"Before it All Began," by Wendy Williams

This phrase, "Yet once more," indicates the removal of what is shaken-- that is, created things-- so that what cannot be shaken may remain. Therefore, since we are receiving a kingdom that cannot be shaken, let us give thanks, by which we offer to God an acceptable worship with reverence and awe; for indeed our God is a consuming fire.

Editors note: This passage above from the penultimate chapter of the Letter to the Hebrews struck me as the right introduction to what follows, which, as a piece of writing and art needs no introduction. But I offer one because I waited two years to publish it, wanting to find the right time.

Two years ago, there were vaccines for COVID-19 and a constant release of research figures. The U.S. surpassed 900,000 deaths. We had been without a bishop for a year, and it was a time for coming back to church while grieving loss. It was a time of reckoning with more than could be reckoned with.

Two years ago, the writer of this post had just begun to serve at the altar of our Cathedral. Some of us were reading Paradise Lost by John Milton (a far stranger book than I had imagined). Always ready to share poetry, Wendy read it too. Wendy is a visual artist, mental health counselor, and a friend of many years now. We both work with people while grappling with God and art. We share awe.

above: Thank You Fog for Lifting ( after Auden), 2021, mixed media on paper, 34” x 30”

Now is the time for this piece of writing, I think. We are heading into Lent. Soon we will celebrate the consecration of a new bishop who has moved far with his family to begin a new ministry here. This is a time of awe and joy, fear and gratitude, humility and hope.

A thing like awe that a cathedral is meant to inspire, holy fear is real. In the Bible pronouncements of angels are typically met with this response. Some of us run from God’s call like the prophet Jonah, becoming suffocated by daily ease as if swallowed by a whale. Some of us come to reckon with God after falling in love or the birth of a child brings beauty and terror of responsibility. Awe and fear come with the abundant life that comes from above when we say Yes to it. Here are Wendy’s words…..

Before it all began :

On Heavenly ground they stood, and from the shore

They viewed the vast immeasurable abyss. ( Paradise Lost Book VII,210)

Preparation for the feast. In a cold room with steaming ancient radiators I wonder how justice is served when lowly paupered souls attempt to give glory and honor. We dress the part. Later the holy ministers will wear vestments color-coded to the liturgy. It is not without some reverence and panic that I enter the back of the sanctuary to hear this sound…..the songs of angels. Waiting to light very tall candles in an orderly way on the altar is a feat. Preparation continues and then we assemble.

The stained glass window portraying St. Elizabeth is the highest point in the side chapel that I stare at longingly holding a crucifix that weighs more than I could have imagined. Under this window is an altar. At that altar the holy ministers prepare themselves for the procession while others take ready to support and at the same time feed on the unsaid prayers that are quietly being thought or versed internally.

I am acutely aware of the weight of the moment both literally and figuratively as I focus in on the hollow of Christ’s abdominal area that is carved as a circular abyss like shape in the wooden structure. I feel this as a punch in my own stomach. It is difficult as I become teary to the gravity of the gesture and the responsibility. The weight of the cross is real and I immediately sense the suffering and know, that just being there is enough and that Christ will accompany me in my own weakness which is real, caused not just by sin but by a weakness that wracks my body.

The waters have lifted up. O Lord,

The waters have lifted up their voice:

The waters have lifted up their pounding waves. (Psalm 93)

 It is the first time I have truly identified with Christ on the cross despite being a doubting yet willing person. As a congregant I sensed this preparatory time in a different way. It is building an energy that is likened to a time of being seen for the first time, or in a different sense of time. Weddings and funerals, even ordinations share this as the time to behold the spectacle as it is given, formally and with reverence. I pray for strength silently as I know this is not an easy task.

In the assembling here I am also acutely aware of the importance of maintaining composure with piety. The experience is emphasized again sitting behind the ministers in choir after the procession. The draped vestment is carefully arranged over chairs as scripture and sermon are spoken and I feel the prayerful presence of The Dean who holds this quiet strength. I sense this. It buoys me to believe. The journey here is witness.

The Second time the reality of the difficulty, unlit candles, steps stumbled, strength summoned, still leaves me feeling like a Hollow Man gazing with doubt. I can be one person in this choreography defined and designed to summon deep concern for the kept rituals and reminders of the long path. So stepping lightly but firmly, remind myself that this is not about me or them, but Jesus on the cross.

The liturgy of Ash Wednesday will be celebrated at the Cathedral with the imposition of ashes on Wednesday, February 14 at 7AM, 12:05PM, and 7PM.

Please join me for Art of the Cross on Zoom on Tuesday, March 19 from 7:30PM for an hour of Lenten meditation with the art of Christ and His Cross. We will look at individual artworks as well as the symbol itself and its life in Christian history and imagination. Click HERE to register.

Art of the Bloom 2024

At Cathedral in Bloom Open Studio Saturday artists arrived before opening to bring in their supplies and begin making art from the flowers. Below is an exhibit of some of the art made in 2024. As I prepare this post, I wonder about what lies dormant in sketch books and of the budding projects promising future bloom, not ready for our eyes just yet. It seems to me that this work is, on an individual level, like the art of the Cathedral which aspires to make a picture of heaven that, because it needs completion, ever inspires. Thank you to all of the floral artists who inspired and to the artists who came to be inspired and who share their work here. May you continue to find joy and spiritual growth in your life’s work in 2024!

above: St. John Chapel arrangement by The Enchanted Florist, Albany, NY

above: artist Deborah Geurtze works in the choir stalls during a tour

above: Young artist Yohance Jolivette received a commission

above: The artists whose work is featured below

above: Art by Christina Boyd

above: Art by Sheryl Brown Galinski

above: Art by Carol Coogan

above: Art byTamara Byrne

above: Art by Paula Read

Nativity

“St. Augustine says, ‘What does it avail me that this birth is always happening, if it does not happen in me? That it should happen in me is what matters.’ We shall therefore speak of this birth, of how it may take place in us.”

—Meister Eckhart (1260–1327)

"In the context of the Cathedral and the liturgical calendar, we speak of the Nativity, the birth of the Divine Child in the manger, the Incarnation, and yet in the highest and deepest sense of a calling, the Nativity is not confined to Christmas Eve, nor to Bethlehem.  Whether or not we listen or hear, aren’t all of us called to continue bringing something sacred to birth in ourselves, in our communities?   In speech, in ideals, choices and endeavors?  This includes our friendships, communities, the world!  Through image and word,  I would love to cultivate meditative dialogue on Incarnation and on The Incarnation by walking with Mary, the mystical rose, with the Child, with the midwife, with the three Wise Men, with the shepherds in the fields and with the Holy Spirit.   Mystical texts describe the whole participation of the natural world too.  It is said that the forest and trees, springs and even the stars quivered at The Incarnation, and if we trace those threads with love and awe, with wonder and humility, the Divine might be reborn in us too.” 

— Therese Schroeder-Sheker

Several of us associated with the Cathedral and several from elsewhere throughout the U.S. were blessed this Advent to engage in a small group four-week online retreat with artist-theologian-clinician Therese Schroeder-Sheker, the visionary founder of music-thanatology and the Chalice of Repose Project.

In our first week, we meditated on what virginity means archetypally. As a “virgin forest” is untrammeled and without commodification, full of both living and dying things which make it fertile, we were asked to ask ourselves, Who am/was I when I was unburdened, before I was filled with outside influences?, and to think of Mary as one “true to her own special congruence, which is fecund……and her Virgin consciousness as One unto oneself.”

Through her consciousness of word and image and of creating and holding a womb-like space, Therese nurtured us into awareness and articulation of an “I-Thou relationship of the ‘One and the Envisioned.’” We were encouraged to, like Mary, have the courage to protect the vision we must learn to hold before speaking of it too soon.

above: Study for The Annunciation, Henry Ossawa Tanner, oil, 1898

Protecting, while held in an assurance of revealing, we spoke of visions we may not have spoken of to anyone else before, or in many years.

above: The Annunciation, Henry Ossawa Tanner, oil, 1898

Providentially for me, I began to correspond with Therese early this year in preparation for her Lenten retreat and within days of becoming a hospital chaplain intern. I have since watched myself reach for and hold visions of Beauty in the hospital, increasingly aware of the Thou facing me at all possible moments of life and death, potentially recognizable inasmuch as my inner sight has grown in capacity to behold it.

The image above is of The Dormition of Mary (ivory, circa 900). (This scene was written of by (Pseudo-) Dionysius circa 500, possibly reflecting an earlier tradition I am unaware of.) In our retreat, we marveled together how the death of Mary above is like a birth, with her Son as midwife.

Perhaps the images in the art of this post are good to hold especially if what is called “the holidays” seem commodified and sterilely indifferent to love, loss and grief. Even while we live at the dim thresholds of the winter solstice and of our own lives, these frame in us the vision of the Light which ever holds all creation alive in God’s sight.

Above: Bé bé (the Nativity) 1896, oil by Paul Gauguin. The painting at the top of this post is a detail.

Beholding

Dear Cathedral Arts Blog Reader:

It has been a while since I have written, while our vocation of faith and art is my mind and heart as I undergo formation as a hospital chaplain resident, a role I began at the end of August. This work is many things for me–one is an affirmation of what I learned through beginning the Cathedral Arts program five years ago—that my study of the human form as an artist and our work of beauty in worship has everything to do with my ability to offer healing through spiritual conversation. Below is a study of a model I made many years ago which I call, “Mariner,” as I was listening to Coleridge’s poem while I made it.

Remembering for moving forward—we have reflected on how the Logos, the Word of God, in poetical early Christian and ancient-world thinking was intimately connected with the concept of Image, or Ikon in Greek. I have made recent attempts, bringing you with me, at understanding iconography in the Eastern Orthodox tradition which depicts Christ and the saints. A contemporary iconographer, Christine Hales, publishes an in-depth blog for those who wish to learn more about icons as Christian art and prayer HERE.

The liturgical arts workshop at the Chichester Cathedral has also come to my attention–read about this HERE in the Orthodox Arts Journal.

Recently, the Cathedral welcomed Malcolm Guite to speak on the Psalms with his own poetry made in meditative response to them. His scholarship and creative work seeks to help the church recover its imagination and thereby its God-given power. His course called Lifting the Veil: Imagination & The Kingdom of God is being offered by Nashotah House Theological Seminary for free HERE:

A few weeks ago, I was to give the talks at the retreat for the Daughters of the King. Finding it difficult to emerge from the primordial ooze one’s mind returns to when starting a new role–particularly one that is emotionally and spiritually demanding–-to write something meditative and comprehensible, Julian of Norwich (to whose order I had made a commitment exactly two years earlier) rescued me in saintly fashion.

