Year: 2024 (Page 1 of 2)

I’ve often been fascinated by the characters artists have shown to be present at Jesus’ birth, who they’ve omitted, and the implications of their choices. Clearly Mary and the baby Jesus are there as the primary characters, and Joseph too, albeit in a less significant role if they took the ‘Virgin Birth’ literally, or in a more prominent one if maybe they didn’t.

Often angels are present, perhaps singing and dancing in celebration, as the only figures who truly understand the significance of what is happening, thus underlining the Divine Presence.

Shepherds might be there, representing ordinary men interrupted from their work, and sometimes mid-wives to represent working women. No priests or obviously religious figures. But in paintings commissioned by wealthy patrons, three kings or wise men and their impressive entourages are there, with the kings looking remarkably like the wealthy patrons. [Who of course are not portrayed as shepherds] They’re usually shown as representing the three ages of man, one young, one middle-aged, and one elderly. They also usually represent different countries of origin, with one having a black skin, to show that this birth was for the salvation of all the human race. If they’re wise men rather than kings, then other faiths are also present.

Some artists place animals in the scene, a donkey, cattle & sometimes sheep or a camel, with the implication that salvation was for the animal kingdom, and maybe all of creation, as well. But often they are omitted, with the implication, intended or not, that salvation was just for humans.

But I’ve just been sent, by my daughter Hannah an article by Erna Albertz in which she reflects on a 1515 painting “The Adoration of the Christ Child,” created by a follower of the Dutch painter Jan Joest of Kalkar.  

No animals in this one, but “a close look at the artwork reveals two characters who appear to have Down syndrome. One a shepherd–looking down at the scene from behind a post at the center of the painting–and the other an angel standing beside the mother Mary, these two participants in the nativity are situated in what would seem to be places of honor.

Because the painter is unknown, his motive for placing them there can only be surmised. He may have had a child with Down syndrome or simply known individuals with the condition. At that time, the syndrome also may not have been formally diagnosed as it is today. What seems beyond doubt is that he felt they belonged there, in the midst of the holy scene. Tears came to my eyes when first examining this painting: I have a younger sister with Down syndrome and can strongly relate to what the painter must have been trying to convey. Against what must surely have been a hostile environment for people with disabilities, his work attests to the power of love. I thought you’d appreciate seeing it too.”  And I do.

Another writer whom Hannah came across commented: “This oil on wood painting shows a classic nativity scene, and the little angel kneeling at the front on the left clearly has Down’s syndrome. Some think the shepherd at the back on the left also has an additional chromosome. At the time when the work was created it was common for the faces of those who had commissioned the art to feature within it. Perhaps we are looking at the face of the much-loved daughter of a wealthy and proud 16th Century Flemish family here. 

So examine your Christmas cards depicting the Birth of Jesus, and any nativity tableaus you may witness, and ask yourself ‘Who is the salvation depicted here for, who is included and who is absent, and why? And what are the implications of the choices that have been, probably unconsciously, made?’ And, even, who would you want to be pictured present at Jesus’ birth if you were to be in the position to commission an artwork?

First posted in http://contemporaryspirituality.blog

I was recently in Sheffield with my daughter Lizzie, and we visited the Graves Gallery hoping to see a favourite painting of mine by Gwen John, ‘A Corner of the Artist’s Room in Paris’. It was out on loan, so I bought a postcard instead. It is a remarkable image.

It captures what R S Thomas might have called ‘the presence of an absence’ for neither the artist nor anyone else is in the picture. There are no signs of the artist’s equipment. We just have an empty chair with a white cushion facing slightly towards us, there is a blue garment strewn across it, a white parasol resting against it; and a table in front of a window, on which is a small vase of flowers. Gwen John is conspicuously not there, but there are things that indicate that she has been there and will return there, and together with the room itself, simple and uncluttered, with a window onto the world outside, they give a powerful sense of her presence. We can intuit quite a lot about her from this space that we know she inhabits, despite her absence. The existence of the picture implies that the artist herself must have been present in order to paint it, but chose to remain absent from it. Not even the title gives her away: it could be any artist.

