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

Julian Returns as a Rule

Dear Cathedral Arts Blog Reader,

Please come along with me as I take you on an errand. At the end of October, I was admitted as an associate of the contemplative Episcopal Order of Julian of Norwich, and as part of my personal Rule of Life I have chosen to write about her and her work every year on her lesser festival day, May 8. This year the commemoration was transferred to today because it fell on Sunday, and was followed yesterday by the commemoration of Gregory Nazianzus, one of the Cappadocian Fathers, essential to the Church and more important to me for being the one after whom a Cathedral baby is named. So yesterday was Gregory’s day, and today is Julian’s day.

A commitment to a religious order is like a commitment to a family, church or vocation—it is a daily opportunity to give and receive and fail to do these things with regularity and be given the opportunity to try again. So be it. Trusting in the process is what allows writers to keep writing; trusting in the process is what allowed me to join others praying in the spirit of Julian; trusting in the process is why those of us who go to church stay in church even after we realize God is everywhere and there are a number of other places we could be. Trust in the process is what we have when we cannot see what the end result of our commitments will be.

Part of the recent interest in Julian of Norwich (1342-1413) has been that she lived during the Great Plague, was locked into the cell of a church, and yet lived a rich life through which she blessed others. Many wanted that when they saw in Julian the possibility of a good outcome of pandemic shutdown, or simply a way to survive it. I wrote a few blog posts about Julian during the shutdown which you can find HERE. My favorite contains Dr. Helene Scheck’s reading of a passage of Julian’s writing in Middle English.

After centuries of obscurity Julian’s work is now in the open and its irrepressible creativity gives greater birth to the Christian tradition preceding it. Her festival is in the height of spring, this year on Mother’s Day during Albany’s tulip festival in Washington Park. A child was doing cartwheels in front of Moses striking the rock in the midst of the tulips.

Linking my life-process with that of others, namely the life and work of this cathedral church and that of Mother Julian and her friends—as what you choose to live in process with……fill in the blank……your art, city, church, prayer routine, work, family and friends—makes a Rule of Life, whether or not we have ever written it down or thought to call it such. A Rule is like a trellis that supports our growth in the Kingdom of God as we live here, the Kingdom being likened to a vineyard in the Bible. (This is why grape vines appear throughout our Cathedral.)

A Rule of Life goes at least as far back as early monasticism. Augustine (354 –430 AD-CE) wrote a Rule for a group of nuns in Africa. From the time of Benedict of Nursia (480 – 548) and on through the Middle Ages, favoring Benedict’s Rule for how he conceived of a monastery like a family, monasteries flourished. They were not places for strange people who wanted to forget the rest of the world but became central, keeping time for a town by their bells, copying and illuminating books, providing a hospital and school, growing medicinal herbs, perhaps brewing beer and keeping bees as well as the offices—the cycle of prayer—and sometimes connected to a cathedral church.

The Dissolution of the Monasteries under Henry VIII in England in the first half of the 16th century plundered monastic communities which by then owned great wealth and were reported to often be corrupt. His archbishop sought to write a Book of Common Prayer condensing the offices into Morning and Evening Prayer so that people could pray like monastics within their own churches. On the north side of our Cathedral of All Saints, on Elk St., you can see the cloister and arcade in which to meditate as part of Bishop Doane’s vision for an English medieval cathedral in Albany. So we are in St. Alban’s chapel nearby on the first and third Mondays of the month saying Evening Prayer and having a contemporary discussion about other ways of prayer.

Monastics cared for the world around them, and still do today, by praying and working toward their vows of stability, obedience, and transformation (or conversion) of life—the qualities that families need to function well—and by offering hospitality to others who recognize that it is good to be affected by prayer and the wisdom gained in struggling with these things. To a greater or lesser extent, churches and cathedrals do this too, such as we have been by offering an educational series on prayer.

One of Julian’s prayers is, “God of your goodness, give me Yourself, for You are enough to me. I can ask nothing less that shall be full honor to You, and if I ask anything less, I shall always be in want, for only in You have I all.”

