Onward

Henri Matisse, Goldfish and Palette, 1914

Years ago, when the Museum of Modern Art had a large room filled only with paintings by Matisse and a bench against the wall by windows, I would sit with my painting teacher, the man who led me to Christ, to look at people. When they approached a painting of a still life on the left wall, we marked where they stood to enjoy it.

Again, someone would stand to the right of the center of the painting and within a step of where the last person stood. “See?” my teacher would say. “That is where Matisse stood in relation to the still life when he drew it.”

By this he meant that the lines which Matisse made from the point of his beginning—you could call it a vanishing point—direct a viewer to stand where the artist stood.

In the gospels, one can see that Jesus’ point of beginning, call it a vanishing point if you like, is God the Father. The Father is always Jesus’ point of reference. If you look at Jesus, you face the Father.

William Blake (1757-1827) Christ’s Entry into Jerusalem, Glasgow Museums

A couple of days ago was Palm Sunday. Several people discussed their spiritual journeys with me on that day on which we remember Jesus’ journey into Jerusalem where he would die. The conversations seemed to me to be no coincidence. Just as with the spectators in the museum and Matisse, when we enter Jesus’ life through the art of liturgy his life orients us.

The art of Jesus’ life is not limited in time or dimension, rather it is a Way that he welcomes us to. Jesus’ point of reference, God the Father, the One with whom he was at the beginning, is always carried within himself, all the way to the cross.

As with the still life by Matisse, when we enter Jesus’ life, we become centered in the beginning. And we become carried forward. With Jesus as the Way tucked inside ourselves, notwithstanding the global pandemic that stopped all of us in our tracks, in spite of all division and death, our lives find direction.

To love this life and so lose it, as Jesus said, or to hate this life and keep it eternally, as He also said, speaks to there being no way to go except forward, from birth to death and along the points that lie between. How will we go? is the question.

Poetry, which our poetry mission consultant Evan Craig Reardon says is always about death, or love, or poetry—“poetry” means creative process, I would say—is a gift that many of us bring on our way. Similar to what the mystery of the cross of Christ bears, poetry, born of mystery, also holds space for mystery. It can seem that a poem willingly lays itself down to bear our life, and reading poetry can become a way of life.

Here is what Evan has to say about the role of poetry in our mission in the arts:

Poetry is an integral part of the Christian faith. From the Psalms to Simeon’s song in the Gospel of Luke, through to John Milton and the Metaphysical Poets, and in modern times with TS Eliot and Denise Levertov, poetry has long played an essential role in articulating the Christian faith. Poetry expresses a kind of thinking about God and Christ, about the difficulty of living that way of life, and about the beauty of holiness and the majesty of praise.

The Poetry Mission at the Cathedral of All Saints seizes on this legacy of profound creativity to lead contemporary Christians into a deeper union with Christ, while still attending to the vision of poetry in itself. Poetry is ultimately a discourse about God in the same vein as philosophy and theology, but a unique way of leading thought into ever deeper communion with God and God's Mystery.

You, dear audience, I know is not one that must be sold on the benefits of reading, but, like me, you might feel intimidated by poetry. However this finds you, I want to invite you to join us for the Hidden Cathedral Poetry Celebration—an online series of readings and ruminations around contemporary Christian poetry which will last all Eastertide. I hope you will enter this journey with us and allow yourself to be carried along.

Poet Marly Youmans has been working away at preparing a series of diverse offerings for us. You can hear her invitation and introduction to her series by clicking HERE.

If you received this blog post in your inbox, you are already subscribed to be part of the Hidden Cathedral Poetry Festival. If not, you can do so below. And please forward this to a friend.

And, a note for those interested in studying spiritual direction……

Here is an opportunity led by one of our past poetry presenters—Holy Ground is a program for forming spiritual directors led by Sister Katherine Hanley, CSJ, PhD, known at our cathedral for leading a workshop in the poetry of George Herbert in September of 2020. Sister Kitty and her fellow presenters are currently deciding if they will offer the program again in October of 2021. If you are interested, click HERE for a pdf to learn more.