The theme of the workshop was “Behold.” In pursuing the roots of this Old English word, much-favored by early English Bible translators and also by Julian in her book, Revelations of Divine Love. I read what Denys Turner of Yale writes in his book, Julian of Norwich, Theologian, that Julian would have been familiar with the stages of lectio divina (lectio, oratio, meditatio, contemplatio), and that her book would have better been called Meditations on Divine Love.

And that for Julian, beseeking (or beseeching) was oratio–what we might call intercessory prayer, born of the desire God put in our hearts. And, Turner writes, for Julian the last step of prayer is beholding corresponding to contemplatio in the stages of lectio divina.

Julian affirmed my vocation of beholding—beholding those who are in danger of feeling lost in life’s liminalities and reflecting what I see that is good, true and beautiful back to them—beholding faith in art and art in faith within the life of the Cathedral. Through contemplation with Julian my proverbial tongue was loosened, and I was able to see and share art again.

I showed the Daughters this medal below, made in England during Julian’s lifetime for one on pilgrimage. The animate willingness of the bird-like figure makes me think of the words in the 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……”

And I shared this image below from a Spanish mural of the 12th century which is at the Cloisters in New York City. Medievals supposed lions wiped out their tracks with their long tails. This is Christ, who gained victory over sin and death by hiding his true identity from the devil and tricking him into bringing about his death for the salvation of humankind. Will your modern imagination allow you to see this cat with a hipster mustache as Christ? 

This symbol of Christ was painted a couple hundred years before Julian had her visions while plague caused widespread suffering. During these years the prevalent image of Christ shifted from the victor over sin and death to sacrificial victim. Julian’s vivid visions begun with Christ bleeding out on the cross and her subsequent meditations on them led her into deep contemplation of God’s love where she ends by declaring, “Love was His meaning.” 

A week and a half ago I went to New York again to the Neue Gallery to see the exhibit MAX BECKMANN: THE FORMATIVE YEARS, 1915-1925 up through January 15, 2024. But first, I walked through the permanent collection, and was arrested by a portrait by Oskar Kokoshka. 

For me it was a matter of beholding—this painting is barely more than line and dry-brushed pigment with which a human hand is formed, gesticulating in its space with profound and simple expression. For me, even though the sitter is engaged in an unhealthy modern habit, the painting is like a parable of Jesus about a woman sweeping or kneading bread because of how it bears attentive witness to the human.

For me, seeing that painting was like seeing the human hand in cave paintings, and I felt I remembered what art is. Then I was ready to walk into the first gallery with Max Beckmann's paintings. This Descent From the Cross is on the wall across from the bench on which I sunk.

I examined the shapes, color, and the artist’s drawing of human bodies from shockingly assembled disparate views as if they had been dropped from the sky and put back together. I wondered over the artist's intention described in the quote on the wall–to make a “new church” through his work, having witnessed the horrors of the first WWI as a volunteer nurse and determined to paint as an artist of his time in the face of the horror he saw coming.

I beheld the heart and mind of the artist through his representation of the human body in space and time. I felt time to be as it was described by the early prince of modern people, “out of joint.” Hamlet said this while meditating on the murder of his father by his uncle and planning retribution. The time is out of joint: O cursed spite / That ever I was born to set it right.

We are superstitious these days, believing we were born to merely set things right rather than for love and beauty. We see the time as out of joint rather than ourselves as out of joint. The poet and painter constructed worlds for modern characters in claustrophobic scenes with twisted space and reasoning. The deed already done in Beckmann’s paintings is in Shakespeare’s Hamlet the human psyche breaking and losing its capacity for beauty:

I have of late--but

wherefore I know not--lost all my mirth, forgone all

custom of exercises; and indeed it goes so heavily

with my disposition that this goodly frame, the

earth, seems to me a sterile promontory, this most

excellent canopy, the air, look you, this brave

o'erhanging firmament, this majestical roof fretted

with golden fire, why, it appears no other thing to

me than a foul and pestilent congregation of vapours.

This speech became a ballad in the 60’s musical Hair which I sang with my parents’ vinyl record as a teenager and recently again while I emptied their house. I also embrace what it says in Ecclesiastes—The heart of the wise is in the house of mourning; but the heart of fools is in the house of mirth. But I know from experience that where mirth is lost madness is near. If we sing, even of our imagination for beauty being lost, we find beauty.

As Christ beholds suffering, beautiful art may be ugly as long as it is true. Beckmann's paintings may be truly representative of beauty in that they are true, exposing faulty human reasoning and cursed spite. Myself and others stunned into contemplation on the bench before them is perhaps what the artist hoped for when he wrote he wanted to make a “new church,” one that could imagine a different future than what it helped make.

The prophetic and imaginative work of bearing witness to the Image-Ikon of God and the Word-Logos of God is the work of reflecting the images and analogies of the Beautiful One we are intended to be, however bent we may be.

Advent is coming, the liturgical season which commands expectation and promises a new Adam and a new Eve. There is imagination and beauty in the church to keep us sane still. Join us for a free roots jam this Sunday, and for Handel’s Messiah on Dec. 5 and for Christmas services. Until we see you, peace be with you.

Art Seeking Understanding: Painting into Modernity

Above: Christ the Redeemer, Andrei Rublev, early 15th century

As with theological exploration of Christ, depiction of Christ does not conform to our preferred idealized period of history. Our system of neat timelines that slices imagery into eras, holding up one over another as more beautiful or reverent, becomes inadequate the more we perceive the fundamental iconicity of creation and Christ as the Light that has come into the world.

Christological exploration is an exercise in freedom as we desire encounter with the One who sets us free. Theological exploration has continuity even while it may appear the church has split or fallen apart. Seemingly new movements have begun with those who return not only to scripture but to other writings of the early church, such as John Wesley who read St. Macarius the Egyptian. Similarly, concepts in art original to Christianity live on in both eastern iconography and in western religious art.

In “The Art of the Icon: A Theology of Beauty” (apparently out of print but available on Kindle), by Paul Evdokimov, the author writes, “There are ‘points of view,’ always partial and therefore deforming, and then there is full and total seeing which makes man, according to the expression of St. Marcarius, an immense ‘single eye’ penetrated by the divine Light.” The icon at the top was found in a Russian woodshed in 1919. It is recognized to be the work of the great iconographer Rublev for how it brings us face to face with divine Light.

An understanding of experiencing art as an embodied praxis of hope for transfiguration connects to the understanding that the icon, through meditating on it, shows the “Tabor Light,” the uncreated light seen on the mountain of Jesus’ Transfiguration. Rublev shows transfiguration through a great openness to divine Light and an openness to the expression of nature. His figures are not mere idealizations of saints, they move as humans do. In this detail from Rublev’s Transfiguration icon below, Jesus stands with a subtle contrapposto that artists of the Renaissance saw in the work of Praxitiles (Greek, 4th century BC), which was demonstrated in the 20th century by Auguste Rodin in clay, also below.

There are repeating forms in nature lodged deep in our memory which body forth in our art. The artist as a natural creature is revealed in art seeking to transfigure people into icons of the original Icon, Christ, by means of natural signs and symbols.

Do you see Christ in Rublev’s icon of the Ascension below in the mandorla, appearing as Edward Munch’s Sun? Do you see the angels behind Mary shaped as a white lily with Mary at the center, and her womb where the ovary of the flower is, and the heads and necks of the disciples as anthers and stamen gesturing toward the sun? Was Rublev conscious of all he made, or did he, by an eye honed through prayer and art-making, unconsciously repeat patterns made by the original Creator?

Meditation on icons is as the ancient practice of lectio divina in which a passage of scripture is read (lectio), meditated upon (meditatio), prayed with (oratio), and contemplated (contemplatio, implying silence and stillness). Art-making, with color and line as signs applied in meditation, developing shape and symbol articulating meaning, resolving into stillness as an object of contemplation, is a practice aimed at transfiguration for the artist who is humbly dedicated to it.

As Hans Boersma writes in the introduction to his recent book on lectio divina, Pierced by Love: Divine Reading with the Christian Tradition (Lexham Press, 2023), “If reading means encounter, then the imagination is perhaps the key faculty that allows encounter to happen.” He shows how theologians such as Anselm of Canterbury, Aelred of Rievaulx, and Bernard of Clairvaux have used ‘the insight that words make pictures……[and] that through the imagination we are united with Christ as the one revealed to us in biblical words.”

It’s a delightful book, with a beautifully designed cover with what appears to be an etching of Jesus rendered in purple and gold, perhaps speaking parables to the crowds. Telling parables is, in the words of Emily Dickinson, telling the truth but telling it slant. Parables mean what they mean on multiple levels. Without the insight of the Teacher, the Truth and the Light, the interpretation we settle on will be only what we are able to hear and perceive by our own devices.

In our final workshop on Art and Theology a few weeks ago, we looked at paintings of Pieter Bruegel the Elder. One could spend a lifetime unpacking their meaning and never do so. But his allegories and jokes may be enjoyed without worrying much over his elaborate compositions, such as this painting below called "The Peasant and the Birdnester," painted in 1568.

Notice the painter’s use of contrapposto. Brueghel was a fan of painting humble peasants, but he studied in Italy and was well aware of its sophisticated art—he may have poked fun at it while honoring it. This painting is said to be about this Netherlandish proverb:

Dije den nest Weet dijen weeten, dijen Roft dij heeten.

He who knows where the nest is, has the knowledge; he who robs, has the nest.

To my mind, the proverb sounds much like this statement by John the Baptist (John 3:28):

He who has the bride is the bridegroom; the friend of the bridegroom, who stands and hears him, rejoices greatly at the bridegroom’s voice; therefore this joy of mine is now full.

Did you know that a device for seeing more deeply into art is to study it upside down? See our beloved icon discovered in 1919 below upside down, next to this painting by Amedeo Modigliani painted in 1917. See humanity shown as the flower of creation and Icon of God, balanced on the neck as a stalk—both heads appear with the balance of a flower, but the neck of Christ has a muscularity that seems more symbolic than plausibly natural.

Do you the Light of a penetrating single-eye only in the Icon of Christ, or can you see this light in each piece of art?

As we seek the perfect Beauty of God, our work will never end until our own transfiguration. Until then, Peace be with you.

Art Seeking Understanding, II

above: Anastasis, c. 14th century, Hagia Sophia

This is the second of two posts—you can read the first one HERE. I hope you will come and seek with me on Zoom on August 1 through another workshop on art and faith. Click HERE to register, if you haven’t already.

In the first workshop, we focused on Christian art up to the Renaissance. I used an article on Russian Orthodox theologian, Sergius Bulgakov for an outline and an opportunity to consider icons of the Eastern Orthodox tradition along with the western religious art with which I am more familiar.