Julian of Norwich, the first woman known to write a book in English, begins with a domestic scene in which she receives her visions at age thirty while on her death bed. She seems to have written the “short text” of her Revelations of Divine Love soon after, and in the twenty-some years that transpire before she writes the “long text” she becomes an anchoress, locked into a cell at a parish “round tower” church on one of the busiest streets in Norwich where she offered spiritual guidance to visitors through a window.

Margery Kempe, also commemorated by the Episcopal Church, was one such visitor. Margery dictated what some consider to be the first autobiography in English. An irrepressible woman who had visions and conversations with God and was often on pilgrimage, Margery was often too much for others in how she outwardly expressed her faith. She was tried as a heretic by those weary of her many tears, preaching (which was forbidden to women), and wearing white like a nun after birthing fourteen children—the last of whom she seems to have brought or delivered on pilgrimage.

 Margery reports that Julian affirmed the authenticity of her faith and visions but instructed her to "measure these experiences according to the worship they accrue to God and the profit to her fellow Christians." Julian’s teaching is like that of Paul writing to the Corinthians about speaking in tongues. These are the words of one who, though having near-death experience, life-altering visions, and the urge to tell others about God like fire in the bones despite her gender which limited her education and had long prayed over these things, had learned something about stability, obedience, and transformation of life, and was willing to offer it to others.

And so Julian is with us today, and Margery too and various and sundry characters as ourselves as we look through our window—our lens of the Cathedral and the Christian life and the creative history they represent—out into the world, and the world outside looks at the Christian life and the Cathedral and through this blog here, through Cathedral in Bloom, Evensong, festal services, other events and the conversations we have with those seeking God who come to us by a variety of ways. We are a witness that there can be stability through obedience to the call to seek God, and that thereby we may find further transformation of the life in God given to us through Jesus Christ.

To See Or Not To See

Jesus said to him, "Have you believed because you have seen me? Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have come to believe." — John 20:29

As we heard on Sunday, the resurrected Christ does not question Thomas’ need to put his hand in his wounds. God knows we need earthly experiences to approach heavenly ones. We need a point of contact by which our senses are grounded in order to transcend ourselves, even if we affirm our senses by denying them for a time, such as by practicing silence or by fasting during Lent so that we might feel the joy of the resurrection.

Perhaps as a way of touching Christ’s wounds myself, I write the obvious in this post—about how daunting it can be to try to make words through which to see God. Since the resurrection, we, the Church, are the earthly body of Christ, and so the best way to try to see God is to approach God together.

I look forward to Tuesdays on Zoom, starting on April 26, when my colleagues and I will each discuss a category of prayer and offer a survey of Christian practice. These will be Silent Prayer/ Christian Meditation (tomorrow), The Book of Common Prayer–Daily Office, The Book of Common Prayer–Collects, Lectio & Visio Divina, and Praying the Rosary.

In preparing for this I ask myself, how do we pray taking into consideration both the immanence of God–how God is perceptible and graspable, as in Christ in the flesh, in scripture, sacraments, liturgy and sacred arts–and the transcendence of God–how God is limitless, ineffable, unknowable, and indescribable?

It seems to me that to discuss spirituality or art is to have to use imperfect categories, and to try to construct them transparently enough so one might move through them and progress rather than trip over them or feel barricaded and stranded by them. The hope that God puts in the heart–Emily Dickinson’s “thing with feathers that perches in the soul”–must not be caged or silenced by our human, finite attempts to describe the infinitude of God which hope boundlessly seeks.

So we will use categories the Church in its wisdom has made for prayer, knowing that any category we make by which we claim to approach God, and any name we apply to God will be, as one ancient mystic noted, like favoring a portrait over the person whom it resembles.

When I teach portraiture to children, after giving them turns to model, I sit for them so they all get to work. My silent prayer becomes imagining what God sees as I watch as many versions of myself emerge as those who make them. Each one looks somewhat like me while as different from each other as their makers are different. That the artists have made me in their own image makes me none other than who I am, nor does it negate their creative responses to me. And so it is with our prayers to God.

Through studying forms of prayer we receive a palette for a creative life with God–the One who perpetually draws us by the hope breathed into us at the beginning of Creation. A particular way of prayer will call to you to use it, others will not. As if to paint in blue monochrome, as blue is Mary’s color, you might want to learn to pray the Rosary. Or you might be drawn to the red of the Book of Common Prayer, or the red-letter sayings of Jesus in the Bible for a practice of Lectio Divina. 