May you have a blessed Holy Week. See you for poetry in joy of the Resurrection on Monday when we hear our first poet, Leonard A. Slade, Jr. read with his magnificent voice from his most recent book, Selected Poems for Freedom, Peace, and Love.

~ Brynna Carpenter-Nardone, Cathedral Arts Missioner

Notes from the Water

John the Baptist by Donatello, polychrome on wood, 1438

Today is the feast of the Baptism of the Lord, or the Theophany. I began my morning as I often do, with an audio Ignatian meditation on the day’s scripture. It is rare that I am able to imagine a biblical scene immediately when asked to, usually I struggle with it and drop it, only to find myself surprised by how it appears in my mind later in the day.

The morning’s sermon by the Dean of our Cathedral may have opened my imagination through its clarity and scope. (You can listen to it by clicking HERE). Also in my mind has been an illustration I made for the feast some years ago, which you will find below.

The baptism of Jesus is a complicated scene—especially when you indulge in conflating all the gospel versions of it and in embellishing the result. We have John clad in camel hair, with the antenna of a locust stuck in his teeth, admonishing the crowd (“You brood of vipers, who warned you to flee from the wrath to come?”) so they would remember their sins and repent of them.

And then Jesus, his cousin, approaches him. It is as if Jesus, rather than the crowd, which, if of more decent appearance would be in a different scene, needs to be cleansed. Jesus, who always knew more and better than John, who, even as a twelve-year-old, sat in the synagogue and astounded everyone with his understanding.

Others there who knew Jesus were also surprised to see him wade into the Jordan. The air around him acquired an opaqueness as it parted with the certain bearing of his being.

There had been rumors surrounding Jesus’ birth. While his parents were holy and good by all accounts, there was an unlikeliness about their lives that followed them everywhere and made those around them unsettled and inclined to question.

“Why, you?” John croaked at his cousin. He gaped like an old wine skin, ruddy from the sun, raw-red where the end of his wet camel hair tunic scraped repeatedly against his knee.

John had made the crowd feel desperate with the words he shouted from the wilderness. The words had turned them out of themselves and drove them into the wilderness to hear more. Now the crowd averted their eyes from the one they hoped would save them as they heard John ask Jesus to baptize him instead.

Then they remembered, vague in the heat, something about a greater one to come wearing dirty sandals.

“No. It is fitting,” Jesus said. John’s studied his cousin’s eyes. His face tautened. He nodded and stretched out his hands……..

Baptism of Jesus by Brynna Carpenter-Nardone

From Darkness to Light

Jesus with Two Disciples, by Rembrandt Van Rijn

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Dear Friends,

 I hope you had a blessed Thanksgiving. I did, while it was different this year.  I find much to be thankful for, including planning the Advent Through Art retreat that begins on Wednesday. You can still sign up by clicking HERE.

People who write fiction write what they want to read, as people who write sermons write what they need to hear. And so, planning this time on Zoom with art and the scripture of Advent helps me ready myself for the season. In this blog post, I share some of my notes for preparing to begin the four-week journey.

I am grateful too that we were able to have our annual Bible Symposium this year. Rev. Dr. Wesley Hill came and spoke from the experience of writing his book on the Lord’s Prayer. Not to spoil it for you (as his talks were recorded and we will release them someday) I found it interesting how he unpacked that prayer using the Gospel of John in which we do not find the text of the Lord’s Prayer.

The Gospel of John is a different kind of critter, as a professor of mine would say. Not one of the synoptic gospels—the other three whose stories all more or less parallel each other—John appears as an outlier. This causes assumptions that it was written either before or after the other three.

It contains no story of Jesus’ early life and in it Jesus seems more divine than human. Therefore it would seem that we do not look to John for the narrative of Jesus’ birth in the flesh. But it is there, while its scene would make a better abstract painting than a nativity set.

“And the light shineth in darkness; and the darkness comprehended it not.” (John 1:5)

John makes Christ’s birth through poetry—art—symbolic words best suited to the scope of what he wanted to convey. John’s Christ is dynamically revealed to the world as he casts the world into shadow…..

