gestures of the crucified messiah. For he reaches out his hands even to forgive those who have tortured and sought to kill him. This is the most beautiful thing we could ever see.

As we pray in a Morning Prayer collect, “Lord Jesus Christ, you stretched out your arms of love on the hard wood of the cross that everyone might come within the reach of your saving embrace…”

Perceiving all this helps us make sense of the paradox at the heart of Jesus’ Crucifixion. For, in it, we perceive the dramatic juxtaposition of serenity with antagonism, of beauty with its dark opposite, and of moral good with apparent evil. We can see this in two paintings I have included with your worship bulletin: Hieronymus Bosch’ painting of Christ Carrying the Cross, and Stanley Spencer’s 1958 painting, The Crucifixion. Looking at them, I encourage you to join me in asking an awkward question: with which person or persons in these paintings do we identify?

Hieronymus Bosch, Christ Carrying the Cross

Though some 500 years apart, both painters portray the tranquil appearance of the peaceful heart of Jesus, even in the face of vicious hostility. And like Bosch, Spencer helps us see what the beautiful One in our midst sometimes provokes. Especially when the shining light of his presence exposes the dark shadows within and around us. For his light sometimes prompts fierce anger and envy, as well as a callous indifference to cruelty and suffering. Things of which we are all capable. And we are likely to have much invested in denying this ugly truth. Strangely, when confronted face to face with the divine opposite of our perversity, we will either fight the light that we encounter, or surrender to it. The Passion narratives give us examples of those who resisted and even fought against the Light of the World. For we sometimes fight against the disturbing possibility that Jesus will conquer our pervasive ungodliness. And so, consciously or not, we try to do away with his godliness.

An encounter with true beauty can be unsettling and troubling, especially if we have already settled for so much less. We may often hope for the triumph of good over evil, that beauty will overcome darkness, and serenity will displace antagonism. But we cannot find it within ourselves to do more than hope. We cannot achieve the redemptive resolution for which we haltingly reach out with our feeble hands and hearts.

It is not an accident that the figure of Jesus in Stanley Spencer’s painting visually recedes in the foreground, while those who oppose and crucify him grab our interest and attention. Spencer, after mastering traditional realism, adopted what he called a neo-primitive style. He was a gifted colorist, and highly proficient with composition. And so, as Spencer has rendered him, Jesus’ skin tone and color roughly match that of the wood of the cross, as well as the clothing of the man with the hammer swung over his head. Spencer’s rendering of the Lord’s skin tone and color also match much of the sky and the ground below… including the tunic of Mary Magdalene, prostrate at the foot of the cross. This forms a compelling visual symbol. For Jesus totally identified with us, in his Incarnation, and in his Crucifixion. His crucifixion symbolizes his complete joining with us, and with our world of wrenching hurts and suffering.

In fact —as we see in Spencer’s composition and coloring— it is precisely because Jesus blended in so well with everyday life, that those who opposed him could literally gain the upper hand, ultimately with hammers and nails. (For he did not call down an army of angels to help him, as he could have.) But this is the marvel of the incarnation of our God in Jesus. The fullness of divinity thoroughly became joined with our fallen humanity. As the Gospels attest, this joining was so complete that many did not notice or have regard for his divinity. When we do notice his total identification with us, when we come face to face with the truth it represents, we have either one or the other of two reactions. We throw ourselves down in humility before him. Or, we seek to throw him down, to humble him before us.

These paradoxes are brought to their greatest prominence when, as he predicted, he is lifted up. His lifting up is his glorification, and the glorification of God within him. Yet his lifting up is on a cross, and in the agony of a humiliating public execution. Here we see the ‘strange beauty’ of our Lord — a beauty for which churches and museums better prepare us than do our malls and most TV shows.

So, let us “behold the fair beauty of the Lord, and … seek him in his temple.” We will find him! We will find him in the “temple” that he promised to raise in three days.

 

Additional note: Those interested in further reflection on some of the Holy Week themes raised here might wish to read my prior post, “What God Can Do, and Is Doing.”

The Beauty of What God Can Do, and Is Doing

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James Tissot, God Creating the World

 

If you are a Christian, and if you reflect on your formation as a person of faith, consider this question: Do you believe it is reasonable for God’s will to make sense to us? To ask this question opens the door to discovering how our beliefs about God were shaped, as well as our beliefs about God’s providential ordering of the world. Indeed, does God even want us to think about such things, or are we simply to accept and obey the divine will, regardless of whether we find this reasonable.

These questions also bear upon how we reflect upon what happened in Jerusalem 2,000 years ago, events that we consider during this Holy Week.