What has been referred to as the “middle way” of Anglicanism welcomes a broad view of Christian prayer and spiritual development which includes the thought and practice of the ancient Church before East/ West division into the Early Modern masterwork of our tradition, the Book of Common Prayer, and its more recent revisions. We will explore and ask questions such as, Is God’s first language silence? (I have never been so sure about that, but we will talk about silent prayer in the first class. For an interesting recent article on that look HERE.)

We will learn ways of sanctifying (setting aside for God) our time with the blessing of doing this together, knowing that our efforts are for the sake of union with the One who initiated our longing, curiosity, and creative efforts, expecting to find them very good.

“God saw everything that he had made, and indeed, it was very good…..” — Genesis 1:31

See more about this sculpture at https://www.mfab.hu/artworks/christ-and-thomas/

Beyond and the Same

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

Noah and Christ, by Leander S. Harding

Noah's Ark (1846), by the American folk painter Edward Hicks

Editor’s note: At our last Christianity 101 class with deacon Jonathan Beck, we read the story in Genesis about the Flood, the second reading for the Great Easter Vigil coming up on Saturday, April 16. At the end of class, our cathedral dean, Leander S. Harding, shared his poem below. Hearing it made me aware of the parts of his sermons that sink me into contemplation as poetry. As Deacon Jonathan said, the Great Easter Vigil is the Church’s great masterwork. It is our epic poem that draws us in and carries us through God’s work in salvation through Christ.

- Brynna Carpenter-Nardone

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Noah and Christ

During the Easter Vigil we hear the story of Noah and the Flood.

The world had become wicked and God determined to begin again

and wipe it clean. He bade Noah take with him into the ark

the only life that would survive. And Noah took all the green things

and the animals both clean and unclean and his wife and children.

The rain came and the Flood rose

obliterating everyone and everything.

Only what was in the ark would come forth

and live. The rain has come again,

bloody rain from the cross of Christ, washing everything.

There is nothing that can survive that deluge

and live again save only

what this new Noah takes with him into the ark of his tomb.  

Oh Lord, gather us, your spouse, your children,

 your most unclean animals, into the ark of  your death

 that we may be saved from the Flood and come forth with you

into the new world of your resurrection.

Only thus shall we live.

See a list of our Lent and Holy Week services

Glory

This past weekend, we enjoyed Cathedral in Bloom, when the glory of the Cathedral is matched by the glory of flowers and the talents of local floral artists.

To describe Cathedral in Bloom as I have above is to use biblical language to evoke creation, as in the first chapter of the first book of the Bible. To write of “glory” is to write of the blossoming of life by the creative energy of God, and the creation of people in God’s image--those whose work will be to tend the garden God gives them.

In the Hebrew Bible, God has Glory, and all created things have glory, too. The Hebrew word for glory, kabod, can speak of the substance of God or of a created thing, as well as of their beauty. The beauty and substance of flowers attracts us to them. The beauty and substance of the Cathedral attracts florists to it, and we to their art. At Cathedral in Bloom, we enjoy the flowers together and become a community together reflecting the glory that was at the beginning of all things: the Glory of God.

From here we soon enter the season of Lent. In other seasons we enjoy an arrangement at the pulpit on Sundays, but in Lent we will fast from flowers. This past Sunday we were utterly surrounded as we read from the Gospel of Luke and heard a sermon on the Transfiguration of Christ, when the Glory of God in Jesus is revealed.

Jesus goes up a mountain with his disciples John, James and Peter to pray. As he prays, the “appearance of his face changed, and his clothes became dazzling white.” The disciples see the “glory” of Moses and Elijah the prophet, and they see the glory of Jesus between them.  This glory on a mountain, as our cathedral Dean writes and also preached on Sunday, corresponds to the Glory of God in Jesus, crucified on Good Friday. As the Glory in the resurrected body of Jesus on Easter Sunday is revealed to his disciples, it extends through creation and time toward us.