And therefore we read John 1 at Christmas. But a setting of light and dark that reveal word and action sets the stage well for our performance of Advent, I think. So, as I risk messing up the drama of the lectionary, I mention the Gospel of John now….

….In thinking about the beginning of the liturgical year and its Sunday readings (you can click HERE for them), contemplating a couple of questions might be help. What do these bring to mind?......there are no right answers, just what God might want you to consider as you walk toward the Advent stage....

"What is the place from which I go to God?" You might imagine what it looks like--how easy is it to see? Is there a light burning? Is it so dark you cannot see your feet? Are there others there (who?), or are you alone? How do you feel when you approach the curtain? Excited? Bored? Fearful?

"What “props” am I carrying that I did not have last year?" We are leaving a year of things we might not be ready to put down yet because they show where we are right now. What are you holding? — specific people and events, images and feelings. Weighing and examining what we carry helps us be ourselves and notice when God makes us lighter.

It is impossible for me to not think of Rembrandt here—a painter who was known to pose his subjects in costume and well-considered light and shadow. Indeed, some of his ink-wash drawings seem to be mere and quick observation of those scenes.

Rembrandt’s work recalls what John did in casting his gospel in dark and light. Asking God to reveal our hearts by the light of his word is like sketching the scene inside of ourselves in preparation for an master work…..

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In the Cross

Piet Mondrian, The Tree A, circa 1913

Tomorrow is Veterans Day, or Armistice Day, a day in which we remember the human souls behind world conflicts—those whom God created in love with bodies, hearts, and minds possibly broken or killed to bring resolution for the world. In turn we think of their families and friends and how wars said to have been won or dissipated long ago still show effects within our private realms.

Christians cannot think long of suffering and death apart from the cross of Jesus. In Roman-occupied ancient Palestine, the cross was a shameful way to die. The cross was reserved for criminals—those considered to be enemies of Rome. Crucifixion was death for losers, for those who did not have a chance to fight. Perhaps this has to do with why, when Pilate asked the crowd whether he should excuse Jesus or Barabbas from death, the crowd chose Barabbas—he was said to have murdered someone.

From a religious perspective, crucifixion at the hands of the enemy would appear as a death meant for someone from whom God had turned His face. Jesus, who always spoke that which gave utterance to the hearts of others, himself said what his disciples were surely thinking: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”

Today at Canterbury Cathedral, in Morning Prayer preparing for Armistice Day, in the garden where the orangery was lost to a bomb, in meditating on the meaning of the cross Dean Robert said “There is no hope of security except in eternity.” I feel this truth acutely as I pray for people today, some of whom are sick, some of whom are dying, while trying to not choke on the conflict in the air.

The cross, as a symbol, has been thought to mean many things. Grace to bear conflict with others and to accept cross-purposes within our own lives is one of them. The cross is two lines in opposition to each other. Some imagine the horizontal line as representing what is earthly and the vertical line symbolizing the heavenly.

In this way, the cross of Jesus, and the purpose of God in allowing it to be inflicted upon His Son and humanity, is available to all of us as a symbol which we might hold, imagine with, and make something from. It can help us face the fears of the world and lay them against what we trust God for—a line on which we can ascend and transcend.

That line might be one of thanksgiving you write in your journal, of one of a drawing that rejoices in the simple gift of the ability to make it, or words of encouragement for a friend. The cross might be imagined to be bearing this line into being, and then giving it away.

Piet Mondrian, Composition in Line, 1916-17

Join me for an Advent retreat with art on Zoom beginning on December 2. Click HERE for details or to register. Peace.

Matrix and Mother

The above painting is from the high altar in our Lady Chapel in which Mass is said daily. As our cathedral is Anglo-Catholic, and the Catholic Church dedicates October to the Rosary, it seems fitting to write about Mary before the month ends.

But this is a ruse because, as an artist and spiritual person, I find God in the gaps between things as much as I find what I am looking for in my objects of study. When I begin to write or make art about something or someone, I sooner or later realize that eyes in the back of my soul are studying something else.