Broadly speaking, the Catholic tradition of thought – going back at least to Thomas Aquinas – anticipates a discernible overlap between divine rationality and that of created and redeemed human nature. God’s rationality is imprinted upon our powers of reasoning. By contrast, broad strands of the Protestant tradition – with its comparatively elevated concept of the Fall and human sin – have not nurtured and have even discouraged a similar expectation of such an overlap. Accordingly, we cannot expect or believe that our rationality has any real continuity with divine rationality.

One of the two traditions described above has emphasized the self-revealing comprehensibility of God, who intends for us to know, and not simply obey, the divine will. The other tradition has privileged the sense that God was and is wholly other, and therefore God’s ways are incomprehensible, except for small graces. Each of these two traditions has therefore had a different understanding of what it means for us to have been created in the image and likeness of God (see Genesis 1:26, in context).

A related and observable distinction regarding these two broad traditions concerns the relationship between grace and nature, and how this is construed. In the wider Catholic understanding, grace is more often seen as infusing nature, and present everywhere. Whereas a common view often found in Protestant piety anticipates that grace touches nature episodically, and sometimes is antithetical to it, given nature’s and our Fallen state.

James TIssot, God Appears to Noah

Another way we can distinguish the spiritual influence of the two traditions I am sketching here concerns the nature of God and of God’s activity. For example, shaped by a broadly Catholic catechesis, it is believed that there are at least three things that God cannot do: create a rock bigger than God can lift; choose to cease to exist; and, command us to hate ‘him.’ For, in the spirit of that same catechetical tradition, each of these three theoretical possibilities would be irrational, and thus contrary to the divine nature and being, as well as to who and how we were and are made to be.

Most Protestant thinkers and preachers would likely dismiss the first two of these three (im)possible ‘things’ as perhaps irrelevant rhetorical distractions. Yet, the third thing, however disagreeable and unforeseen in light of the New Testament, would probably be conceded as theoretically possible, especially given the historically Protestant stress on divine freedom and the importance of acts of will for personal right-believing. (In other words, though God could, God wouldn’t.)

A result of these differences between the two traditions is that questions about sin, misfortune, and the presence of evil, have tended to be handled differently in Protestant belief and teaching as compared to that shaped by Catholic spirituality. This difference can be noticed when we reflect on and speak about ‘bad things’ that happen to us. Does God cause such misfortune, or, allow it? How we tend to answer this ‘cause’ question can reveal something about the Christian catechesis by which our thinking and beliefs have been shaped. And how we think about this question regarding divine responsibility will benefit from insight going back to Aristotle concerning four different aspects of what the word ’cause’ can mean.

James Tissot, God’s Promises to Abram

Here is a fundamental question that can bring many of the above strands of thought into focus: Do we believe that God always loves us; always seeks intimate fellowship with us; and always seeks to draw us more fully into the merciful embrace of God’s redemptive purposes? Or are our answers to these facets of a fundamental question somewhat qualified? And if qualified, then by what?

Especially in view of our observance of Good Friday this week, I believe that we can answer this question about how God loves us in the affirmative. And we can do this without overlooking or ignoring such NT images as the narrow gate, and the Lord who will ask what we have done for the least of his brothers and sisters.

CS Lewis, among others, reminds us of a way that we can appropriately affirm God’s abiding love for all people. We can illustrate Lewis’ view with the following image: We may weep when we come before Him at the end of our lives. But our tears may be both from sorrow as well as from joy at our redemptive inclusion, despite all that may count against us. As long as, in that moment, we acknowledge Him, and who He really is. For we all will have the opportunity to do so.

Alleluia – Easter comes for everyone. If only we could better see how and why that is true!

 

Additional note: As an Anglican, I include my own tradition within what I refer to above as the broadly Catholic tradition. My goal with this post is not historical analysis but to provide grounds for reflection regarding two differing – yet sometimes overlapping – ways of approaching some central questions.

Charlie Russell: Stories That We See

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Whose Meat? (1914), on display at the CM Russell Museum

 

Charlie Russell’s culturally perceptive and action-oriented paintings reflect the social sensitivity that he possessed as well as his visual awareness of the natural world around him. Russell was a much-appreciated story teller, a natural gift that I believe is reflected in his art work. In Charlie Russell’s paintings, we see stories, and many of them represent the climax-point of stories we want to hear.