The word icon is from Ancient Greek εἰκών (eikṓn) . It means image, resemblance, as in "He [Jesus] is the icon of the invisible God." (Col 1:15) The uncreated light that was at the beginning of creation and came into the world in Christ Jesus is what icon writers (not painters) seek to show.

above: Ascension, Andrei Rublev, 1408

Our liturgy retains the kissing of the gospel book before it is read much as icons are kissed in Orthodox churches. Our action of kissing image and word venerates God’s action toward us because image, word, and God were more connected in the early Christian consciousness than those concepts tend to be in our own. In scripture, Christ is both the logos (word) and also the Icon of God.

Above is the oldest known icon, Christ Pantakrator (“ruler of all”) from the 6th century. It survived iconoclasm at St. Cathrine’s monastery on Mt. Sinai. An icon is often referred to as a “door” or a “window,” which helps us to pray as we meditate on it, opening a passage in ourselves through which God communicates. All three persons of the Trinity are imaged in Christ. Other than by the face of Christ, God is not depicted but rather is present through saints and symbols. 

Orthodox theologians have mostly been dismissive of western religious art as a means of prayer and meditation, and have seen its naturalism as contradictory to the “ideal realism” of eastern icons. I am certainly generalizing, but it seems to me that these theologians believe the visual language of eastern icons to be made almost purely of symbols, in contradistinction to the palette of ideas and emotions with which western artists conceive of their work.

But I see a common language in eastern icons made during the Renaissance and western religious art, even though divergence of eastern and western Christianity and reformation brewing in the latter is evident. Below is a painting of Christ Healing the Blind by iconographer turned western painter, El Greco (Domenikos Theotokopoulos), painted around 1570, which is owned by the Metropolitan Museum of Art in NYC.

Going back to our Orthodox theologian, the realism of a painting by Henry VIII’s court painter, Hans Holbein, brought Sergei Bulgakov into a deeper awareness of the humanity of Christ when he became ill with throat cancer and felt he was dying. Holbein’s “Dead Christ” below is a painting Dostoevsky also referred to in his novel, The Idiot. There was something in its naturalism that aided the faith-seeking-understanding of these Russian author-theologians.

It made the humanity of Christ accessible to them in a way that the idealized images of their tradition could not. On a personal note, I have been a hospital chaplain intern for six months and I have met the model for Holbein’s painting. I have also met his mother and friends. It is a teaching of Christ, I believe His only teaching explicitly concerning the Last Judgment, that we love Him by caring for the needs of others. I have found I regularly experience Christ in caring for the dead, as well as for the living.

My favorite day in Holy Week is Holy Saturday. Its icon is called the Anastasis, which means standing again or resurrection. Usually, as at the top of this post, Christ is depicted pulling Adam, and sometimes Eve, from the grave. The image of Christ as victor, seen below in this mosaic from 6th century Ravenna, is retained in the Anastasis, as it is in the Apostle’s Creed.

Something strange is happening - there is a great silence on earth today, a great silence and stillness. The whole earth keeps silence because the King is asleep. The earth trembled and is still because God has fallen asleep in the flesh and He has raised up all who have slept ever since the world began. God has died in the flesh and Hell trembles with fear.

He has gone to search for our first parent, as for a lost sheep. Greatly desiring to visit those who live in darkness and in the shadow of death, He has gone to free from sorrow the captives Adam and Eve, He who is both God and the Son of Eve. The Lord approached them bearing the Cross, the weapon that had won Him the victory. At the sight of Him Adam, the first man He had created, struck his breast in terror and cried out to everyone, “My Lord be with you all.” Christ answered him, “And with your spirit.” He took him by the hand and raised him up, saying, “Awake, O sleeper, and rise from the dead, and Christ will give you light.

— Homily on Holy Saturday: The Lord Descends into Hades, St. Epiphanius, Bishop of Cyprus (403 A.D.)

This way of looking at the resurrection is different from what many western churches have done with Christian imagery since the Reformation—abolishing Christ’s body altogether by showing an empty cross. (Now sometimes there isn’t a cross at all.) I was still attending such a church when I saw this painting below of Holy Saturday and the Resurrection by Andrea Mantegna, painted between 1492 and 1493, at the British Museum. Not knowing the creed at that time, it tapped my desire for a deeper understanding of my faith, which led me here.

To believe in the miracle of his resurrection is to believe that Jesus was truly dead, as in Holbein’s painting, and sooner or later we know by our own bodies that we must die before we rise again. Similarly, because both the meditative-spiritual and the realistic-bodily images of Jesus in death are true, we use the art of the resurrection for our deceased loved ones—we use the colors, words, and music of Easter in our requiem masses.

It seems to me that for art to be spiritual it must reflect (whether through apparent beauty or the beauty it evokes by its absence) the light in which we spy the risen Lord. But far be it from me to remove our sightings in art from the realm of seeking, metaphor, poetry, and meaning-making to the dystopia where good and degenerate art are defined for us.

I think that much art criticism is like a brew fermented from the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, which imbibing overmuch can make us unresponsive and fearful of creativity. Let us not get drunk, as the Bible says, but rather, while it is day, use our freedom to seek God in all that is made. Below is The Sun, by Edvard Munch (1912) on exhibit at The Clark in Williamstown, MA, until October 15, 2023. Peace and joy be yours.

Art Seeking Understanding, I

A couple of weeks ago, I had the pleasure of leading a group through art as a means of exploring theology. Fides quaerens intellectum, “faith seeking understanding” is the definition of theology offered by the first Bishop of Canterbury, St. Anselm (c. 1033 – 1109). Often quoted still, in the most positive light, it is reflective of our creeds as being the art of the early church handed down to us.

Their priority of faith leading to the action of seeking led to the parsing of doctrine and heresy and definition of the essentials of Christian belief. It in no way diminishes inspiration’s role to say it was a creative process. But disagreements through the centuries and a decision by Rome to excommunicate an Eastern Orthodox patriarch led to the East-West Schism of 1054. Where religious strife brings in rupture, the priority of faith and the discipline of seeking have been lost to other aims. Jesus points to this in some of his parables.

Religious art which seeks to proselytize is bound to superficiality at best. Personally, I find the detail of this painting below illustrating the procession of the Holy Spirit from the Father and the Son—rather than just from the Father as the Orthodox maintained in their reading of the creed—to be unrelatable, even disturbing.

I have sat in theology classes discussing heresy and sensed collective discomfort as we privately wondered if we had picked heretical thinking up somewhere like ringworm. But, with a calm professor, as we asked our questions our faith enlivened and our thoughts aimed more clearly at what we sought. We never fully understood. I do not remember which book said that studying theology is like trying to hit the target while knowing you will never hit the bullseye, but I still find this reassuring.

Understanding eludes us as we grow in awe but seeking is something each one of us can certainly do, and must do to grow as spiritual beings. The very idea of “church” (ekklesia) as a gathering of those seeking God invites engaging the creative process. We love because God first loved us. Likewise, we seek as we were first sought. Our work is that of revealing the great gift we have already received. This has certainly been the work of our Cathedral Arts program. Imagine my joy of discovering these carvings in our baptistery and in photographing them.

I hope you will  join me for the next Making Understanding: Art as Theological Statement on August 1 on Zoom—click HERE to register. Do you see my ironic joke in the painting at the top of this post? It is Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s Tower of Babel, representing the opposite of understanding. Bruegel, like Jesus, was a lover of parables and irony. Below that painting is his rendering of Jesus’ parable of The Blind Leading the Blind.

On August 1 we will enjoy more of Bruegel’s works, and seek our way by faith through art to the present. My next July post will include some of our last workshop—our discussion of icons from the East, medieval art from the West, and a painting by Hans Holbein, court painter of Henry VIII of England, which led the Orthodox theologian Sergius Bulgakov into a deeper experience of the humanity of Christ.

Art is my greatest area of expertise and a constant source of inspiration and so I write about it, teetering on the edge of other subjects. Many of you who read this post have expertise regarding theology and the arts, and in other areas such as your own life, and may be becoming aware of seeking thoughts and feelings you want to share. I want you to know that corrections, expansions and criticisms are all welcome, as well as the typical responses generous with appreciation. You are welcome to email me, and please let me know if what you write is something I can share here.

Peace be with you.

Sacred Seeing II: Wendy Williams, Artist

Firmament #2., Wendy Ide Williams, Acrylic on Canvas, 2022

Editors note: Wendy Williams serves as an acolyte at The Cathedral of All Saints and offers much encouragement to me in my role as missioner and director of Cathedral Arts. She and Allen Grindle have a show opening this Saturday at the Laffer Gallery in Schuylerville. Wendy has given me permission to share her recent art and artist’s statement below. (I cannot help but comment on how very difficult I find writing an artist’s statement to be—I love how Wendy tackles the task here.) You can read my post with Wendy’s work from 2021 at: https://www.cathedralofallsaints.org/cathedral-arts-blog/sacred-seeing.

I will be leading an hour with art on Zoom on June 27 at 7:30PM: Making Understanding: Art as Theological Statement, and I welcome you to sign up HERE.

Incipio Coeli After John, Wendy Williams

“The universes that are amenable to the intellect can never satisfy the instincts of the heart.”

—The Cloud of Unknowing, anonymous work of Christian mysticism, late 14th century

My discourse with the painting process takes place in the middle of this theatre of thought and then action. The science of nature, the sense that is formed by understanding and knowing the why of an image or fact seems to fuel the position of complete loss and lost and found. Rooted in biology and botany, nature and gesture as well as conscious and unconscious perception, the baseline for start and finish in the visual dialogue of making a picture lies well beyond my ability to rationalize form and structure. Form and structure are not given by knowing but by exploring the realm of the infinite and finite meeting. Words express this conundrum more explicitly, as in a title if I am so lucky to have landed on one -The wedding of language and image and all that lies between. There is a constant dialectical shift between a graphic representation of energy and form with something unspoken, unseen, sometimes wonderful and sometimes dark and hard.

— Wendy Williams

For directions and gallery hours: https://thelaffergallery.com/

PRAYERSHREDS: Bruce Beasley, Poet, speaks with Evan Craig Reardon

Bruce speaks about his ninth book of poetry, Prayershreds, (Orison Books 2023) with Cathedral Arts poetry consultant Evan Craig Reardon.

Suppose the shreds of our prayers and of our faiths could themselves become a radical, new form of devotion. In Prayershreds, Bruce Beasley confronts the apocalyptic zeitgeist of our time (pandemic, isolation, political turmoil, environmental catastrophe) and the crisis of faiths in the human future. These poems make a sermon of the vocabulary of doubt as they summon a chorus of voices, ancient and spiritual; scholarly, philosophical, and even technological. In these fractured and ecstatic psalms, Beasley makes his ruptured way toward a faith that relies, not on dogmas and creeds, but on a broken utterance for a torn and living faith. Learn more about Bruce Beasley at the poet's website.