As I write about Mary, Mother of Jesus, my gaze flies to the Trinity—the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit—in which Jesus has his constant home. Here, by logic, I see Mary as the Mother of God. But logic is a clumsy tool for me, unlike a paintbrush I load with color. What I grasp as I write is the color that means Mary—blue. I want to show, however clearly, where blue meets God.

Cezanne is known as the the father of modern art. He is reported to have said, “Blue gives other color their vibration, so one must bring a certain amount of blue into a painting.” My painting teacher would say “Blue is the matrix of the universe,” thinking he was quoting Cezanne. (“Matrix” orginally meant “womb” and comes from the Latin word for mother.)

Through the appearance of blues that became available in the eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth centuries—Prussian, ultramarine, and phthalocyanine blues respectively—we see a matrix of blue become increasingly apparent in art. Liberated from costly pigment ground from lapis lazuli—the likely sapphire of the Bible—painters spread blue paint and opened the heavens for us.

Mont Sainte-Victoire, Paul Cézanne, 1902-04

The painter Wassily Kandinsky wrote: “The deeper the blue becomes, the more strongly it calls man towards the infinite, awakening in him a desire for the pure and, finally, for the supernatural... The brighter it becomes, the more it loses its sound, until it turns into silent stillness and becomes white.” A spiritual painter and writer, in writing about blue, did Kandinsky see Mary?

Jaune, Rouge, Bleu, by Wassily Kandinsky, 1925

At a recent Zoom meeting, the Dean sat in front of a tapestry of Jesus and the Sacred Heart as I stood in front of my semi-abstract watercolor of Jesus on the sea, which is my backdrop to the chaos of the pandemic and also to hope. I was struck by how the colors both in the Dean’s tapestry and in my painting are almost the same—as if I and the tapestry-maker held the same palette of colors and their meanings.

The tapestry’s Jesus is made from browns—earth tones—and is surrounded by blue sky comprised of the blues I mention above. The Dean’s Jesus has white angels within the blue. In his sermon on Sunday, Dean Harding spoke of Jesus’ sacred heart on fire for us. The white surrounding the heart shows its constant, intense heat.

Christ on the Sea, Brynna Carpenter-Nardone

In my painting, even as a color, Jesus has taken on earthly flesh to be surrounded by water as he was in the womb of his mother, blue Mary. He emerges to still the storm and point to glimpses of the color the Church loves to end his advent with—white—which might be moonlight or the Spirit moving on the water.

At this moment in time with injustice and unrest, sickness and death, we more easily recognize our fear of chaos than we see that we also fear our own advent and becoming. Can we for a moment, through the art of contemplation, deliver ourselves to be sown with Christ as a seed for the future? Are we able to remember our home in the matrix of the universe?

 We are all meant to be mothers of God...for God is always needing to be born.

—Meister Eckhart

Blessing the Animals with Jerome and Dürer

Today is the feast day of St. Jerome who was said to have tamed a lion.

Today I write as if while looking at a series of portraits. There is the purportedly crotchety and certainly prolific Saint Jerome (died on this day in 420), depicted by Albrecht Dürer (1471-1528) with a lion and dog.

I think of the lion and dog and their portraits as I look forward to drawing before our Blessing of the Animals service this Sunday, October 4. I will begin to draw charcoal portraits at 2 PM to benefit children in Haiti before the short service begins at 3 PM—click HERE for the flyer.

Dürer himself was the subject of a recent NY Times illustrated article on the self-portrait—see it by clicking HERE. The article proposes that Dürer, in his last painted self-portrait, appears as only Christ had been depicted before. This later painting bears the monogram Dürer developed from the letters A and D—his own initials, and perhaps also a reference to “anno domini,” the year marking Christ’s birth.

During his first visit to Italy, Dürer had written back to a friend still in Germany, "How I shall freeze after this sun! Here I am a gentleman, at home only a parasite." It was when he arrived home that Dürer put his monogram to use, lending stature to the job, “artist,” by making art bear the signature of its maker.