Shadows Hint Death (1915)

This raises a significant question regarding the works I am featuring in this post: What distinguishes these Russell paintings from examples like those of James Tissot’s biblical scenes, or Norman Rockwell’s Four Freedoms images? Regarding the paintings of both of the latter two artists, the word illustration may be used without diminishing our regard for their beauty or accomplishment. Yet, and without rendering a judgment about Tissot and Rockwell’s work, there may be a discernible difference between what are technically referred to as illustrations, and paintings that are more properly termed “fine art.”

Tom Gilleon’s recent exhibition of paintings at the CM Russell Museum included a personal reflection by the artist regarding his transition from being an illustrator for Walt Disney and NASA, to pursuing painting as a fine art. In that reflection, he refers to an illustrator’s skill in distilling imagery into its simplest forms, for example, by focusing on the power of simple lines and basic shapes. He suggests that, in his transition to fine painting, he pursued those basic shapes and forms as ends in themselves, being aware of how his paintings connect viewers directly to our primal human understanding of such forms. In a statement titled, “Profound Truths in Simple Forms,” he says that “by eliminating all unnecessary elements and being as direct as possible, an artist has the opportunity to guide viewers’ eyes, to tell them stories, to move their emotions.” The Russell paintings I feature here do just that.

Meat’s Not Meat Til Its in the Pan (1915), on display at the CM Russell Museum

Yet, the question remains. What distinguishes fine art paintings from those we call illustrations? If the latter are of a publishable kind, surely they share some of the properties we associate with fine art, and reflect a comparable degree of skill by the artist and a dedication to quality in the results. Building on Gilleon’s reflection noted above, we might say that illustrations are produced to accompany the telling of a story, whereas many examples of fine art paintings do the telling of the story. They do this by capturing more than a particular moment, while being suggestive of the broader context of what has come before, and what might come next. Another way to make the point is this: artworks intended as illustrations generally provide an image of a moment, or a dimension of a story that is communicated by other means, such as narrative.

Yet, in examples of fine art, a painting is meant to communicate on its own, apart from any accompanying text, and sometimes even without a title. In such work, factors such as atmospheric conditions of weather and lighting, or the emotional disposition of any characters portrayed, as well as interaction between them, often play a major role. And the presence and function of these latter elements can significantly determine the effectiveness of a particular work.

Paying the Fiddler (1916), on display at the CM Russell Museum (depicting a cattle rustler caught in the act)

In these works of representational art, we begin to inhabit the scene and story, while finding out more about them as we consider the imagery. Russell’s attention to background, the broader context, and surrounding figures, contribute significantly to the overall effect of his work. His very well-known early painting, Waiting for the Chinook (The Last of 5000), provides a reference point for this distinction. As a relatively simple image, its power lies in how it rises above the simple portrayal of a fact, in how it suggests multiple answers to a larger question.

Waiting for the Chinook (The Last of 5000)

This may help us observe how each of the paintings featured here not only tells a story, but invites the viewer into those stories to imagine what has led up to the moment being portrayed, as well as concerning what might yet happen in the given situation.

Wild Horse Hunters (1913)

Except for the early Chinook painting (seen above), all of the images included here date after the turn of the 20th century, when the “Old West” had in large part already transitioned from the lore and imagery of the “cowboys and indians” days, an ethos Wild Bill Cody had successfully captured in his eponymous Wild West Show, and was a world soon eclipsed by the emerging film industry.

In Without Knocking (1909)

 

Additional note: Readers may also be interested in the prior post, “Charlie Russell’s Vision of the ‘Old West’.” Once again, I commend a visit to the CM Russell Museum, in Great Falls, MT, to see original Russell paintings and sculptures as well as the artist’s studio and residence, carefully preserved adjacent to the museum. Interior photos of Russell’s studio and home are seen the photo below.

Charlie Russell’s Vision of the “Old West”

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Charles M Russell, The Fireboat (1918)

 

One of the most prolific and skillful painters and sculptors who sought to portray the myth and reality of the “Old West,” having witnessed its waning days, was the cowboy-turned-artist, Charlie Russell. He discovered his real vocation after moving to Montana in 1880 to try ranching at the age of 16. Fans of Russell like to repeat the story of how the would-be-artist communicated to absent land owners about the condition of the few surviving cattle after a brutal winter decimated their herd. Instead of a written report, Russell sent a painting of a single bony steer surrounded by prowling coyotes. Titled, Waiting for a Chinook (The Last of the 5,000), the illustration has become one of Russell’s best known images.

From his earliest days, Russell had the gift of being able to capture with drawing and paint the lives of what he would have called ‘Cowboys and Indians’ in ways that others found compelling. By the time of his death, at the age of 61 in 1926, Charlie Russell was one of the most famous artists in America. Despite his abiding interest in the romance of the Old West and its cowboy ethos, Russell was quite knowledgeable about Native American cultural patterns and spent a significant amount of time with the Blackfeet and other regional tribal peoples, making many enduring friendships in the process.

