Theological Reflection

Easter Sunday 2025

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Peter Koenig, Christ as Second Moses (The Rainbow Resurrection)

 

Having six granddaughters, aged twelve down to two years, I’m very familiar with unicorns and rainbows. There is something about little girls and pastel colors that seems universal. So, when I go into the stores these days, and see all the Easter decorations, I think of our granddaughters. Because everything I see on display seems to be a rainbow of pastels, colors, and patterns, which our little girls love.

Well, as we know, our culture has tamed and domesticated Easter. Good Friday with its silence and its dark remembering is a challenge for us. For we seem to have enough darkness and bad news everyday as it is. And Easter Sunday morning provides the antidote we long for. For a few hours, and even for a few days, we can get a lift, a happy bounce, in a way that we hope for.

But deep down, we know that we want more than a brief lift in our mood, a brief enhancement of our sense of well-being. Our hearts truly long for a lasting joy. For we hope that though happiness may be fleeting, blessedness is abiding. And it was blessedness that Jesus was announcing and commending in his Sermon on the Mount. So here is our question this morning: How does the Gospel Good News about the discovery of an empty tomb help us find a sense of blessedness, and, in a way that might be lasting.

This morning I share with you three images by the English painter, Peter Koenig, images which I think can help us on our spiritual journey this Eastertide. This is our Easter journey toward discovering and experiencing a lasting sense of blessedness. For we discover the kind of blessedness that does not overlook the darkness, or pain, or sadness, that may be a real part of our lives. What we celebrate at Easter is not the simple replacement of what has come before, with something new that wipes away the past. We are not celebrating the spiritual equivalent of a vacation from daily life. For then, in a few days or weeks, we would have a sense that ‘we must now return to reality.’ The reality we celebrate today and throughout Eastertide is the reality of Resurrection transformation.

Now, how do we know this? We know this first from the reports of the Disciples – both the women and the men – who saw the Risen Lord. And who recognized him when they saw his healed scars – not absent scars, but healed scars! They were the first witnesses to the transformation that God brings to us in Resurrection Life. And Resurrection Life is God’s great culminating chapter of what we call Salvation History.

So let’s set our spiritual awareness within the sweep of biblical Salvation History. Here, I offer you a simple phrase with which to help identify and to remember the heart of this mystery. “Through the waters of death into a new covenant life with God.”

Left side panel for Christ as Second Moses

I invite you to look at Peter Koenig’s painting, Jesus as a Second Moses (or, The Rainbow Resurrection), along with its two glorious side panels. Here we notice several details, at least one of which will direct our thoughts toward Easter. We readily notice the rainbow, along with the pastel colors at the top and bottom of the central panel. These – of course – suggest the pastel colors we associate with Easter cards and Easter eggs, and other holiday decorations.

But let’s remind ourselves of what that rainbow first represented. In Salvation History, a rainbow came after a forty day period of massive death and destruction. Most of what we would consider to have been ‘life on earth’ was destroyed and lost, most people, and almost all animals and plants. Noah and his family, and the animals on the ark, traveled through the waters of death into a new covenant life with God. That death, however extensive, however gruesome and abhorrent, was and never would be the last word. God’s Word is – and always has been – a word of promise, a word of covenant. Where we aim for good, things often seem to go bad. Yet, God always aims for good, and achieves good.

Next, we should think of Israel, walking between and through the waters of death at the Red Sea. This brought them to Mt. Sinai, and to the great new Covenant between God and Israel, where blood was sprinkled upon the altar of God, and also upon God’s people. They were then led on a forty year journey through the wilderness to the threshold of their Land of Promise.

This was the moment when Joshua and God’s people crossed the Jordan. This water crossing echoed and recalled our forebears’ two prior journeys through the waters of death into a renewed covenant relation with God. Israel’s renewed covenant relation with God upon the west bank of the Jordan, within the Promised Land, signaled their desire to be faithful to God, and to God’s ways, no matter what.