Cover art by Rosamond Purcell

Bruce Beasley is a professor of English at Western Washington University and the author of nine collections of poems, including most recently Prayershreds (Orison Books, 2023). His books have won three national competitions: the Colorado Prize (selected by Charles Wright) for Summer Mystagogia; the Ohio State University Press/Journal Award for The Creation; and the University of Georgia Contemporary Poetry Series Award for Lord Brain. He has won fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Artist Trust of Washington and three Pushcart prizes in poetry. His work appears in Kenyon Review, Georgia Review, Southern Review, POETRY, Gettysburg Review, Yale Review, and many other journals.

Evan Craig Reardon is a poet and is the electronic services librarian for Nashotah House Theological Seminary. He is archives and poetry consultant for the Cathedral of All Saints. Evan holds master’s degrees in Library and Information Science and English Literature. Before he moved to Wisconsin (where he also is a seminarian), Evan was the librarian and archivist for The Flow Chart Foundation, where he currently serves on the board. Read two of Evan's poems HERE

Cathedral Arts new and upcoming:


"Curraghs: Reflections on a Brief Lenten Pilgrimage" by Fr Paul Hunter

Above: La Barque by Odilon Redon, 1902, pastel

A Poet, a Painter, a Musician, an Architect; the man or woman who is not one of these is not a Christian. - William Blake

Blake was fond of such provocations. For me, this oracular pronouncement seems to form a sort of diptych with Karl Rahner’s almost equally provocative claim that “The devout Christian of the future will either be a ‘mystic,’ one who has experienced ‘something,’ or he will cease to be anything at all.” The two seem to mean something very similar, perhaps fundamentally the same claim seen from different angles. 

I have returned to these two quotes repeatedly in reflecting on the online Lenten retreat led by Therese Schroder-Sheker, and sponsored by the Cathedral Arts program. I wrote about my hopes and expectations for this workshop in a previous post on this blog (here), and I was not disappointed, though I was certainly surprised more than once.

Early on, Therese shared two insights that laid a foundation for our time together. First, that there are two uses of language: to inform or to transform. I doubt any words can be exclusively informative or transformative, but the emphasis does tend to fall to one side or the other. Assembly instructions for an Ikea desk inform, but - and this is the second insight - the words of poets and mystics transform. Poetry and mysticism invite us to enter the consciousness of the authors.

This, of course, is why a poem cannot be reduced to prose. To say “A man pauses while traveling and becomes strangely absorbed in considering snow falling in the forest” conveys hardly anything of the transformative meaning of  the poem“Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening,” through which the reader herself becomes absorbed in contemplating and attending to the real.

Without prejudice to the value of formal theology and philosophy, mystical literature is equally incapable of being reduced to metaphysical propositions, though theological and mystical reflection should support and nurture each other. As Simone Weil put it with characteristic force “When genuine friends of God — such as was Eckhart to my way of thinking — repeat words they have heard in secret amidst the silence of the union of love, and these words are in disagreement with the teaching of the Church, it is simply that the language of the market place is not that of the nuptial chamber.”

All this is a kind of preface, because what I really want to communicate is that the whole time, gathering together with Therese and a small group of fellow retreatants each Tuesday of Lent, was far more transformative than informative. Certainly, a good dose of information was shared, and Beauty formed a focus for our times of reflection together. Still, when a friend asked me what the talks were about I had to reply “It’s not that kind of program.” I did not leave each session with a folio of facts in hand, still less with any techniques of the spiritual life. But in each session, I felt I was invited to enter and share a particular, poetic kind of consciousness.

Therese encouraged us to consider transformative moments or images, themes that had emerged over the course of our lives. She also shared a number of practices which she encouraged us to make use of, that she has found personally helpful in attending to transformative memories and, in a marvelous phrase, “to feel forward into possibility.” There was nothing arcane or occult about these practices - some were as simple as gardening in a prayerful and attentive way. But each was an occasion to cultivate attention in the robust sense which Simone Weil used the term, to describe the mind “waiting, not seeking anything, but ready to receive in its naked truth the object which is to penetrate it.”

If prayer demands the faculty attention, however, it also demands the complementary faculty of Imagination - again, in the most robust sense of that term. For Romantics like Blake and Coleridge, imagination was not to be confused with the unreal or with daydreaming. Rather, the imagination is the power by which we perceive and know the deepest reality of God’s creation, and further, by which we participate in God’s creative activity.

Sergius Bulgakov, a great Russian theologian of the last century, deeply pondered the relationship between Divine and Human freedom. In a musical metaphor, he described all things in creation - especially human persons - as being given a “theme” of their being by God. While the theme is given, it is the task of human persons to expand upon and play the variations of this theme. Humans are given a share in God’s creative activity, a freedom to realize God’s will in their own genuinely creative way. This means that “creative activity is not something that is merely possible… it is man’s duty, God’s will concerning him” (Bride of the Lamb. 332). In another analogy, the primordial human call was to tend a garden. The gardener does not create plants, but does cultivate them, bringing out that fullness of life and beauty that is within them. This is human creativity, and is the “task of all natural human kind, called to dress and keep the Earth” (Bride of the Lamb. 322).

Returning to the Romantics, we could say that imagination is that human power which allows us to engage in this task. When we give attention to the world God has created, it is imagination which allows us both to perceive something of the themes God has implanted in the cosmos, and to elaborate upon them, bringing them to fruition.  This is why Coleridge could say that the imagination is “the living Power and prime Agent of all human Perception… a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite I Am.”

Which brings me, at long last, back to Blake and Rahner. In saying Christians must be poets and mystics neither Blake nor Rahner mean that a Christian must conform to the various stereotypes of poets and mystics that these titles may conjure up. Blake’s Christian poet may never put pen to paper, just as Rahner’s mystic may never see visions, retreat to a cave, wear flowing scarves, or be possessed of any of the other standard accouterments available at your local Whole Foods Market. ™ Nevertheless, spiritual maturity calls for a poetic and mystical way of being in the world.

Of course, mysticism is a notoriously slippery word. As we discussed the nature of mystical language in our retreat, we fell back on a working definition of mysticism drawn from the writings of Bernard McGinn, as “simultaneous experience of loving, knowing, sensing the active presence of God in our lives.” This is the fruit of attention, and is indeed a poetic and imaginative way of being in the world.

I once read a quote, the source of which I cannot now recall or discover even by aid of Google, along the lines of ‘rhyme is a negotiation between memory and hope.’ And so it is for all worthwhile human thought and action.  We live between deep memories, our intuitions of the Being of the world, those moments of rapt attention when we perceive a few bars of God’s creative themes, and the future age when all those themes will be united into one grand music. Above all, it is in Jesus Christ, the one in whom all things hold together (Col 1:17), that we find these themes revealed. Looking to Jesus the “author and perfector of our faith” (KJV Hebrews 12:2) is an act of Imagination, which allows us to ‘feel forward into possibility.’  Blake was surely right then, that the Christian life is a poetic life, a life which becomes a work of art, a hymn of praise to God.

There was one image in particular which Therese used, that seemed to hold many of the insights that I gained from this retreat. There was a monastic practice in Celtic Christianity of seafaring as a spiritual practice. Of course, the most famous monastic seafarer was St. Brendan, who may have actually reached North America. Other monks, however, embarked on more modest journeys in coracles or currachs - simple boats made of hide and willow branches. Sometimes, these journeys were undertaken without the aid of a paddle; the monk would simply get in and allow himself to be carried by wind, wave and providence. I do not know how widespread this practice was, but it has certainly become part of the symbolic lexicon of Celtic Christianity.

Therese pointed out in our retreat that the curragh is “a symbol of embarking upon a transformative life changing experience – one can never return to who or how we were prior to the risk. Genuine prayer is also a coracle if we are praying as Simone Weil defined it – prayer as rapt attention. Listening, receiving, waiting, making room for.” Prayers, poems and art are our coracles, when given over to God, can be vessels which carry us forward into possibility. They are moments the Divine-Humanity of Christ, the Wisdom of God, calls us forward toward the horizon of the age to come. This retreat, too, was a curragh, and I am grateful to divine providence for providing it.

Beauty

Above: The Conversion of St. Augustine, by Fra Angelico and his workshop, circa 1345-1455

This post contains this arts missioner’s meditation on a passage of St Augustine of Hippo’s biography, known as Confessions, followed by a listing of opportunities in faith and the arts with some wonderful poets, scholars, creatives and contemplatives who are friends of Cathedral Arts.

“Late have I loved you, O Beauty ever ancient, ever new, late have I loved you! You were within me, but I was outside, and it was there that I searched for you. In my unloveliness I plunged into the lovely things which you created. You were with me, but I was not with you. Created things kept me from you; yet if they had not been in you they would have not been at all. You called, you shouted, and you broke through my deafness. You flashed, you shone, and you dispelled my blindness. You breathed your fragrance on me; I drew in breath and now I pant for you. I have tasted you, now I hunger and thirst for more. You touched me, and I burned for your peace.”

Augustine (354 – 430) uses Beauty here as a name for God, a name some feel makes God more accessible to them. He writes under the influence of Plato for whom Beauty is the object of desire and closely connected to the Good.

“Late have I loved you, O Beauty ever ancient, ever new, late have I loved you! You were within me, but I was outside, and it was there that I searched for you.”

In the first chapter of the Gospel of John, the one whom Augustine refers to as “ever ancient, ever new,” comes as light which casts what does not perceive him into deep shadow. “He was in the world, and though the world was made through him, the world did not recognize him. He came to that which was his own, but his own did not receive him.” (John 10:1-2, NIV)

Similarly, Beauty, living in the little world that was Augustine, had the effect of casting him out of himself. 

“In my unloveliness I plunged into the lovely things which you created.”

When I remembered Augustine’s passage on Beauty, I wondered how it might serve the Cathedral’s mission of helping people fall in love with God through beauty and also help me write a blog post. Writing is a lovely thing to plunge into, as is our mission in the arts. But misusing Augustine’s use of the word “beauty” here is an unlovely temptation for me. Beauty, here, is a symbol for Godself—a word meant to roam free rather than to be domesticated for my own purposes.

“You were with me, but I was not with you. Created things kept me from you; yet if they had not been in you they would have not been at all.”

The seeming distance between Augustine who is “a little world made cunningly” (in the words of John Donne), and God is no distance at all, but rather an “endless night” in contrast to the Beauty and Light of God.

“You called, you shouted, and you broke through my deafness. You flashed, you shone, and you dispelled my blindness. You breathed your fragrance on me; I drew in breath and now I pant for you. I have tasted you, now I hunger and thirst for more. You touched me, and I burned for your peace.”

Reflective of Augustine, Donne’s poem referenced above ends with “And burn me O Lord, with a fiery zeal/ Of thee and thy house, which doth in eating heal.”

I hear in these lines my own plunging and recognition of the church as “Thy house”— both a cathedral built of many souls and an instrument of God’s healing. I feel concern for Donne’s cure.