Ever since visiting the C.M. “Charlie” Russell Museum while in middle school, I have wanted to return to Great Falls, Montana, in order to see the splendid collection of his paintings and memorabilia for which that facility provides careful and intelligent stewardship. Recently, I was able to attend the annual CM Russell Museum weekend fundraising gala event that includes an auction of a wide array of Western art, including pieces by the museum’s namesake.

The Charlie and Nancy Russell home

 

Charlie Russell’s Studio, on the same property as the home

 

The Russell Museum is located adjacent to the artist’s restored home and log cabin studio, on a quiet street in a residential neighborhood in Great Falls, a relatively small city located on the banks of the upper Missouri River. Little did we know that this event, coinciding with the annual Western Art Week expo, attracts many buyers and patrons, eager to add to their collections. We marveled at the auction of a 1924 watercolor by Russell, Women of America, sold for the astonishing price of $1.6 million! Another watercolor by Russell, the 1904 Mandan Buffalo Hunt, attained an auction price of $750,000. Both of these recently sold works (reproduced here from the catalogue) provide a sense of Russell’s culturally perceptive, action-oriented paintings.

Women in America (1924)

 

The Mandan Buffalo Hunt (1903)

 

Of particular interest was a presentation offered by the Crow Nation linguist, Dr. Lanny Real Bird, who helped non-Native American listeners undertand the significance of sign language among Plains tribal peoples, and how it was a skill with which Charlie Russell had become proficient. This under-appreciated aspect of Russell’s skillset can be discerned in a painting by the artist that has become one of my favorites, The Fireboat (seen at the top of this post).

Dr. Lanny Real Bird

 

Russell’s painting, The Fireboat, was completed in the latter part of his career, and appears to depict a scene along the upper Missouri River near the artist’s home territory. A steamboat (visible in the far lefthand edge of the painting) has attracted the attention of three members of the Blackfeet Nation, who are joined by a fourth in the background. A setting western sun illumines the figures of the mounted Blackfeet warriors, which – along with the steamboat – subliminally suggests the cultural shift occurring on the Western Plains in the last decades of the 19th century, with the gradual eclipse of one nation by another. The middle figure, whose image helps form a visual triangle within the composition, employs a hand signal, presumably after having viewed the riverboat making its way along the river. Not obvious to the uninformed viewer, but aided by a knowledgeable interpreter of Native American signs such as Dr. Lanny Real Bird, we learn that the hand signal in The Fireboat is the one for fire, making Russell’s title for the painting intelligible.

Charlie Russell’s Western paintings may not display the refinement of technique that we might associate with the work of Frederick Remington, but possess a compelling dynamic realism in their nuanced portrayal of real people, accurately observed in their daily lives. It is worth noting that many of Russell’s finest compositions were completed at his and Nancy’s summer cabin at the edge of Glacier National Park. A visit to Great Falls to see the Russell Museum as well as the excellent Lewis and Clark Interpretive Center, just an hour or so from Helena (the state capitol), can enhance a visit to Montana – even in winter – with a significant experience of the artistic and historical spirit of the “Old West.”

 

 

The Beauty of Clay at The Bray

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A studio courtyard at the Archie Bray Foundation in Helena, MT

Pottery and the wider field of ceramics represent an historical art form focused on the production of useful objects even when they are prized and collected for their beauty. This wide area of engagement with clay, and with products made from clay, is now fully a part of the Fine Arts curriculum of most college art departments. An evolution in the practice of ceramics from a primary focus upon utility to an unhindered exploration of the possibilities inherent in the medium was surely a logical result of two things. First, there has been a significant increase in the number of practitioners who work with clay out of a sheer love for what can be done with it, and who have pushed beyond traditional parameters of the art. A second factor has been the general influence of the ‘modernist’ trend in the fine arts, encouraging painting, sculpture, and printmaking to transcend representation. This has yielded such recognizable examples as abstract expressionism in painting, and more broadly what has been called ’conceptual art.’ I have touched upon an example of this broad transition in my prior posts featuring the work of David Shaner.

Given my appreciation for Shaner’s work, we visited the Archie Bray Foundation in Helena on a recent trip to western Montana, where he had been a resident artist as well as the Foundation Director. The Bray, as it is now known, will celebrate 75 years of service in 2026 as a non-profit center for the support and promotion of the ceramic arts. It provides studios and technical facilities, as well as residential fellowships, enabling aspiring ceramicists from across our country and beyond to pursue and develop their artwork. Visitors are welcome to come and see the well-equipped studios while engaging with the resident artists, view and purchase examples of work created at the facility, and explore the grounds of the historic brickyard.