Right side panel for Christ as Second Moses

And yet, the next most significant event embodying this pattern was the baptismal practice of John at the same river Jordan, centuries later, and Jesus’ own Baptism, by John. Of those who came out to John, many if not most of them were Jews by birth and also upbringing. To them, baptism was foreign. For baptism was what Gentile converts did, not Jews! And so, for them to submit to, and receive, John’s Baptism, was a genuine act of living into God’s holy covenants with their ancestors. Yet it was also a submersion into the waters of death ~ death to old ways and old ideas, as well as death to certain prior social and family relations. For John pointed to the renunciation of sin, and a return to God’s ways. It was also the path into a re-newed covenant life with God.

Jesus’ own acceptance of Baptism at the hands of his cousin, John, symbolized something other than a personal need of his. Scripture instead suggests that Jesus, himself, chose to live into this moment. He did so out of his deep identification with all of us, in what would become his world-wide family. Through John’s ministry, and in Jesus’ acceptance of it, Jordan waters once again became a symbol ~ a symbol of going through the waters of death to sin, and acceptance of a renewed or new covenant life with God.

And so, when each of us was or is baptized into Christ, we join all of these faithful people who came before us. In Baptism, with them we cross through the waters of death, into a new covenant life with God.

This may prepare us to acknowledge how we are portrayed in Peter Koenig’s painting. For we are represented by those depicted as standing in the purple shadows, behind the ‘Christ-as-Moses’ figure. We are people who live and walk in darkness until we meet the true light, the Light that comes into the world to enlighten everyone. On what, then do we base our hope? Surely, it is on the hope represented by the fruit of Jesus’ death and Resurrection.

The Son of God embraced the human body, and he became one with it. His body has become the Body we have embraced, and with which we have become one. The Body of his transformation has become the Body of our own transformation. His death and Resurrection was and is our doorway into a new life. This is what this day and our liturgy are all about.

Alleluia! Christ is Risen!

 

Additional note: here I offer my Easter homily, shared this morning at Grace Church, St. Francisville, LA.

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.

The Beauty of Objectivity

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William Blake, The Ancient of Days (one of numerous hand-colored prints)

 

I like to use a couple of throw-away lines: First, the world was here before we were here to notice it (or try to describe and evaluate its various facets). And, second, God was here before we were ever able to think the thought, much less give value to or try to describe this fundamental insight. And so, the world had God-given beauty and value before we were here to notice such things. To put this matter in the formal terms I propose that we recover, we were objects of God’s subjectivity before God ever became an object of ours. These insights ought to be primary in our outlook upon the world, and upon our lives within it.

The stark alternative to what these throw-away lines represent is the view that the world, its meaning and any purposes within it, and or God, came to have significance if not also actuality, when we chose to notice or imagine such things.

I have written before urging recognition of how beauty exists apart from the ‘eyes of the beholder.’ This is to say that the reality of beauty transcends the perception and apprehension processes of the one who beholds it. Another way to say this is to contend that beauty has objective reality. But what do we mean when we say something is objective?

Here, I would like to commend an insight regarding this word, ‘objective,’ and its pair, ‘subjective,’ terms we may use too casually. For we tend to employ these words most often to characterize two different aspects of how we perceive matters that come before us. One we regard as being oriented toward what is factual; we use the second to refer to that which is subject to the variability of emotions and sentiments that are particular to ourselves.

We need to recover a prior sense of what these two words, objective and subjective, can mean. We can return to using the word objective, not first to refer to the fact-oriented aspect of our consciousness of the world, but as referring primarily to the world itself and to the things within it. In this recovered use of these terms, the objective can best designate the objects of perception. And the second term, the subjective, can best represent the subject of our perceptions (us).

We can, of course, have ‘subjective’ notions about the objects of our perception, while we can also seek to be more accurate in our sense of those things that we perceive. Accurate description and evaluation of the objects of our perception are aided by comparative reference to the perceptions of those same things by others, and thus are aided by an effort to step beyond notions that are particular to ourselves and to our private experience of them.

In this respect, the practice of good science shares a basic property with the practice of good religion. Both seek to describe what is true, and what is in accord with reality.

God the Geometer (from a medieval manuscript)

In perhaps an overly simplistic summary, the choice between these two outlooks upon ‘what is,’ emerged with what we now call the Enlightenment, and the development of what we now call ‘natural science.’ And yet, the emergence of modern science, and the world view which it has come to nurture, lies in pre-modern theism, in the ancient and primal belief that before all things, was and is God. And that God was and is the author of what the medievals called the Book of Nature, who was also the author of the Book of Scripture. Two books with overlapping significance, by one Author, about all that was, and is, and ever shall be.