I find that quite fascinating. On reflection its saying something that in many ways is commonplace and obvious. If I enter a room it will tell me a lot about the person/people who have created and inhabit it. If I visit an urban space it will tell me something about the culture of the people who live there. Reading this blog you might get a sense of the man who wrote it, without having ever met me in the flesh.

The winner of the Booker prize has just been announced, its ‘Orbit’ by Samantha Harvey, and I read it a couple of months ago. It’s about a day in the life of the International Space Station currently orbiting the earth sixteen times a day: the cosmonauts rather humdrum existence, and what they feel as they gaze at the planet, their real home. Earth looks very different from out there of course, it’s awe-inspiringly beautiful.

While in Sheffield, Lizzie and I went for a walk in the Rivelin Valley, and it was stunning & awe-inspiringly beautiful too, with its bare trees & autumn colours.

The Great Cosmic Artist, of course is as absent; from all this as Gwen John is from her painting, but we can intuit much about Her/Him from the clues that are available to us. Its just a matter of looking and being aware of the Presence that is hiding in plain sight.

First posted in http://contemporaryspirituality.blog

Come Lord Jesus.

You are coming.

Christ has died

Christ is risen

Christ is coming again

and again, and again;

every day you come.

Every moment. 

You come, you show up

in the dross

in the loss

in the smile of the senile. 

In the mall,

the Mass, the Mosque

in the market, damp

cellars where rats scamper.

In the Hope & Anchor

you come, you show up

Look out! He’s on the way!

Recently I went with my friend James to an art gallery to see a small exhibition of just three paintings. One of them we both knew well, the other two less so. We spent a long time looking & talking about each painting in turn, and the more we looked the more we saw, and what we saw went beyond a simple description of the painting itself. We began to see what I would call “the painting behind the painting,” an awareness that the painting was about something more than just its surface subject. As the artist must have spent weeks if not months working on it, it was difficult to imagine that he was not aware of what we had begun to see. It must have been something he had glimpsed or become aware of and felt duty bound to share, while knowing that not everybody would understand it.

I suspect that all creative artists, be they poets, novelists, composers or whatever, would recognise this process: of creating something that hints of a reality behind the surface reality of what they have created. Indeed it may have been an awareness of this deeper reality that they were primarily concerned to communicate.

This is a process that I recognise. I enjoy reading poetry, for example, and a good poem has not only a surface meaning but something deeper that requires serious probing to reveal itself. The same is true of a good novel. Music often causes an immediate pleasure behind which lurks something deeper. But the same can be true of a meeting, or a conversation, a view of a landscape. Potentially it can be found in anything, and by anybody, although some people have a particular sensitivity to it.

The Irish writer Noel Dermot O’Donoghue in his book ‘The Mountain behind the mountain’ writes of this ‘hidden reality. In it he sets out to explore “the possibility that there is a region or regions of reality which are discovered by way of an imaginative inner perception that is not simply projective but delicately and profoundly receptive of a world or worlds of reality normally concealed. This faculty that perceives what is really there, comes as a fruitful marriage of what is in the mind and what is outside it. It involves a deep attunement not available to all.”

“Thematic and systematic thought may close the doors of perception. Primal perception, for all its elemental realism, leaves those doors open, or at least ajar, so that the light of imagination……may shine through & illuminate, for a moment or as a constancy, the mountain behind the mountain.”

Prayer invites us to do something similar: to be aware of a reality present in everyday reality but also beyond it, a reality that we are invited to trust and place at the centre of our lives.

Any activity that takes us there is prayer. Activities that lead us into stillness and silence take us there. It is an area of reality that we can try to stay open to and which enriches and deepens us. We find ourselves opened to a reality that opens itself to us, inviting us to trust it, to have faith in it, but over which we have no conscious control. We can only submit to it or choose not to as Lord Kenneth Clarke once did.