Structures from the former Western Clay Company brickyard at The Bray

In its early days, the Archie Bray Foundation was associated with the pursuit of ceramics as an artform influenced by both western and eastern folk art traditions. Particularly influential in this regard was a visit to The Bray by the English potter, Bernard Leach, and Japan’s Shoji Hamada, later designated as a Living National Treasure by the Japanese government. Leach and Hamada’s presence at The Bray in 1952, along with that of the Japanese philosopher and art critic, Soetsu Yanagi, encouraged attention to the aesthetics of the Mingei tradition of Japanese folk art. David Shaner numbered among those receiving significant creative inspiration from this influence.

Soetsu Yanagi, Bernard Leach, and Shoji Hamada, with two early resident potters at The Bray in 1952

The Bray is situated in the foothills of the Rocky Mountains on the western edge of Helena, in a setting incorporating an attractive blend of historic and modern buildings. While visiting this center of creativity, Martha and I met and were able to visit with a young woman named Lexus Giles, from Jackson, Mississippi, whose home is just a few hours north of our own. Her work epitomizes that of many of her fellow artists in residence in her exploration of ideas and forms unique to her own imaginative vision. This reflects The Bray’s laudable encouragement and support for resident artists, for periods up to two years, freely to pursue artistic work reflecting their different backgrounds and particular interests.

Lexus Giles in her studio at The Bray

For Lexus, this means the opportunity to explore aspects of African American culture through experimentation with the tradition of making face jugs or face vessels. Lexus explained this relatively unfamiliar art form as having origins in the Carolinas among enslaved people, who may have had access to clay and a simple means of firing it, and who used the results to mark graves when headstones and the like were impossible for them to acquire.

Face Jugs by Lexus Giles

Face Jug with a ‘church lady’ motif, as noted by the artist

While we met and were able to learn from Lexus Giles about her work, we also appreciated the opportunity to view ceramic creations by other resident artists at The Bray, displayed in a gallery in the administrative building. Some examples are featured in the photos below.

We came away from our visit at The Bray impressed with the quality of the work by the resident artists, and by the positive atmosphere of creativity evident in the studio spaces. Visitors are welcome to the facility and to tour the studios without an appointment, and to walk among the remaining structures within the former brickyard. Back when I was an art student, The Bray is just the sort of place where I would like to have had the opportunity to pursue my interests and develop my skills.

 

Additional note: Those interested in learning more about Lexus Chiles may wish to see the following brief biography that is posted outside her studio at The Bray.

Once again, in anticipation of this coming Lenten Sunday, I offer a homily I prepared in a prior year, which may be accessed by clicking here.

Beauty in the Face of Jesus

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William Holman Hunt, The Light of the World (detail)

 

Since the earliest centuries of the Christian era, believers have found encouraging meaning in paintings of the imagined face of Jesus. Since no such images exist from his lifetime (as far as we know), but only written depictions of Jesus’ character as displayed in his words and actions, later artists have literally drawn upon acts of imagination in how best to present him. In so many of these paintings of Jesus, we find abiding images that convey an abiding love.

Salvator Mundi, attributed to Leonardo da Vinci

More than a few in our great Tradition have had an aversion to the making of these images, believing that such efforts to depict Jesus risk engaging in or promoting idolatry, a concern that is not difficult to appreciate. Yet painters, particularly in the Christian East, have believed that, in view of our Lord’s Incarnation, paintings of Jesus and of holy events in which he was involved are not only appropriate, they can be divinely inspired windows into eternity.

Christ Pantocrator, an icon in St. Catherine’s Monastery, Sinai, Egypt

Modern Evangelicalism has played a parallel role to this in the belief that compelling contemporary images of a beautiful and winsome Jesus can aid the faithful by stirring devotion in Bible reading, prayer, and in daily living.

Warner Sallman’s 1940, Head of Christ, reprinted in many Protestant Bibles and devotionals

The face of Jesus, by R. Hook, a 1964 painting widely popular in the Jesus Movement of the 1970’s and among Evangelicals

How do we picture Jesus? Although though we may appropriately demur from referring to God by using personal pronouns or with gender-based associations, when hearing the Gospel reading on Sundays, or while reading devotional books, images of Jesus inevitably arise in our conscious awareness generated by acts of imagination.