As the web of life in the biblical story of glory and God’s love for creation wove through the understanding of the artists and artisans who built our Cathedral, it reaches us, whatever we understand of it. We welcome you to understand more. This evening, Tuesday, March 1 at 8 PM, join us for a free series on Zoom, Christianity 101, in which the Rev. Jonathan Beck will lead us to deeply examine the Christian faith through the beautiful and ancient liturgy of the Great Easter Vigil. Click HERE to learn more and to register.

The photos below combine images from both Cathedral in Bloom and the Great Vigil of Easter when baptisms take place, as in ancient times. Recently the baptismal font overflowed with the glory of white flowers, and carvings around the doors of the Cathedral's baptistery bloomed in Cathedral in Bloom 2020.

Epiphanies of Light and Dark

Above is my drawing for the Feast of Epiphany which celebrates the end of the Magi’s journey to find the child Jesus and their presentation of gold, frankincense, and myrrh—honoring His nature as kingly and divine, and in preparation for His death.

I had trouble beginning this drawing, but T.S. Eliot’s poem helped me in with its cold, grumbling Magi complaining of ”the camel men cursing and running away, wanting their liquor and women.” Uncomfortable, the Magi became real people to me. Once I was inside the story, I could begin the trek across the desert of my mind toward an oasis of imagination found in the Christ Child.

Here in my drawing, the Magi appear to Jesus as uncles. The divine Toddler is more interested in the camel than in gold. One uncle, being wise, understands this, while another hangs back keeping his camel calm. The third informs Mary, who has the support of her cat as she must receive another surprise into her heart.

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Today, sadly, is now also the day on which we remember the insurrection at the Capitol one year ago. At first I thought this incongruous—remembering such violence as we celebrate our young Lord, but then I realized how fitting it is that these dates co-exist on our calendar.

The coming of Christ into the world in great humility is in total opposition to the way human beings typically perceive and assert power—especially those who obtain authority by force such as Herod, who seeks to manipulate the Magi to lead him to the young King so he can destroy him.

Unlike human beings who use each other to satisfy their appetites, the Christ Child shows us the humility of the entire Godhead. The Child reveals to us God’s longing for something that is powerful while opposing manipulation—true intimacy—and that with human beings.

Please join me and the Dean of our Cathedral for more epiphanies through art on 1/29 when we read W.H. Auden’s poem, “New Year Letter,” with the insight and guidance of our poetry workshop leader, Evan Craig Reardon. This event has moved to Zoom, please sign up HERE.

“On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity”

Note: Today our poetry consultant, Evan Craig Reardon, offers thoughts on John Milton’s poem:

John Milton’s “On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity” is one of his earliest extant poems, written probably in 1629 when Milton was 21 years old. He was already quite mature poetically and the poem displays many of the features common to his work, such as a deep knowledge of the classics and a conscious attempt to work in the classical tradition; a concern for the theological and philosophical, in not just theme but also language and ideas; and an ornate, highly developed poetic style with multivalent word choices and long, searching lines. All of these aspects, however, are secondary to the deep spirituality and adoration of God that supports and animates all of his writings.

This spirituality is plain in this poem. There are many points of entry into all of Milton’s poetry, but in this poem his concern with exploring the Incarnation, in all of its terrestrial, temporal, and cosmic implications. The poem itself is deeply incarnational: beginning with the very first line we, the readers, are manifested into both the poem and the event of the incarnation that is propelling the poem’s narrative. The poem begins “This is the month, and this the happy morn,” and with that “this” we are interpolated through space and time into a specific time and place—this month, this morning. We are manifested into a text that is reveling in the awful mystery that God was made man among us in the form of the Infant Jesus.

Throughout the poem everything is focused on the Incarnation, what it means for nature, history, society, and the cosmos. For Milton, the singular act of God entering the world in the form of a child has repercussions through all of creation, with lines leading out from the birth of Jesus.

This Christmas, I invite you to spend a moment with Milton and his thinking poetically through this cosmic event. Follow the Incarnation throughout the poem, asking yourself, what am I seeing? Experiencing? And what are the implications for me, now? For Milton, the entry of Jesus into the world was not an event locked in the past because “This is the month, and this the happy morn,” this, now is the morning of Christ’s nativity.

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Illustrations: top, “The Descent of Peace,” bottom, The Annunciation to the Shepherds, by William Blake. Click HERE to see all of Blake’s illustrations for Milton’s poem.