He described: “A curious episode……. I had a religious experience. It took place in the Church of San Lorenzo, but it did not seem to be connected with the harmonious beauty of the architecture. I can only say that for a few minutes my whole being was irradiated by a kind of heavenly joy, far more intense than anything I had known before. This state of mind lasted for several months, and wonderful though it was, it posed an awkward problem in terms of action. My life was far from blameless: I would have to reform. My family would think I was going mad, and perhaps after all it was a delusion, for I was in every way unworthy of receiving such a flood of grace. Gradually the effect wore off, and I made no effort to retain it. I think I was right: I was too deeply embedded in the world to change course. But that I had ‘felt the finger of God’ I am quite sure, and, although the memory of this experience has faded, it still helps me to understand the joys of the Saints.”

I shared this blog with my friends James and he commented:

“One of my reflections after our visit to the gallery was the astonishment at how long we had spent and I wondered whether a destabilized sense of time is common to all these experiences and is in some ways a confirmation of them…”

I think that’s he’s spot on.

First posted in http://contemporaryspirituality.blog

In one of her excellent newsletters [newsletter@themarginalian.org] Maria Popova wrote some words that touched me deeply not least because they appear to me to be profoundly true. I quote them here, not in full but without further comment from me.. She wrote:

“Somewhere along the way of life, we learn that love means very different things to different people, and yet all personal love is but a fractal of a larger universal love. Some call it God. I call it wonder. Dante called it “the Love that moves the Sun and the other stars.” 

Because the capacity for love may be the crowning achievement of consciousness and consciousness the crowning achievement of the universe, because the mystery of the universe will always exceed the reach of the consciousness forged by that mystery, love in the largest sense is a matter of active surrender (to borrow Jeanette Winterson’s perfect term for the paradox of art) to the mystery.  It may be that we are only here to learn how to love.”

She went on to quote words of the palaeontologist, philosopher of science, and poet Loren Eiseley:

“The venture into space is meaningless unless it coincides with a certain interior expansion, an ever growing universe within, to correspond with the far flight of the galaxies our telescopes follow from without… That inward world… can be more volatile and mobile, more terrible and impoverished, yet withal more ennobling in its self-consciousness, than the universe that gave it birth.”

She then went on to describe how walking to his office afternoon, deep in thought while working on a book, Eiseley trips on a street drain, crashes violently onto the curb, and finds himself facedown on the sidewalk in a pool of his own blood. In the delirium of disorientation and pain, he looks at the vermillion liquid in the sunshine and suddenly sees life itself, suddenly feels all the tenderness one feels for the miracle of life whenever one is fully feeling. And then, with that wonderful capacity we humans have, he surprises himself:

Confusedly, painfully, indifferent to running feet and the anxious cries of witnesses about me, I lifted a wet hand out of this welter and murmured in compassionate concern, “Oh, don’t go. I’m sorry, I’ve done for you.” 

The words were not addressed to the crowd gathering about me. They were inside and spoken to no one but a part of myself. I was quite sane, only it was an oddly detached sanity, for I was addressing blood cells, phagocytes, platelets, all the crawling, living, independent wonder that had been part of me and now, through my folly and lack of care, were dying like beached fish on the hot pavement. A great wave of passionate contrition, even of adoration, swept through my mind, a sensation of love on a cosmic scale, for mark that this experience was, in its way, as vast a catastrophe as would be that of a galaxy consciously suffering through the loss of its solar systems. 

I was made up of millions of these tiny creatures, their toil, their sacrifices, as they hurried to seal and repair the rent fabric of this vast being whom they had unknowingly, but in love, compounded. And I, for the first time in my mortal existence, did not see these creatures as odd objects under the microscope. Instead, an echo of the force that moved them came up from the deep well of my being and flooded through the shaken circuits of my brain. I was they — their galaxy, their creation. For the first time, I loved them consciously, even as I was plucked up and away by willing hands. It seemed to me then, and does now in retrospect, that I had caused to the universe I inhabited as many deaths as the explosion of a supernova in the cosmos.