I conclude my meditation with a prayer for our little world: May the fragrance of incense, the sound of voice and organ, and the grace to take and eat break through and help us to know ourselves to have been touched by Beauty, and burning for peace. Amen.

Here are the promised notes……

  • Between the services on Sunday we have coffee downstairs at 9AM and share in lectio divina—divine reading—from which flows meditation and creative conversation not unlike this blog post. And if you are coming to Albany and have not seen the tulips in Albany’s Washington Park, now is the time—they are at their most beautiful now.

  • Speaking of fire, church and the senses, the Cathedral will offer the ancient liturgy of the Pentecost Vigil this year on Saturday, May 27 at 7PM. Our friend Dr. Brian Taylor of St. George’s Episcopal Church in Schenectady will be the organist.

  • The Chalice of Repose Project Lenten Workshop with Therese Schroeder-Sheker was a recent time of deep learning and meditation — “transformational rather than merely informational,” as one participant put it. We are collecting interest for future workshops with Chalice, which are open to only ten participants. You can learn more and show your interest HERE.

  • It is due to the years-long interest of Father Paul Hunter in the writings of Schroeder-Sheker that the Chalice of Repose Project came to our cathedral. The next blog post will be a sequel to his last, Grail Questions, which you can read HERE, or on the Chalice of Repose Project website.

  • Our leader in poetry, Evan Craig Reardon, will soon record a discussion with poet Bruce Beasley whose new book, Prayershreds, was just published by Orison Books. You can read about Beasley’s work HERE while you await the release of our conversation with him.

  • Save the date for more poetry!—on Saturday, November 4 we will welcome poet, scholar, musician and priest Malcolm Guite to the Cathedral of All Saints. He will speak on the Psalms for our Annual Bible Symposium.

  • Peace.

The Mystical in Art

Often we refer to Lent as a journey. Leaving home to wander for the love of God—peregrinatio—is part of the Christian mystical tradition. In this post we will wander into the “mystical,” a word that may seem to imply extraordinary experience, and the “abstract,” a word indicating something without immediately graspable substance.

Merriam Webster’s definition of “mystical” includes “having a spiritual meaning or reality that is neither apparent to the senses nor obvious to the intelligence.” If art has spiritual meaning, does this mean that abstract art is mystical? Can we hope to receive spiritual meaning from an abstract painting as we do from a religious one? Can being deprived of recognizable figures and stories lead us to inner clarity? 

“Like great poets and great artists, the great mystics are examples of extraordinary human achievement who challenge and inspire even those who may not share their commitments,” writes Bernard McGinn, foremost contemporary writer on Christian Mysticism, in his introduction to an anthology by that name. To help us understand where the word mysticism originates, he writes

“Although the word mysticism is fairly recent…..the adjective mystical (“hidden” in Greek) has been widely used among Christians since at least the late 2nd century CE…..The mystical life is essentially a process, an itinerary or journey to God, not just a moment or brief state of what is often called mystical union, important as such moments may be.”

McGinn prefers the phrase mystical consciousness to mystical experience, the former being indicative of the inseparability of perception and sensibility from “the higher mental activities of understanding, judging, willing, and loving that form the conscious life of subjects, that is, of creatures defined by their ability to know and love,” and also “states of awareness in which God becomes present in our inner acts, not as an object to be grasped, but as the direct and transforming center of life.” 

Using the idea of a journey, can we remember a work of art which at a turn or a stop in our lives lit up our consciousness and illuminated our way?  Are these experiences with art mystical? Or perhaps a better question to reflect on is, Did the art transform our ability to know and to love?

When it comes to art that mystifies or overwhelms, we do not have to import our own meaning to it. If it has something to say to us we will know if only we surrender to it for a time, because the elements of its meaning are already in us. 

Surrender to art is like gazing into the sky. Sooner or later our negligible dimensionality, our being just a little mirror to vastness sinks in. In witnessing the sky we become constellated by its contents. We become oriented to ourselves who have elements of sky in our eyes, lungs, and blood.

above, Red Cloud, Piet Mondrian, oil, 1907

One might think that the mystical in art is mostly in the eye, or in the response, of the beholder. But whatever our taste is in art and however we feel about “mysticism”-- however we relate to those objects — is far removed from God’s knowing and loving—God’s preference for everything that is made. (Gen 1:31)

Preference for creation is mirrored by art which is not formed by mannerism or mimicry, but through discerning what it reveals. Not overstepping “the modesty of nature” is mystical consciousness in art. As Shakespeare’s character Hamlet instructed some actors: 

Suit the action to the word, the word to the action, with this

special observance, that you o'erstep not the modesty of nature:

for any thing so o'erdone is from the purpose of playing, whose

end, both at the first and now, was and is, to hold as 'twere the

mirror up to nature: to show virtue her feature, scorn her own

image, and the very age and body of the time his form and

pressure. 

The Eucharist is a drama. Those who serve in liturgical worship act with consciousness similar to what Hamlet advises above–holding a mirror to the meaning of the life, passion, death, and resurrection of Christ with symbolic gestures matched to and not overstepping the words of the liturgy, showing “the very age and body” of Christ until His coming again.

The seasons of Advent and Lent draw us into the drama deeply while they reflect each other, as shown in the poem by Donald Hall called “Advent” which ends:

When I know that the grave is empty,

Absence eviscerates me,

And I dwell in a cavernous, constant

        Horror vacui.

Horror vacui—fear of vacant spaces such as abstract art or contemplating the mystical may conjure in us. Where something rises, space is left behind and the question of what to do with it.

In his essay “The Unsayable Said," Donald Hall writes of poetry in relation to the body in a way that sounds Eucharistic to me: “The body is poetry's door; the sounds of words—throbbing in legs and arms; rich in the mouth—let us into the house of reading a poem…..”

Our bodies are God’s door, the bread and wine in the mouth let us into the house of receiving Christ.

“We speculate; speculation does no harm when it acknowledges itself,” Hall writes. “We must never assume that the poem, appearing simple, hides an intellectual statement that only professors are equipped to explicate.”

So it is with the strange simplicity of the bread and wine—as we speculate and reflect on the Eucharist we do not import meaning to it, but rather grow in knowing and loving by it. We ask God to just “say the word,” and we receive. This is the only mystical experience many Christians are conscious of as being their own. 

When we speak of the “mystery” of the Eucharist, we speak of the meaning of the consecrated bread and wine that cannot be contained by our mouths or comprehended with sense or intellect. Similarly, an abstract painting may hold the “unsayable said,” and we may want to stand before it, bearing silent witness.

Stations of the Cross: Lema Sabachtani, Barnett Newman, 1958-1966 (source: Wikimedia commons)

Some Cathedral Arts notes:

April is National Poetry Month and Eastertide, and it is time to sign up for reading Wallace Stevens with Evan Craig Reardon on Zoom on April 18 & 25. This a free opportunity for peregrinatio with a skilled poet and friends. No prior experience with poetry is required. Click HERE to register.

The Cathedral’s former vicar, Fr Jonathan P. Beck, has moved on to become Priest-in-Charge at Trinity Church in Potsdam. There have been multiple poetry sightings (citings?) at his sermons HERE.

Save the Date: We are looking forward to bringing poet, musician, and priest Malcolm Guite to the Cathedral on Saturday, November 4, 2023 to speak on the Psalms for our annual Bible Symposium. You can listen to a conversation between Malcolm and the Cathedral Dean, Leander S. Harding, from our 2021 poetry celebration HERE.

Do join us for the Meditation on the Passion of Christ choral service preceded by an organ recital, and during Holy Week and Easter.

“Grail Questions,” by Fr. Paul Hunter

The Damsel of Sanct Grael, by Dante Gabriel Rossetti, 1857, watercolor

“Grail Questions: A Reflection on the Work of Therese Schroeder-Sheker and the Chalice of Repose Project”

During Lent 2023 Therese Schroeder-Sheker, founder and dean of the Chalice of Repose Project, will serve as theologian and artist in residence, offering a six session Lenten program via Zoom on Tuesday evenings. I offer the following reflection in anticipation of the program, and plan to offer a final reflection at the program’s conclusion in Eastertide. - Father Paul Hunter. 

In the first legend of the Grail, it is said that the Grail belongs to the first comer who asks the guardian of the vessel, a king three-quarters paralyzed by the most painful wound: “What are you going through?” The love of our neighbor in all its fullness simply means being able to say to him: “What are you going through?”… Only he who is capable of attention can do this.

- Simone Weil, ‘Reflections on The Right Use of School Studies with a View to the Love of God.’ 

The altogether inimitable French philosopher, mystic and political activist Simone Weil spent much of her brief life (she died at the age of 34) as a school teacher. She argued that the primary goal of education was neither marketable skills nor even good citizens, and certainly not to meet minimum standards of familiarity with prescribed subjects. Rather, the goal of school studies was what she called “attention.” Attention became a kind of technical term in her thought, which she distinguished sharply from the sort of “muscular effort” that usually passes for focus. “Attention consists of suspending our thought, leaving it detached, empty and ready to be penetrated… Above all our thought should be empty, waiting, not seeking anything, but ready to receive in its naked truth the object which is to penetrate it.” For Weil, love of neighbor and prayer are the great fruits of attention because “Prayer consists of attention. It is the orientation of all the attention of which the soul is capable towards God.”  

In the Grail legend Weil references, the Grail is the original chalice used at the last supper, or perhaps a cup which caught the blood of Christ at the crucifixion. Knights sought this relic, and some finally made it as far as the castle where the cup was guarded by a wounded King, who could not be healed until he was asked the grail question. Even those who made it as far as the Grail Castle might fail in their quest if they failed to recognize the Grail when it appeared before them. But, if they did both recognize the Grail and ask the wounded king the question, they would receive the Grail and its healing power would work on both the King and the stricken land. Weil reads this as a symbol of how the love of our neighbors may heal and restore, but this healing can only be accomplished by those who know how to ask the right questions. 

Attention is a way of knowing that runs counter to some of the most ingrained habits of modern thought. At least since Francis Bacon declared that knowledge is power, we have tended to equate understanding with mastery, technique and control. We tend, as a matter of course, to assume that all problems can be reduced to issues of management that may be solved with sufficient expertise. There may indeed be advantages to such a cast of mind. Still, such an attitude cannot teach us to ask the Grail questions; it does not even recognize them as questions worthy to be asked. But that is the one thing most needful: to ask the questions which heal and bind up, which can renew both soul and earth.      

For that, a different way of knowing is required, not the powerful way of mastery, but the disarmed, contemplative, Marian way of knowing that Simone Weil named attention. Our Lady exemplified this way of knowing as the archetypal contemplative, the one who heard God’s Word with a receptive heart and brought forth the incarnate Lord; the one whom St. Luke continually shows to us in his gospel as keenly sensitive to the Spirit’s movement, beholding and treasuring in her heart all she saw. She did this, even when she knew that heart would be pierced, penetrated, and wounded by such beholding. It is the way of knowing exemplified as well by that other Mary who sat at Christ’s feet, while her sister Martha engaged in more obviously practical efforts. 