Here we receive encouragement from C.S. Lewis, J.R. Tolkien, and other spiritually inclined writers, who have helped us recover confidence in the idea that the power of imagination can be a redeemed vehicle for conceiving holy images, both of biblical scenes and also of allegorical parallels based upon them.

Hieronymus Bosch, Christ Carrying the Cross (detail)

The popular pious suggestion that we ask ourselves, “what would Jesus do, or say about this matter,” can therefore be a helpful spiritual exercise, especially if pursued reverently and with a scripturally informed process of deliberate thought.

Christ and the Rich Young Ruler, Heinrich Hoffman

In my prior post, I shared detail of a compelling image of Jesus by the 19th century painter, Heinrich Hoffman. I love this painting, expressing the artist’s rendering of Jesus’ encounter with the so-called rich young ruler. Hoffman portrays well the love Jesus had for and showed to the man who asked him how he could enter the Kingdom of Heaven. The painter depicts how Jesus loved him and, we believe, continued to love him, both before and after this man turned away in discontent and confusion.

As we grow in our familiarity with images of Jesus, we can become sensitive to the way that Western art has tended to portray our Lord’s humanity, influenced by the European artistic tradition, which has not overlooked Jesus’ Semitic background. Nevertheless, how artists and others portray Jesus finds in him reflections of themselves, which is true to his known desire to identify with who we are. It has become more common in recent years for artists to portray Jesus in the form and appearance of other cultures, and the iconographic paintings of Brother Robert Lentz (some of which I have featured before) provide a good example. Among them is his image of Jesus set within the context of Japanese Buddhist spirituality, seen in the following image.

Turning again and again to such images can be most helpful to us in our spiritual journeys, especially when we choose well-conceived and well-executed paintings, drawings, or sculptures, that express to us facets of divine beauty, as well as the goodness and truth of God, found in the face of Jesus.

 

Note: Jaroslav Pelikan’s book, The Illustrated Jesus Through the Centuries, provides a ready and helpful way of finding images that can accompany our journey through Lent toward Easter living. Once again, I would like to thank Kathy Kane for my copy of this beautiful book.

In anticipation of this coming Sunday, Lent 2, Year C, I offer here a copy of a homily from a prior year, which may be accessed by clicking here.

The Beauty of Truth

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The Risen body of Christ bears the healed scars from the Crucifixion in Matthias Grunewald’s Isenheim Altarpiece.

My commitment to writing about Beauty is evident in my ongoing posts. I have also written about the connection between Beauty and Goodness as well as Truth, the three so-called Transcendentals. To use a phrase from another context, these are three things we ‘cannot not know,’ at least in principle.

As I expressed in my most recent post, in Christ we find the icon of God. For he is the icon of God’s beauty, God’s goodness, and of God’s truth. In turn, and as we are reminded during Lent, we are all called to become icons of Christ, and to seek to embody in ourselves what we find revealed and embodied in him.

Yet, of these three Transcendentals, Beauty, Goodness, and Truth, the third may be the most difficult for us to realize in ourselves, much less to try to describe. This is one reason why since earlier times people have recognized a hierarchy among these three things that we cannot not know. Among the three, beauty tends to be most evident and accessible to us, followed by goodness. The first often leads to greater appreciation for the second, and both can lead us to search for truth, however and wherever we may find it.

It is nevertheless not uncommon for us to be unsure about the presence or the nature of beauty and goodness when viewing objects, actions, or events. And we are very capable of engaging in disputes regarding such evaluations. But here is a paradox: though we may be just as unsure about how best to characterize what is true, or how to evaluate that quality in relation to ourselves, we seem to have much less hesitancy when it comes to ascribing the apparent absence or deficiency of truth in the words and actions of others.

To paraphrase a successful nineteenth century aspirant to the Presidency, grand ideas outlive those who hold them. James Garfield expressed this view just months before his assassination. Frederick Douglas was so impressed with Garfield’s principles and potential for national leadership that he led the procession onto the rostrum for Garfield’s Inauguration. Among those abiding principles and ideals was Garfield’s voiced recognition of the truth within a difference between many white Confederate soldiers and their leaders, and the black men who served in the Union Army. The former had betrayed the flag and their country; the latter did not. Ideas that help us identify and articulate things we value, like beauty, goodness, and truth, abide.

Nevertheless, for many of us, what we reckon to be true – as compared to what is beautiful and or good – is not always so clear. And yet, we believe in Truth. Even when we despair about its instantiation in general human affairs, and in the more limited spheres of our daily involvements, we believe that what is true should guide our lives and our conduct with one another. And, when it comes to what we practice as compared to what we believe or hope for, truth seems to be a principle that we more often honor in the breach.