It is often like this, in some small sudden experience, that we awaken to reality in all its immensity and complexity. Any such awareness — whether we attain it through science or art or another spiritual practice — is an act of ‘unselfing‘, to borrow Iris Murdoch’s perfect term. And every act of ‘unselfing’ is an act of love — it is how we contact, how we channel, “the Love that moves the Sun and the other stars.” It is the self — the prison of it, the illusion of it — that keeps us trapped in lives of less-than-love. But a self is a story, which means we can always change the story to change, to dismantle, to be set free from the self — and it might not even require a bloody face.”

First posted in http://contemporaryspirituality.blog

I woke early one morning last week, and being wide awake, knowing that I wouldn’t be able to doze off again, I got up and performed my usual morning tasks before getting dressed and going out for my morning walk.  It was quieter than usual, and I saw nobody.

I decided on a whim, that while I’d do my usual walk, I’d do it in reverse order. I was surprised and slightly amused at how different everything seemed. It wasn’t different of course it was exactly the same as it always was, but it looked and felt different because I was coming at it from a different direction. I came up a slope when usually I’d be going down it, and the view was very different. It felt like a new walk, seeing something familiar but as if for the first time, with the anticipation of, perhaps a fresh start is too strong, but certainly of a refreshed vision.

All this reminded me of something I often say to myself when I find myself trapped by a seemingly intractable problem with either no obvious solution or one I don’t care for. “There’s always another way of looking at it” I say. There always is, possibly several other ways. They may be no better than the one I’m feeling trapped with, but to discover that there are alternatives and that I have choices, takes away the feeling of being trapped & leaves me feeling empowered rather than disempowered. 

The trick is learning to become good at looking at things, & life in general, in ways other than with our habitual assumptions. The New Testament word ‘repent’ mean change direction, look at things differently, and Jesus’ announcement of the presence of God’s Kingdom is an invitation to view the world differently. Wise religious teachers, many comedians including clowns, novelists, poets, artists and creative women and men, anybody somehow other than us, can provoke us into doing so for that may be their gift to us. 

First posted in http://contemporaryspirituality.blog

Increasingly I feel uncomfortable with the term ‘spiritual direction’, with its implication of a one-sided meeting with an authoritative person. Instead, I prefer to talk of a ‘spiritual conversation’ which implies to me a mutual meeting of friends. Both terms are concerned with a meeting in which God is felt to be present. An obvious Biblical example of such a thing is the meeting of Mary and Elizabeth described in Luke’s Gospel

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When I was a young man beginning to study The Bible, the story of The Annunciation always left me cold and mystified. I was very doubtful about the existence of angels, and the idea that one might ‘appear’ to Mary to announce her forthcoming pregnancy sounded ridiculous. The story made no sense.  But all that changed when I saw a print of Fra Angelico’s painting of it

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We are soon to have an election, and many people are pressing that it should be about policies and not personalities. I think that Jesus would agree with that.

His preaching was not about himself, [He claimed no title save the that of ‘the son of man’] but about what He had learnt of God in the overwhelming experience He had after His baptism. He had come to repent to God of His sin and found to His astonishment that God spoke to Him saying ‘You are my dearly beloved son, in whom I am well pleased.” Unconditional love seeks reconciliation rather than repentance. His knowledge of God was turned on its head.

He became aware that this was true not just for Him, but for everybody. He set out to demonstrate that to those who had not had the experience that He’d had, and especially to those whose experience rather was that they were told that God judged them negatively, and that society excluded them. 

The risen Jesus called His followers to continue His mission, which was not primarily about Himself but about God’s unconditional love for all, and especially for those who felt themselves to be unworthy & excluded. For Jesus, God’s policies were more important than His personality.

First posted in http://contemporaryspirituality.blog