Attention may be evoked suddenly by the appearance of something which exceeds our control and arrests our restless thoughts. Perhaps it is most often evoked by the experience of beauty. But it is also a capacity that may be nurtured by practice, which brings me, rather elliptically, to the work of Therese Schroeder-Sheker. I don’t remember now how I first encountered Therese’s music or her work with the dying. It may have been a blurb she wrote on the back of a book I was reading about Christian mysticism, or it may have been through reading her lyrical essays in Jesus the Imagination, a lovely, eclectic journal of art, theology and - occasionally- revolutionary politics. After her name came the description “Founder, The Chalice of Repose Project.” 

The Chalice of Repose. This name conjured images of castles, deep medieval woods, armored knights seeking, finding and losing the grail - all of which appealed to my deep-seated Romanticism immediately. Nor, having learned more about the Chalice of Repose, does it seem that my romantic associations were too far off the mark, because Therese is someone who knows how to ask the grail questions. 

The Chalice of Repose Project trains musicians in the palliative medical field of Music- Thanatology, the practice of offering care to the dying through music, which Therese has pioneered. Practitioners use harps, keeping vigil at the deathbed with the goal of “relief from either physiological pain or spiritual suffering” (Transitus 56). Again, there is something deeply romantic about this image, but it is not dreamy, not elevator music for the dying, as Therese takes pains to point out. 

Prescriptive music is not a bedside concert, nor is it entertainment, ambient music, atmosphere music, auditory affection, favorite music, intuitive music, jazz improvisation, or distraction therapy. It is a sonic medicine, compounded and customized to meet the needs of the individual.  (56)

The proper compounding of this medicine demands a discipline of attention and responsiveness to vital signs and respiratory cycles and more, by which a sympathetic resonance between musician, patient and instrument is established. Playing for the dying patient the musician-clinician “must phrase with the patients, beginning and ending phrases in alignment with their own cycles of inhalation and exhalation. Student interns must learn… how to use major and minor scales, chromaticism, harmony and rhythm clinically, because it is possible to stimulate or suppress body temperature, metabolism or any of the vital signs with the reorganizing properties of sound” (57).  This is an active, rather than passive, receptivity. It is a practice that demands and cultivates attention, in order to “make love audible” (83).  

Therese describes how the Chalice of Repose Project received its name, which came 

…from the heart of quiet and sustained prayer; they were not words generated in intellectual discoveries. Following this, I saw-experienced a beautiful lily, with translucent petals and trembling veins, exuding an exquisite fragrance. The work with the dying was well underway. It had already permeated my imagination and soul and it was easy to recognize: “...That’s how we could be when tending to the dying, like that lily…” We could be open, like a chalice, translucent, with an embodied stillness or repose. (Transitus 74. Emphasis in original). 

Reading these words I cannot help but think, of course, of the Eucharistic chalice and of the Grail, which I take to be a kind of mythic image of and reflection upon the meaning of the Eucharist. It is in the Eucharist that Christ makes himself completely and most intimately available to us, and in the Eucharist that we are united to both God and our neighbors, “For we being many are one bread, and one body: for we are all partakers of that one bread” (KJV 1 Cor 10.17). Each one of us who receives Christ in the Eucharist, becomes a vessel holding Christ within our very hearts. 

But equally, we also receive and carry each other, fellow communicants, because it is the same Christ who dwells in each of us. We cannot receive the incarnate Lord without receiving his people. This is why Saint Paul warned the Church in Corinth that if we take communion while failing to love our neighbors, we also fail to ‘discern the Lord’s body’ (1 Cor 11.29). It is entirely possible to make it all the way to the Grail castle and yet fail to recognize the mystery in front of us - the mystery of Christ present in his people. 

When we do recognize that mystery, however, we become ourselves healing vessels of his presence, carrying one another in our hearts and bearing each other's burdens (Gal 6.2). We can become “open, like a chalice, translucent, with an embodied stillness or repose” that welcomes our neighbors with all their wounds.

Therese’s work with the dying is certainly Grail work, but I see the same qualities of attention running through all her work, whether keeping vigil at a deathbed, writing to address the abuse crisis in the Church, or even reflecting on the spiritual labor of keeping a garden. 

Therese describes this practice of attention simply as beholding. “Whether in silence, in speech, at harp, in prayer, working inside or working outdoors, beholding is the entree. Beholding builds a metaphysical ark, a currach for earth, air, fire and water” (“Garden Gate” in Jesus the Imagination. vol 4. 37). Yet another Mary, Mary Magdalene, shows the power of beholding. 

The Magdalene was with Jesus at the Cross till the very end, and… she saw Him, the Risen Christ, pre-dawn on Sunday morning, in spring air that is quivering in the fragrance of blossoming trees… a distracted or preoccupied person would not be able to notice someone standing nearby, in spirit, nor would he or she have been able to receive his or her humanity mirrored back as an archetypal gardener engaged in manual labor” (“Garden Gate” 46-47). 

For this reason, I am so grateful that Therese will be leading a Lenten program at the Cathedral of All Saints. In conversations preparing for this program, Therese has made it clear that this will not be a course in Music-Thanatology, or even in contemplative musicianship. In these conversations we will explore the spiritual power of beauty. Even as a person with no ambition to become a music-thanatologist, I believe Therese is someone from whom I can learn to ask those Grail questions a little more faithfully. And coming to Easter, perhaps I will not be too distracted to notice the Risen Lord standing beside me. 

Art of the Bloom

Above: The Baptismal Font by Bedminster Florist, Lee Longell

Last weekend was Cathedral in Bloom weekend, when local floral artists fill the Cathedral with their creations in response to the Cathedral’s art-filled interior.

Those familiar with the Cathedral and its unique character born of the integrity of its design for worship supported by the efforts of individual, often identifiable, artists and artisans, feel its happiness when it is full of people and thanksgiving, as it is at events such as Lessons and Carols and Cathedral in Bloom—times when the swell of human hearts toward every line sung and bud bursting is most heard and seen.

On Friday, I gave a pastel drawing demonstration on the Flowers of Redon, during which we explored what a Symbolist treatment of flowers means aesthetically, technically, spiritually ……

Photo credit: Meredith Ewbank

A floral arrangement shows the essence of a bloom as a stone carving shows natural form. An artist’s response to these is a showing of what is elemental while it is something new.

On Saturday we hosted an Open Studio for artists, and Albany’s Urban Sketchers came—a group dedicated to drawing from direct observation and with each other.

They and other artists have graciously shared their work for this post……

Above: pen sketch of the Great East Window (by Ottavia Huang/@ms.otter.studio)

Works by Albany’s Urban Sketchers

Above: sketch by Sheryl Galinski

Above: drawing by Deborah Fox

Above: photograph by Camille Hoheb

Sketch by Paula Read

Art by Carol Coogan

(You can read a meditation on Glory and see photos from last year’s Cathedral in Bloom HERE.)

We look forward to seeing you at Cathedral in Bloom 2024!

Journey

“Journey,” preceded by “spiritual,” is a phrase often used in our time to describe the Christian life, and also works in interfaith circles. I suppose that “spiritual journey” effectively describes what is a humbling and stumbling process, as it also quells fear of the evidently burdensome word which could be used instead—“discipleship”—which might sound overcommitting. “Journey” is broadly applicable to creatures who do not know where they are on the path, but that they are on it.

I do not think it is using too broad a brush to say that we who set out in faith sooner or later notice ourselves in a state of incomprehension. But we go forward, perhaps feeling less like the Magi above in this sarcophagus relief from the 4th century and more like their camels, who look earnest enough.

“Even Christians” is 14th century Julian of Norwich’s tender Middle English phrase for those who attempt to follow Christ while God looks on with “pity, and not with blame.” She concluded that “Love was His meaning” from her twenty-some year journey in the light of prayer and Christian teaching. There was nothing new in what she wrote—the love she found was in the underbrush of her age.

The visions Julian experienced as a young woman were her Damascus Road—such as where St. Paul had a revelation of Christ and was struck blind—and Julian’s star, such as the star followed by the Magi who sought the newborn King. Commitment to her path led to the clearing where Julian could finally articulate what she perceived in her book, Revelations of Divine Love.

The keenly shining light or enfolding dark—life’s turning point—is where we find faith, or where we lose faith in an inferior god and long for one greater. At such junctures we have the chance to step into a journey of deeper knowing where we come to perceive ourselves known by God, and thereby become wiser.

T.S. Eliot’s poem, The Journey of the Magi, captures well the anticlimax of the spiritual path that extends beyond life’s turning point. The speaker, a magus, tells the journey from his position of being back home:

We returned to our palaces, these Kingdoms,

But no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation,

With an alien people clutching their gods.

I should be glad of another death.

“Spiritual Journey” includes the disorientation we may feel for the the rest of our lives after an encounter with God that is a birth and also the death of what we had known. “Spiritual journey” describes the whole trip—the stars and the mud, the wildflowers and thorn-bushes, and how we respond to them—each coming away with something to give that is life to the idol-clutching world.

As we look forward to the Feast of the Epiphany on Friday, I look back on a recent leg of my spiritual journey—a 32-week retreat in daily life with the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius of Loyola—a 16th century manual for spiritual directors to lead retreats in imaginative prayer with scripture. My spiritual director, sketchbook, pens, and even my dreams, came along.

I did nothing new in those weeks, but by praying through drawing and images with scripture, I remembered who I am—an adult version of the child who spent hours drawing on paper bags on the floor. It is a great gift of the spiritual journey to know that God who is named “I am,” spoken in the bush on Moses’ path, desires that we, like God, will be our meaning.

I leave you with a watercolor sketch from my prayer notebook—the Magi find the house where Jesus and Mary are and put down their suitcases…..May you be able to lay down your burdens, such as they are and where you are, and find God’s welcome in the New Year. Peace.


Joy on the Way

It is week three of the Advent journey. The scripture readings, music, and prayer bring a dawning sense of the Glory of God. A source of joy for me every week is finding art for preparing a visual presentation to share on the Wednesdays of Advent.

The pastel above by the French Symbolist painter, Odilon Redon. Mary is visiting her cousin Elizabeth who is saying, “And why is this granted to me that the mother of my Lord should come to me? For behold, when the sound of your greeting came to my ears, the baby in my womb leaped for joy. And blessed is she who believed that there would be a fulfillment of what was spoken to her from the Lord.” (Luke 1:42-45)

At the moment depicted above, Elizabeth and Mary alone bear the risk of bringing these unexpected cousins into the world: John the Baptist who would proclaim the coming of the Lord in the wilderness, and Jesus, who would be called Christ. As their mothers support each other during pregnancy, the sons will support each other’s roles in the story of the coming of God’s Glory.