Another paradoxical aspect of our desire to know the truth has to do with how what is true can not only be uncomfortable but even painful. A mother waiting up for a teenage son who is hours late getting home, and a husband awaiting word from his spouse who has not returned from responding to a wildfire, are likely to have mixed emotions about what they might learn when answering a knock at the door. And yet, in these and in countless similar cases, we want to know what is true, and the truth we want to know is one that is unleavened with inaccuracy or falsehood even if it is painful to hear.

What is true can be beautiful and good, at least for those who believe in the Gospel of Redemption. This is because Christians believe that ‘facts are friendly,’ and that there is no person or situation that is outside the scope of God’s loving redemptive purposes. What personally can be hard to accept as true can still be beautiful and good. And if not so at the moment, then it can be so when we pass beyond the veil and see the embodied Beauty, Goodness, and Truth, for which we so yearn.

Heinrich Hoffman, Jesus and the Rich Young Ruler (detail)

For us, Beauty and Goodness, as the first Transcendentals, provide this experiential advantage: we find them more readily evident as they are instantiated in objects, events, and in others. Truth, by contrast, can seem more elusive and more subject to the variable preferences and uncertain powers of our apprehension. As a Transcendental, Truth – like Beauty and Goodness – has objective reality. Yet, like her sister “Graces,” Truth must sometimes, if not often, penetrate the fog of our subjectivity and experiential awareness for us to perceive it.

 

Additional note: I am publishing this post on Ash Wednesday, a day on which we are invited to reflect on the patterns of our lives in light of the truths we have come to know, and which have been revealed to us.

In anticipation of this coming First Sunday in Lent, I offer here a copy of a blog post with an attached homily (with related images) that I presented in a prior year, based on the Lectionary (which may be accessed by clicking here).

The Beauty of Redemption-Based Identity

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Fra Angelico, The Transfiguration, prefiguring the glory of the Risen Christ and the beauty of our redeemed humanity

 

There is beauty to be found when we base our identity or concept of ourselves upon the Redemption that has been freely shared with us. Yet, we can experience sadness when we rest our self-perception upon our ailments and disorders. Regardless of our feelings, these alternatives represent choices we can make on a daily basis.

We all have an innate disposition to sin, and in various ways we all enact this disposition. But, for Baptized people and all others, this is not ‘the be all and end all’ of who we are made to be. Our end is in Christ, and so our wholeness is in Christ. We may be sinners; we are also among those who have been redeemed and are being transformed by the power of the Resurrection.

Appreciative Inquiry teaches us that what we we focus on grows. This empirical fact can be seen in two readily observable ways. New soccer players, especially the youngest ones, tend to swarm around the soccer ball. And, when on a fast break to try to score a goal, almost inevitably they kick the ball toward the goalie, the apparent impediment on whom their eyes are affixed instead of upon empty areas of the net. Another example lies in how Drivers Ed instruction teaches aspiring drivers to keep their eyes on the road. Why? Because we steer toward what we are looking at, often with sad results when what catches our attention are the flashing lights of an emergency vehicle on the shoulder.

I remember an observant friend remarking about another person known to both of us, regarding how that person was “someone who dotes on his infirmities.” Not a recipe for health in light of our greater awareness about the symbiotic relationship between psychology and physiology.

These insights may have what I hope are obvious spiritual implications. They may lead us to ask, toward what end are we living? Upon what image of our humanity are we most focused?

Raphael, The Transfiguration (detail)

An ironic aspect of the way that we can associate our identity with symptoms or conditions from which we suffer is how we commonly speak about our embodiment. When we say things like, “my leg is killing me,” or “my head feels terrible,” we may unintentionally reinforce a kind of dualism. All too casually, we dismiss such statements as mere figures of speech, and we may wish to consider their further significance. If I say that ‘my leg is killing me,’ then I suggest that in some way ‘my leg’ is not ‘me.’ Because my words imply that ‘it’ is acting upon ‘me.’ In a slightly more abstract way, we make statements like, “my conscience is bothering me.”

When I am inclined to think and speak in this latter way, I suggest by my words that ‘my conscience’ is something other than ‘me,’ and that it has some power of agency over or against me. What we commonly refer to as ‘my conscience’ might better be described as my experience of ‘consciencing’ (an intentional neologism). Or about how I am the kind of being who experiences and engages in acts of conscience. As the older moral tradition recognizes, conscience must not only be followed; conscience can and must be educated.