The monogram as self-identifier is itself a sort of self-portrait. It occupies a corner of a work not unlike a skull or “memento mori” that began its appearance in art in earlier times as reminder of mortality to both artist and onlooker.

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“The Ambassadors” painted by Hans Holbein the Younger in 1533, has a memento mori at the bottom made visible by viewing the portrait from close to its lower right side and turning to look to the left. Watch Dr. Kat’s video to further explore the painting by clicking HERE.

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Dürer’s monogram appears in his etching of St. Jerome opposite a memento mori—a human skull. I have always assumed that Dürer identified with the hard-working writing and translating saint whom he depicted in the medieval study with his pets at his feet.

Jerome wrote, “The face is the mirror of the mind, and eyes without speaking confess the secrets of the heart.” Perhaps Dürer thought of this as he reflected himself in Jerome. It recalls scriptural references that hearken back to the original portrait in Genesis—the man and woman whom God created as a self-likeness.

Is it this God-likeness that Dürer felt gave him authority to paint himself as Christ’s likeness in his third and last painted self-portrait? Might the entire painting be a memento mori—an integration of image and inscription which reads in Durer’s first painted self-portrait, “Things happen to me as is written on high?”

Tails of Two Cathedrals

The Cathedral of All Saints in Albany, NY

Recently my prayers are most importantly that—prayers—while they often flow from a discombobulated mind and unsettled heart. For someone such as myself, sensitive and somewhat disorganized by nature, the Daily Offices of the Book of Common Prayer are effective means for steering myself toward God.

And so I am thankful that Thomas Cramner, Archbishop of Canterbury, pieced together that good English book from the Good Book and traditional prayers during his time of turmoil and reformation.

But I also have a creative mind that seeks itself to build a raft on which to float toward the uncertain future. Therefore I have an affinity for St. Ignatius, the day dreamer who discerned God’s action in his life and sought to teach others to do the same. Though I have not made a full retreat of his spiritual exercises, on most days I read a suggested passage of scripture for making the retreat. Then I revisit it, sometimes wrestle with it, sometimes draw it, throughout the day.

My first attempt at drawing an imaginative prayer—The angel’s visits to Mary and Joseph became conflated into one visit in my mind as the couple both accept the call to parent Jesus.

More on Ignatian prayer in the next blog post. Meanwhile, while I work on integrating his work, I enjoy our poetry workshops at our cathedral and listen to a variety of online podcasts and services.

A comfort to me during the pandemic has been my YouTube subscription to Canterbury Cathedral, where all prayers began to be said outside in its various gardens when it closed. All spring and summer, Dean Robert has read stories, such as The Little Prince, has begun prayers with quotes (this morning it was from Sylvia Plath’s journal), and gives homilies as the green around him becomes increasingly boisterous and shot through with blossoms.

I am no stranger to church mice and an occasional bat, but many animals live at Canterbury Cathedral. A cat is always somewhere in the frame at Morning Prayer, stealing the show. A few mornings ago, a black one ran as if chased. “It is a very windy day here,” the Dean said. “The cats don’t like it because it gets in their whiskers.”

He spoke with the same authority and inner knowledge in his voice that his homilies contain. I always listen to the liturgy rather than speak with him due to our different prayer book and lectionary. He seems aware of this as he invites me to say the Lord’s Prayer in whatever language I can muster. When I give thanks with him for anniversaries in the life of the world that he is careful to name, my private beast—my concern—jumps off the table as if to set about grooming itself straight.

A week or two ago, after Morning Prayer in a chicken coop had ended, a long series of grunts began. Hearing no prayer, I looked at my phone to see what had begun. It was a three-hour video of Clemmie the sow giving birth. Now, if I have already listened to Morning Prayer and I feel lost, I watch the videos of the growing piglets.

Grunts mean that life goes on even when cathedrals are closed and prayer has ended, even when pandemics rage. Jesus Christ is the same today, yesterday and forever. Clemmie and Winston are too busy in the piglet nursery to imagine that it could be otherwise. Dean Robert, always mindful of whiskers, the Cathedral looming above him and the sky above it, attest to the truth of these things.