Redon’s art also shows the moment before Mary breaks out into her prayer-poem we call the Magnificat, which was one of the choices for readings for last Sunday, known as Gaudete Sunday—gaudete meaning “rejoice.”

“My soul magnifies the Lord,
  and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior,
for he has looked on the humble estate of his servant.
    For behold, from now on all generations will call me blessed….”

Reading Advent’s scripture with concepts in visual art, such as contrast in light and dark, is one focus of our Advent & Art series. It is said that Advent begins in darkness. And so did Redon’s career—he did not use color often until he was about fifty. To my eye, Elizabeth and Mary’s experience is expressed above in Redon’s selection of colors. Orange and blue are complements—opposite each other on the color wheel.

Elizabeth, united to Mary in orange tones, expresses her own joy at her improbable pregnancy with John, while blessing Mary for believing there would be fulfillment of the unbelievable thing spoken to her by the Lord. The women are gestating the great story of contrast—the Glory of God in a broken world.

For many, light struggles to break through this time of year. As a child, uneducated in faith, I experienced a seasonal fatalism, not hope. I knew, as I know now, that something was going to happen. However naive, I think it would have been good for me to view God as one from whom I might receive a good gift. But a Santa Claus-like god comes and leaves. He does not hang around long in the darkness.

Persevering in faith in the darkness, one may see the opportunity to learn to desire the Giver above the gifts. Suffering the lowliness of believing in the darkness invites Glory to break through.

Eventually, I learned that hope comes by adding substance to faith—by proclaiming it—embodying it—trying to do like Mary did.

“Faith is what someone knows to be true, whether they believe it or not,” was writer Flannery O’Connor’s modern take, perhaps on Hebrews 11, “Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.” O’Connor wrote about faith as she could in her time—strangely, often with ugliness to show beauty by contrast.

We do not live in a society like Mary’s where the prophets were read and people waited for the kingdom of God to come. But we have what we know is true and beautiful, and we can proclaim it, as Mary did. If we give it flesh, Christ, the light of the world, appears in the flesh—in us—showing who God is.

From this stance much poetry has been born. For our Bible Symposium in 2023, we look forward to welcoming the priest-poet Malcolm Guite, whose interview with Tish Harrison Warren appeared in Sunday’s NY Times. Unfortunately it is only accessible to subscribers, but I have included the link to Guite’s Advent book HERE, and below are some of his words from the interview. Peace.

The word Advent means “arrival” or “coming.” The church saw that preparing for the coming of Christ at Christmas could also be a way of looking to that larger hope, which is the final coming of Jesus, the day when, at last, the earth will be filled with the glory of God. And in my book I said, well, I think there’s a third “coming,” a kind of continuous coming. We all experience a series of Advents. My prayer life and spirituality is very much focused on the Eucharist. So for me, every time I hold out my hands and the wafer is placed there and I receive him, that’s an advent. And in fact, that’s actually also Christmas. It’s an incarnation. He chooses the humble form of the bread as he chose the humble form of the baby to be his body.

The Crumbs of St. Francis

On Sunday I drew portraits of cats and dogs in all their furry and wiggling glory, as I do annually before our Blessing of the Animals service held on the Sunday afternoon closest to the Feast of St. Francis, which is today. This raised money for our mission to a school in Pouly, Haiti, which the Cathedral has long supported. You may make a donation in support of the school HERE.

After the 7.0 magnitude earthquake that struck Haiti in 2010, at my former church, a woman from Haiti (who eventually became my prayer partner) said to the congregation, “Haiti is a blessing country.” Those were her exact words. While people who had visited Haiti seemed to know what she meant, I pondered. In her speech to the congregation, she said her young son had asked her, “Why?” And the answer she said she gave him was, “Haiti is a blessing country.“

She and her son laid the Haitian flag in a basket on the altar and left it there, walking back to their pew. I noticed she had not called her country “blessed,” something that seemed impossible at that moment. I realized that what she was saying is that Haiti chooses to keep one foot in the kingdom of the blessed. She was speaking of what she experienced the calling of her former home to be. To offer blessing, no matter what, no matter how poor or devastated. This is what growing up there had taught her, and what she wanted her son and her church to know.

How is it possible to bless no matter what? Love can be the only answer. We enjoyed this truth on Sunday with a simple prayer service during which pets were blessed by Dean Harding after we had been blessed with our way of seeing them, and read in the first chapter of Genesis how God saw what God made and called it good.

The creation is good, however much it suffers. However much we have sinned against it and against ourselves as part of it. However much we choose to bless it—however we humble ourselves to protect it or fail to and diminish—creation and its creatures retain God-given goodness.

My friend understood well the God-given goodness of the suffering country of her birth. I imagine this understanding has been the basis for her life of prayer and her work in serving the Church and caring for the sick—work she hoped to do again in Haiti someday.

Some of us need a better sense of our origin as redeemed to begin our work. St. Francis is fabled to have taken off his sumptuous clothing and laid them at his rich father’s feet before embarking on a life with what he called his beloved “Lady Poverty.”

I think those who encountered Francis responded with wonder about the source of his orientation not unlike how I wondered at my friend’s origins in Haiti. What set of spiritual experiences form the bones of an entire life that can point from the lowest place to the highest, where the crucified One is enthroned?

Today, as I read Thomas of Celano’s account of St. Francis’ encounter with the six-winged Seraph with arms outstretched like a crucified man, from whom he received the stigmata, I am touched by how Francis’ visitation with wounds came not only from the spiritual realm but also from the animal world.

Seraphs first appear in the Book of Isaiah, which is the topic of the Dean’s Forum on October 18, and of the Cathedral’s Bible Symposium on November 5. Click HERE for tickets.

For St. Francis who preached to the birds, it seems fitting that the crucified One who was with God at the beginning of creation manifested with wings to call Francis to share the experience of His earthly body, as animals keep us earthed and present to bodily essential goodness, creaturely furry and feathery warmth.

Would you join us this evening on Zoom for the Feast of St. Francis? We are blessed to welcome Franciscan priest Fr. Dennis E. Tamburello O.F.M., Professor of Religious Studies at Sienna College, to lead us in a discussion of the great saint from Assisi. Please click HERE to fill out the form to register if you did not attend the September Dean’s Forums, or send me an email, both before 8PM, to receive the Zoom link.

God’s peace,

Brynna

Director of Cathedral Arts mission

Light from Light: Transfiguration, with Sermon

In the heat and humidity of Sunday we celebrated the Transfiguration. Bishop Richard Fenwick (retired), was our preacher and celebrant. As he began the task of creating images in his sermon by which we might glimpse the uncreated light revealed on the mountain in the transfiguration of Jesus before his disciples, I forgot the heat and became transfixed.

As Bishop Fenwick—Richard—indicated, it is impossible to imagine such an event, which left a searing impression on the mind of Peter, who, as those visited by angels in Hebrew scripture, tried to offer hospitality to Moses and Elijah when they appeared next to Jesus. Peter was not wrong, but his imagination was wholly inadequate in the face of God’s Glory. As is ours.

But artists—and writing sermons is an art—must attempt to climb this mountain and say something about the indescribable Beauty that touches down. And so, impossibly leaping from Mount Tabor to the snowy peaks of Mount Hermon, Bishop Richard spoke of the icons of the Novgorod school that try to show Jesus to be who the Church has been saying for almost 1700 years in the Nicene Creed, “God from God, light from light…..”

The entire service is HERE, while just the sermon is HERE:

My recent creative attempts manifested a week ago in a slide presentation I offered on Zoom, Visio Divina, Prayer, & and the Art of the Cathedral. I fleshed out my slides to offer background on our Cathedral of All Saints and its makers, with photos of its history and art. It is a course on visual prayer in the context of art that belongs to us all. My intention is to make the slides available to anyone who would like to use the notes and images to learn more about our Cathedral, or for prayer, and to share with church, family and friends. You can find my slides HERE.

In the Desert with Antony

While contemplating global despair, dullness of feeling, and how we must learn austerity to adapt and survive, I thought of how the austerity required to make art with meaning deeper than its surface is much like the perseverance of saints. I looked for writings on Christian asceticism and found those who cast themselves into the desert to face their concerns. I fell in love with the original holy monk, St. Antony, and the art his life inspired. Above is The Tribulations of St. Antony, an oil painting by Belgian painter James Ensor, made in 1887.

St. Antony of Egypt is also known as St. Antony the Great, the Father of All Monks, and by a number of other names. St. Athanasius of Alexandria wrote the Life of St. Antony shortly after his death in 356, and it became a bestseller. I read a translation with a foreword by contemporary poet Scott Cairns. To introduce us to the saint and his work, Cairns writes:

“[Antony] understood his calling—and that of every human person—to be an invitation to what the Orthodox call theosis — human participation in the inexhaustible enormity of divine life……His attention to others — noting in one of love of prayer, in another joyful humility, and yet in another a compassion availed for him a conviction…..that salvation could be tasted in the flesh. Saint Anthony was a man for whom salvation was not a future condition, but a present gift offered to be tasted and seen, and now.”

The above captures what Antony learned in his formation and what he conveyed to others—it does not mention how Antony’s formation occurred during decades of solitude in the desert, much of the time battling demons.

For early Christians, demons were a fact of life, and the desert wilderness was their primary abode. A search for ”Temptations of St. Antony” brings forth a multitude of torturous images. Most feature a seductive woman, that particular demonic apparition being easier to depict than others that made themselves known to Antony by noise or by beatings.

As a teenager I frequented MOMA and studied the painting above, and I have long been a fan of James Ensor, who made self-portraits with demons tormenting him. I don’t encourage fascination with evil, but like Antony and Ensor, I do encourage facing torments head-on with the help of Christ.

Therefore I was delighted to find an online catalogue from the Chicago Art Institute on Ensor’s drawing, The Temptations of St. Antony, which shows how it is made with 51 separate pages mounted on canvas. The entire work is like the praying St. Antony did over decades in the desert, addressing every imaginable demon and temptation. At the rate of one drawing a week, this work might easily represent a year of prayer in the life of the artist.

Ensor’s drawing includes the scope of his own concerns, including fried sausages in the lower left and scientific theory in the upper right. A variety of women are present, as are ancient idols. Christ is at the top above Antony’s sight, ready to illumine him as the saint struggles to focus his prayer above the rumpus.

The humor in this drawing is typical of Ensor, but perhaps also inspired by the Life of Antony. Seriously religious and creative people learn to temper themselves with humor (hopefully), often after multiple thrashings by the demons of scrupulosity and perfectionism.