Among the works of this author, and behind or within them, are ideas, ideas latent in the mind of the Author. And preeminent among these ideas are Beauty, Goodness, and Truth. These ideas represent the highest things we cannot not know, especially if we seek to have our minds shaped by the mind of the Author of all things. Beauty, Goodness, and Truth, are therefore – as we like to say and think – objective. That is, they are among the highest, most valuable and excellent, objects of our perception. And whether we grasp their significance, and how we grasp their significance, as fellow-subjects of their perception, can of course be – as we like to say and think – subjective.

William Blake, Newton as A Divine Geometer

Nevertheless, the objects of our perception ought to govern and discipline our shared and comparative perception – as fellow-subjects – of Beauty, Goodness, and Truth. This is the beauty of human objectivity and of subjectivity.

 

 

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.

The Beautiful Spirit of my Friend, Renee

 

I want to share my continuing appreciation for the beautiful spirit of a friend with whom I have been a colleague in life and work for over twenty years, and from whom I have learned much. Renee was first a mentor to me, as someone who exemplified spiritual authenticity while also demonstrating leadership gifts that have come to be recognized in the wider Church and in the corporate world. Renee truly loves people in a genuinely infectious way. It is no surprise, therefore, that she is a natural team leader who is blessed with the gift of inspiring others to become more whole, and to take the pursuit of holiness more seriously.

Renee was raised in the Midwest and the Southwestern desert, but yearned for a wider worldview than what her family and her early educational and social communities seemed to offer. This has led her to pursue a great deal of travel throughout her life, a good bit of it overseas. She has always been a seeker who has moved through life with the humility of an inquisitive learner and perceptive observer. To me, these qualities are fundamental.

I got to know her as a fellow leader at conferences in what she and I humorously might call the ‘early days,’ when she sought to share her vision for mission and ministry with a wider community. I remember her approaching the task of assembling some fifty-plus plastic transparencies to be set upon an overhead projector {remember those?}. And yet, despite these kinds of challenges we commonly faced as conference presenters, her story and personal witness were always compelling. For she quickly made meaningful connections with others in ways that encouraged us to identify with what she had come to see and know, and then as things we could take on to value in our own lives.

Some personal details of Renee’s life-journey fortify my appreciation for who she is, and the person she has been open to becoming. After her childhood and subsequent education, largely shaped by life in middle America, she adventurously responded to a ministry opportunity that took her to a rural area in the Philippines. This was likely a significant growth opportunity as well as an early indication of some emerging directions in her future vision and work. In so many ways, she has had an inclination to approach ideas about what it means to live as a spiritual being who engages with this world in all its complexity, with curiosity and a compelling equanimity. I particularly value her intentional pursuit of aspects of Asian cultural and spiritual life, and her frequent travels to the far side of the Pacific. These pursuits stand out to me given my own childhood and adolescent experience of growing up in Japan.

As a practical example, her decision for many years to risk adopting a pattern of clothing that could by some be labeled as ‘cultural appropriation,’ was yet a sign of her openness to other and non-traditional ways of living and of seeing things. Based on a spiritual principle, she has also often led worship after removing her shoes. For her, these kinds of decisions regarding how she approaches daily life are not an affectation, and call attention to what she is focused upon and to those things in which she finds value, rather than to herself.

Having lived and worked for a period of time in the humid hill country of the Philippines, Renee has also been effective in encouraging church community in the comparatively arid rural areas of Idaho, the azure coastal region of central California, as well as in the rice-growing flat land of southeastern Arkansas. Throughout her life, Renee has been drawn most to the desert, and to the spirituality that can be found in places like where Abraham perceived the nearness of God, outside his tent on a bright starry night, and where Jesus confirmed his vocation while setting aside the alluring possibilities offered by the Enemy. Her regard for the divine Spirit, who is often best found in the desert and in desert-like places, provides insight about the abiding interiority of Renee’s spiritual character.