So, to say that “I am powerless over sin” does not necessarily mean that I am powerless over my disposition to engage in the bad choices and decisions that I tend to make. Like my emotional experience, I may not be able to choose to have the various physiological conditions that I experience. But I can choose how I respond, or how I act in relation to such experiences and conditions. As John Wesley is remembered as having said about the vice of lust, “a bird may land on my head, but I don’t have to make a nest for it with my hair.”

Experientially, I can associate myself with the conditions that may ‘happen to’ me, and with which I may suffer. But conceptually, I can also choose to identify with the reality of the person I have been made to be and become. By grace, we have been made to become icons of Christ, who is the beautiful Icon of God. To seek to become so is to seek to become an icon of the goodness of God as well as of the truth of God, as these have been revealed to us in the face of Christ.

Rembrandt, The Ascension, an image prefiguring our redeemed humanity to keep in mind so that we may, as the Prayer Book’s venerable words put it, “thither thereto ascend.”

 

Note: The wisdom of our Holy Tradition is reflected in the fact that our Lectionary appoints Gospel readings about the Transfiguration on two occasions every year: on the last Sunday after the Epiphany (or the Sunday before Ash Wednesday and Lent, March 2 this year), and also on August 6, the Feast of the Transfiguration of our Lord. / In addition, readers interested in some of the ideas presented above might consider further material relevant to them in my book, Ethics After Easter, available from libraries and booksellers.

The reflections offered here may assist choosing a theme upon which to focus in preparing for and in keeping a Holy Lent.

A Lost Rembrandt: Is Beauty Ephemeral?

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A lost painting: Rembrandt’s The Storm on the Sea of Galilee

In 1990, in one of the most notable art thefts in modern history, two men disguised as police officers entered the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum and stole Rembrandt’s famous painting, The Storm on the Sea of Galilee, and 12 other significant works of art. When one considers the loss of this painting (for it has never been recovered), as well as the many significant works of art that have disappeared through history, two related questions may arise: Can beauty be lost? Is beauty ephemeral?

In the process of reckoning with the recent Los Angeles wildfires, people who are art-minded are beginning to wonder about a particular aspect of all that has been lost, which understandably has received less attention, works of art.

After fires and earthquakes, beautiful buildings can be rebuilt, sometimes even better than before given the learning that may have come with their destruction. But what about lost paintings, drawings, and sculptures?

The Adoration of the Magi, attributed to Rembrandt and long thought to be lost but recently re-discovered, known otherwise through copies made by others.

Clearly, and as many of the examples featured in this space attest, works of art may now sometimes be best (or even only) appreciated through photographic reproductions obtained through the internet. It has not always been so. In earlier times collectors relied upon expert advisors and buyers through which they obtained artworks for their collections, for which they may at times only have had descriptions or comparatively poor reproductions – as did Gardner with the assistance of the famed historian, Bernard Berenson. And yet, especially when the originals had yet to be seen “in person,” or are no longer available for personal viewing, works like Rembrandts Storm painting have a beauty that is not transitory, and these artworks continue to exist as they inhabit the memory and imaginations of many others, as has been true in my own experience.

Yet, whether or not examples of Beauty in art or in nature are available for personal perusal, Beauty itself abides.

Another lost painting attributed to Rembrandt, The Unconscious Patient, also recently rediscovered.

To be consistent with their faith claims, those who are Christian believers should be among the first to agree that Beauty is not ephemeral, not here in one moment and gone in the next, nor of passing significance. Beauty, like Goodness and Truth, has since ancient times been recognized as one of the three Transcendentals. In terms of Christian faith claims, we might consider the witness of an example like the prayer for the Feast of the Transfiguration of our Lord (August 6), found in The Book of Common Prayer:

O God, who on the holy mount revealed to chosen witnesses your well-beloved Son, wonderfully transfigured, in raiment white and glistening: Mercifully grant that we, being delivered from the disquietude of this world, may by faith behold the King in his beauty; who with you, O Father, and you, O Holy Spirit, lives and reigns, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.

The Beauty of the King that is spoken of in this prayer, as with his divinity and his full participation in the Shekinah glory of the Father, is eternal rather than temporal. And so, in reference to God, to the divine nature as well as to the three persons of the Trinity who share it, we should properly speak of the source of Beauty, rather than as an example of Beauty.

Yet, as the recent Los Angeles wildfires remind us, while examples of Beauty can – at least in some respects – be ephemeral, the idea and reality of Beauty abides, continuing to inspire us even when examples of Beauty are no longer there before us to admire.

Plato, Aristotle’s teacher, continues to teach us!