During Lent, in journeying with Christ to the Cross through scripture and liturgical arts, we follow what the Body of Christ—the Church—has guarded to provide the essential meaning of God’s work for all people in all times. In glass and stone, with paint and plaster, this is the work that Cathedrals hold, as with the above, one of our Stations of the Cross.
In meditating on these things, we are doers of theology ourselves. As 12th century mystical theologian Hugh of St. Victor wrote, “Invisible things can only be made known by visible things, and therefore the whole of theology must use visible demonstrations.” We remember Jesus’ words in in front of one of the Stations, “Whoever does not bear his own cross and come after me, cannot be my disciple.”
We are led to the question, What is my cross? while the cloud of witnesses and their art that show the beauty of the resurrection is beyond us. We read the life of Jesus and walk the path of his suffering here. We pass through clouds of dust of his road, are invited to lay our yokes on him and lighten our burdens, and walk forward with him by his light through our darkness.
Once I saw a self-portrait of someone being held by Jesus on his cross, and thought it a masterful work of Lenten theology. We start Lent on Ash Wednesday with the affirmation that God hates nothing He has made. We remember we are beloved dust for whom God holds hope we do not have for ourselves or for the world. We remember that our self-sufficiency, self-hatred and self-rejection inevitably lead to the rejection of God and others and the earth from which we were made.
Returning, reflecting, repenting, through Lent we go forward with Jesus with the dust of our earth still on his toes. We contend with Jesus’ heavy instructions on love by loading what and whom we reject onto him to take to his cross. However happy or unhappy we are, we appropriate delight in God’s love and beauty from what is written and made of them while we are still unable to perceive them ourselves.
Creatives and ministers of the “word” have worked throughout the ages to translate and make the love and beauty of Christ perceptible to us. Last Sunday we were exposed to the outrage of Jesus’ teachings on love through Dean Harding’s sermon on the Parable of the Prodigal Son.
For writer and Roman Catholic priest Henri Nouwen, it was meditating on Rembrandt’s painting of that parable that led him to see the need of finding himself in it. His self-recognition in the self-righteous son led him to recognize his longing to be received into the hands of the loving Father. He understood that it was only by receiving God’s love and compassion himself that he could assume the role of father for others.
As liturgy reminds, ministers are no more able to help themselves than others are, however the work demands it. Scripture, and sometimes art, reminds that power to love as God loves only comes by the death of our self-sufficiency on the cross of Christ. Or, as contemporary artist Makoto Fujimura writes in Art + Faith, God is the only true artist.
Right now, we might be aware of our need of God through grieving a personal loss—the cross we did not choose but must bear. Through the readings of Lent, we grieve with those who loved and lost Jesus during his earthly life. During worship, their grief slips into us and joins ours.
In the Cathedral this coming Sunday, incense will fill our nostrils and ascend as we enter the room where Mary of Bethany cracked open a costly vial of fragrance to anoint Jesus for his death and burial. We will hear Judas Iscariot complaining it could be sold to help the poor and Jesus’ reply, “Leave her alone. She bought it so that she might keep it for the day of my burial. You always have the poor with you, but you do not always have me.”
Last fall, we read Art + Faith by contemporary painter Makoto Fujimura in the Dean’s Forum. The chapter titled, “The Journey to the New Through Christ’s Tears” was about Mary anointing Jesus. Fujimura considers his art to be “a devotional act, a memorial in response to this woman’s act.” He uses precious metals to make his works objects which reflect their subject, who is Christ. But the line from this chapter that has stayed with me is spare, “Mary’s nard on his body is the only earthly possession Jesus took with him to the cross.”
I had never before deeply perceived Mary’s love and its expression until I read this line by the artist and they appeared in my senses. Similarly, through our Lenten art and liturgy, we seek to comprehend something of the humility and love of God that was laid bare for us in the human form of Jesus. We are reminded of our inability to recognize Him, to stick to Him ourselves, and yet, like Mary, we pour out our gifts and meditate with the creative efforts of those who have gone before us in hope of divine perception.
“There are those who say that what the arts are concerned with remains forever the same. This, then, is what the arts are concerned with, this is what they intend, namely, to restore within us the divine likeness, a likeness which to us is a form but to God is his nature. The more we are conformed to the divine nature, the more do we possess Wisdom, for then there begins to shine forth again in us what has forever existed in the divine Idea or Pattern, coming and going in us but standing changeless in God.” — Hugh of St. Victor, Didascalicon
“The eye through which I see God is the same eye through which God sees me; my eye and God's eye are one eye, one seeing, one knowing, one love.”
― Meister Eckhart, Sermons of Meister Eckhart