What particularly marks Renee as a learner and as a teacher is her remarkable capacity for creative but also sincere self-remaking. She has in many ways transcended perceived attitudinal ‘boundaries,’ and has not only grown but has flourished in her life-informed path, to the joy of many others.

I offer this with thanks for my friend, Renee Miller, who embodies a wonderful appreciation for ‘the beauty of holiness.’

Here are some words from Renee that I think capture well her positive view of her life and ministry: “My primary core value is attributing the highest motive to people’s behavior. This helps me stay in the place of unconditional love, and for me, there’s nothing more theological or beautiful than the reality and demonstration of love. It can transform even the ugly and horrific, and if not transform, at least lessen its power.” Surley, these are words that we all want to live by.

 

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!

 

Can Beauty be Found in Judgment?

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James Tissot, Jesus Looking Through the Lattice (detail). This may remind us to ask, in whose sight do we live?

 

One of the most widely quoted, but perhaps least understood, sayings of Jesus amounts to the admonition, do not judge. A common way these words are understood can be summed up in the instruction, do not judge others lest you, yourself, become judged (see Matthew 7:1 and Luke 6:37).

Did Jesus mean to forbid all forms of judgment?

A good way to appreciate Jesus’ teaching in this regard is to make a distinction between judging persons, and judging a person’s actions. For example, trying to appropriate his teaching on this matter may require us to make judgments about what actions would constitute faithful obedience to his words, and those which are proscribed by him. In order to follow his teaching, I may need to ask myself, would this or that act of mine (whether merely in thought, or in my spoken words and or actions) constitute an example of what he meant to forbid?

At the same time, and if following through with the above distinction, I need to consider a further question. If Jesus did have the above distinction in mind, what more precisely was he concerned to have us try to avoid doing?

When interpreting Jesus’ words on this subject, New Testament scholars tend to focus on the inherent problem of our presumption of a divine prerogative. This is evident in our predilection to be the ones who determine which actions, behaviors, and or attitudes, are characteristic of the things that will impede our (and more especially other persons’) enjoyment of eternal fellowship with our Father in heaven. According to this understanding, we are not to make judgements like these: “That person, as a result of his words or actions, is as good as ‘gone to hell!’” Or, “that person is beyond redeeming, and is no longer worthy of my attention or positive regard.”

James Tissot, Woe Unto to You, Scribes and Pharisees

On the other hand, and as I seek to think, live, and love, as a graced participant in the life of Kingdom fellowship, I need to make distinctions about what kinds of thoughts, words, and actions are characteristic of Kingdom life. To do this requires making judgments – judgments about thoughts, words, and actions, rather than about people. And Jesus, as quoted in John 7:24, appears to encourage making right judgements. Though in this context in John’s Gospel, he is asking for right judgement to be made about himself, about who he is; his encouragement to do so rests upon his hearers making such judgements based on their (or our) experience of having engaged in similar acts of prudential reasoning.

James Tissot, The Soul of the Good Thief (a reminder of the Good End toward which we are able to live)

Making good or right judgments about what is characteristic of Kingdom life, and about choices or actions within it, can not only be helpful, even crucial, but also a thing of Beauty. Seeking first the Kingdom of God, and God’s righteousness would seem not only to permit such judgments, it may require making them. Indeed, how else are we to know what patterns of life, and specific types of action, fulfill Jesus’ teaching in the Sermon on the Mount? For we are able to make judgements about what kinds of thoughts or actions, and what kinds of disciplines or practices, can help us grow further into the holiness of Christ, our living icon of a beautifully redeemed humanity.

James Tissot, The Sermon of the Beatitudes (detail)

One key to understanding this implication of Jesus’ teaching about the value of right judement is provided by considering a number of Biblical and Prayer Book texts regarding the connection between our participation in the Beauty of the Lord, and our grace-enabled growth into divine righteousness. I hope to develop this idea in a subsequent post. For the moment, I will restate a maxim I like to remember: We are called to live as we pray – to the Father, through the Son, in the Holy Spirit. This helps us to “see thee more clearly, love thee more dearly, follow thee more nearly, day by day.”

 

The closing words in the last paragraph above are a quote from St. Richard of Chichester, as found in hymn 654, The Hymnal 1982, and are familiar to many of us from a song featured in the musical, Godspell.