Anthanasius’ biography of Antony is serious. But it is earthy too, maybe funny at times. Anthanasius’ own life—his battles with Arian heresy, his intermittent episcopacy and frequent exiles which gave him the name Athanasius Contra Mundum, “Anthanasius Against the World,” vibrate in his tone.

Athanasius begins the story close to Antony’s converting experience. As a young man, Antony was orphaned, along with a younger sister. Upon hearing the gospel story about the rich young man, Antony gave up his wealth except what he needed to care for her. Upon hearing Jesus’ command, Do not be anxious for tomorrow, Antony gave up the rest of his money and placed his sister in a convent so that he might live the life of an ascetic.

Monks were not in the desert yet, but holy people lived on the edges of towns. If Antony heard of a “zealous person anywhere, he searched him out like the wise bee.” He marked the particular perseverance with which one fasted or another slept on the ground and strove to “manifest in himself what was best from all,” and so became loved by all.

The devil undertook Antony’s undoing, besieging the youth with boredom and with missing his sister. When this did not work, he tried to inspire lustful thoughts, taking the form of a woman and then of a boy who identified himself as the “Spirit of Fornication.”

“This was Antony’s first contest against the devil,” Athanasius reports, and then carefully adds, “or rather this was in Antony the success of the Savior, who condemned sin in the flesh, in order that the just requirement of the law might be fulfilled in us, who walk not according to the flesh but according to the Spirit.” (Romans 8:4)

Antony continued to excel in ascetic practices, eating only bread and salt once daily, refusing oil for his skin, and never washing. He went to live in the tombs beyond the village, instructing a friend to bring his bread. Upon finding him almost beaten to death by demons sent in fear that Antony would “fill the desert with discipline,” his friend brought him to town where other friends and family kept vigil over him. When they feel asleep, Antony begged his friend to return him to the tombs.

The demons returned to terrify him. Lying on the floor and unable to stand, Antony yelled out, “Here I am—Antony!” and sang Psalm 27. The forms of leopards, bulls, serpents, bears, asps, scorpions and wolves began to fill the place. The roof opened, “as it seemed,” and light beamed. The Lord took away Antony’s pain and spoke, promising to help him and make him famous “everywhere.”

Antony found an abandoned fortress full of reptiles which left as if chased out, and sealed himself in, planning to retrieve bread delivered to the roof once every six months. People came to receive his wisdom through cracks and to check if he were alive or dead. Some, while spending nights outside, heard a mob within. As they approached the door, Antony urged them to sign themselves and go, leaving the demons to “mock themselves” because, he explained, cowardice only encourages demonic apparitions.

After almost twenty years in the fortress, those seeking to emulate Antony tore down the door. “Anthony came forth as if from some shrine, having been led into divine mysteries and inspired by God.” He was unchanged from when he had entered twenty years earlier, and was “not annoyed any more than he was elated by being embraced by so many people. He maintained utter equilibrium, like one guided by reason and steadfast in that which accords with nature.”

Antony consoled and healed, and urged all to prefer nothing above the love of Christ. He encouraged so many to the solitary life that “the desert was made a city by monks.” Quoting much scripture, Antony instructed his followers on many points. When the Greeks came to argue with Antony, none could refute his wisdom.

When he was old and worn out by his followers, Antony retired to the inner mountain, where he grew a patch of wheat for bread, delighting to not be a burden to anyone. But Antony returned to the outer mountain to heal and to teach. At the end of a list of Anthony’s healings, Athanasius tells us to not be amazed at Antony—after all, Jesus promised we would do great things with faith the size of a mustard seed.

The details of Antony’s temptations are good material for art, but his long life after his formation is less picturesque. The discourses of Antony as told by Athanasius are better read rather than excerpted here. But it seems important to say that Antony, who stayed up all night with those plagued with the most repulsive diseases and behaviors—praying until he or she was healed—must have been the most tender of men.

What ascetic practices Antony believed he must keep to remain that tender man in love with Christ! Never in all his adulthood did he wash his feet. He only washed his shirt once—before he went to court in hope of being martyred. Perhaps joking that we should believe this next proof of Antony’s influence unless it were saved for the end of the book, Athanasius writes,

“And how many young women who had men hoping to marry them, on simply seeing Antony at a distance, remained virgins for Christ!”

It is also near the end of the biography where we find how the work of Antony was a model for the work of St. Ignatius of Loyola through his Spiritual Exercises, developed about thirteen-hundred years later:

“Possessing the gift of discerning spirits….., [Antony] recognized their movements, and he knew that for which each one of them had a desire and appetite….., offering encouragement to those who were distressed in their thoughts.”

Eschewing fandom even in death, Antony died where two would bury him in an unmarked grave so he would not be mummified and displayed, as was still the Egyptian custom with honored dead. Below are Fayum mummy portraits, called such after the Fayum basin in Egypt. The woman was painted close to Antony’s time, in the 4th century, and the man is from Jesus’ 1st century.

Antony of the Desert is still a willing friend for those who seek him. His desert continues to be fertile ground for the creative life of the Church, and he is still able to speak in the desert within ourselves.

The Promised Place

The story of the life of Moses remains forever alive and helpful to me. At first, it was about a Hebrew baby meant to die but who was adopted into privilege by Pharoah’s daughter. This seemed like the gift of faith I received unexpectedly in early life, along with the gifts of finding an excellent art mentor and the benefits of being born white and middle class—all things that made my path easy, all things I did not deserve and yet received.

Moses seemed to be a sufferer of a perpetual identity crisis and guilt not unlike my own. After he killed an Egyptian beating an enslaved Hebrew and was discovered, Moses flew to Midian where he met the daughters of Jethro trying to water their flock, and helped them. Above is a painting of Moses with his wife, Zipporah, Jethro’s daughter, by Jacob Jordaens.

Then, forty years later, there was the matter of God calling to him from the burning bush on the mountain and the fear associated with that call—both for Moses and for me in reading about all the stages of grief leading to Moses’ acceptance through going back to Egypt to prepare Pharaoh to let his people go, and then in caring for the people in the wilderness.

To me, the couple above appear as if greeting a guest at their front door. They are for me as if I came through the wilderness and arrived in a clearing, facing them. I see on Zipporah’s face a life-long work of love and patience as her husband opens his mouth to speak, perhaps as if he will never stop, perhaps about the tablet he leans on and all it means to him.

Zipporah might be remembering when her father brought her and her sons to reunite with Moses in the wilderness after and they found him adjudicating the squabbles of every Israelite in the place. Moses loved the people, while their needs overwhelmed him. After hugs and a meal and hearing Moses out, Zipporah’s father said to him,

“The thing that you are doing is not good. You will surely wear out, both yourself and these people who are with you, for the task is too heavy for you; you cannot do it alone.” (Exodus 18:17-18, NASB)

Jethro then reminded Moses that his task was to represent the people to God and teach them the law and their work, and instructed him to appoint honest men as leaders of large groups and subgroups. They were only to bother Moses with major disputes.

This reminds me of the following quote by Thomas Merton that I have been shopping around lately from his book, Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander:

“There is a pervasive form of contemporary violence to which the idealist most easily succumbs: activism and overwork.

The rush and pressure of modern life are a form, perhaps the most common  form, of its innate violence.

To allow oneself to be carried away by a multitude of conflicting concerns, to surrender to too many demands, to commit oneself to too many projects, to want to help everyone in everything, is to succumb to violence.

The frenzy of our activism neutralizes our work for peace. It destroys our own inner capacity for peace. It destroys the fruitfulness of our own work, because it numbs the root of inner wisdom which makes work fruitful.”

We may congratulate ourselves for not being unjust to others, but as Thomas Merton noted in the tradition of Jethro, idealists often succumb to violence—injustice—toward self. Somehow we often find violence toward self to be acceptable and the pain of introspection intolerable. We think we can be harsh and unloving toward ourselves and simultaneously uphold justice for others. This is what I believed for many years unconsciously.

But when we begin to see what alienates us in our lives in the light of the love of God—as if flames calling to us from an ordinary bush—we start to hope for life and growth. As Moses had Jethro, we need spiritual companions who have been obedient to their own call to help us learn to obey ours and to learn to do justice to ourselves and to others.

The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, who lived and died close to the life of Moses, and Thomas Merton, who some believe to have been martyred for his anti-war work, left writings and speeches which have provided many with spiritual companionship inspiring toward justice. They had their companions, such as theologian Howard Thurman, whose writing King carried along with his Bible. Merton had the desert fathers of the 4th century, among others.

There is nothing new under the sun—spiritual people grow from seeds sown by spiritual people. John Cassian (360 – c. 435), brought the teachings of the desert fathers to the West by writing in Latin. Cassian influenced Benedict of Nursia (480 – 548), whose Rule for monastics continues to guide many. Both inspired Saint Ignatius of Loyola wrote a series of spiritual exercises in 1522–1524 in which I currently engage and which, even in the great difficulty of our time and place, help me start each day with peace.

Before the Exercises begin, Ignatian teaching offers support for growing in greater recognition of God’s love and lessons in discernment. Only after the exerciser is secure in God’s love do they consider their sin. (This takes many hours, read Psalm 139 over the course of a half-hour on three different days to get a sense of being grounded in God’s love through spiritual exercise.)

The aim of the Exercises is to let go of all that does not fulfill God’s purpose. One desire we are to pray for is what some call “Ignatian indifference.” This is not indifference such as in the email signature of a former pastor of mine which reads, “Indifference is a sin.” Ignatian indifference is opposite deadly indifference in that it is fertile ground for growing in love of God and neighbor.

Ignatian indifference is peace born of struggling to desire no particular created thing, but only what is for the “greater glory of God.” If you like, you can click to see a video with the star of Silence, Andrew Garfield, and Stephen Colbert, which tells briefly how the work of Ignatius affected one actor’s life.

Now there is an opportunity with a trained spiritual director and the book The Spiritual Work of Racial Justice, beginning soon on Zoom on Tuesday evenings. I will be participating in this myself. If you are interested in joining, click here to email me, and I will put you in touch with the presenter.

This workshop will be a context for white people in particular to listen to the experiences of people of color and to do some painful introspection in the context of God’s love which gives us strength to grow toward greater justice.

This post is likely the first of two posts—in the second I will write more about Moses and Zipporah, biblical interpretation, and racial justice. There may be another post or two in between and, I pray, no more mass shootings, racially motivated and other, although I know there will be.

(Perhaps you have noticed I cannot write for you soon after these hit me. But in this country there is more than one mass shooting happening every single day. Perhaps my growth in justice will include writing more about them.)

Until next time, may the peace that passes all understanding guard your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus (Phil 4:6). You will need peace in this place to approach it with an open heart and mind.

“The opposite of love is not hate, it’s indifference. The opposite of art is not ugliness, it’s indifference.  The opposite of faith is not heresy, it’s indifference. And the opposite of life is not death, it’s indifference.”

–Elie Wiesel