Please join us at the Cathedral on January 29 for a meditative reading of W.H. Auden’s, “New Year Letter,” by clicking HERE.

Interested in reading “Paradise Regained?” by John Milton? Send us an email to help us plan our next workshop/s.

From all of us who work with the Cathedral Arts mission, we wish you a blessed Christmas!

Power & Weakness

“And Mary said, ‘Behold the handmaid of the Lord; be it unto me according to thy word.’ And the angel departed from her.” (Luke 1:38)

Not having grown up in church, the four weeks of Advent leading to Christmas were a discovery for me. To anyone struggling with and or afraid to face Christmas, I would proclaim the benefits of Advent. I would say, Christmas can be difficult and I do not blame you if you cannot bear it. But Advent is made especially for those who feel they have nothing to give.

Recently I offered something that makes me feel weak and inadequate, as it probably should. I gave an account of how I received my calling. Antithetical to how I would speak of my accomplishments, I told of God caring for me in the midst of my weakness and sickness. I tried to describe grace, the gift that defies description. The effort left me exhausted and dumbfounded.

My response to contemplating God’s Glory up close is always more or less like that of the prophets--it involves protestations, fear, and eventually praise. Remembering my struggles in God’s presence reminds me of the explanation of The Fall I like best--that we humans cannot accept our weakness—our being mere creatures. And that sin—eating from the forbidden tree of the knowledge of good and evil—is claiming an authority which dooms us to a false existence.

I think this touches on why Mary, the virgin mother of Jesus, is called the “second Eve,” and why we are in awe of her questioning but full assent to the angelic annunciation. We spend much effort insuring against being done “unto.” Despite our barrenness and need for God, we keep a tight grasp on our illusion of control. 

Imagining how Mary was able to let it go is a wellspring of human creativity.

It was a few words in the conclusion of his early book, Creative Ministry, by Henri Nouwen, that enabled me to find words again:

“There are few who are willing to lay down their lives for others and make their weakness a source of their creativity.”

I have that ingredient, I thought. I will try to make an Advent gift from it.

The story of Jesus blessing the children and his explanation for doing so is not what we tend to read on Christmas, but I think it illuminates the potential in our weakness, in Mary’s youth, and in the nativity of Jesus well:

“Verily I say unto you, whosoever shall not receive the kingdom of God as a little child, he shall not enter therein.” (Luke 18:17, Mark 10:15)

Advent contemplates and Christmas eventuates the coming of the Kingdom of Heaven through the incarnation of Christ. None of us wants to feel bereft or lost, but when we allow our weakness and emptiness to prepare us to receive what God offers, we receive the seed of a creative gift and also a point of entry into God’s kingdom.

Join me for a short Advent retreat on Zoom on 12/17 in which we will prepare for and celebrate God’s creative work in us through art, with a short prayer service of Compline after for those who wish to stay on. All are welcome. Click HERE to register.

And look for John Milton’s “On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity” in the next Blog post, with some thoughts by our poetry consultant, Evan Craig Reardon.

Click HERE for a listing of our Advent and Christmas services.

Wishing you God’s peace,

—Brynna, Director of Cathedral Arts and Assistant to the Dean for Mission

For a creative and perhaps odd Advent gift, learn about the painting below and see more by this artist by clicking HERE.

Lions of Contemplation: II

The Lion and the Rat by Marc Chagall, 1926

As I wrote in the last post: dreams may force us to contemplate, suddenly awakening us to things we cannot name. A metaphor or symbol or a symbolic work, such as a piece of art or a dream, is a vehicle that can bear a load heavier than our conscious selves are ready to undertake. An example is the Book of Revelation: that poem, dream, and prayer.

Art, poetry and dreams, as with the more enigmatic material of the Bible, lighten our loads. The Book of Revelation has been carrying us for almost two millennia now. Whether we feel disturbed or elated when a creation of gratuitous strangeness and beauty attaches to our psyche, we feel something wonderful drawn from us.

You are entering my dream of the lion here—a dream of one who thought of little else than drawing and painting for many years. Maybe the dream is also a prose poem, or a prayer. The only way to describe the setting of this dream is to do it from the ground up, like a painting. Like something that was made for an inexplicable reason.

It seems it was made on a canvas stretched over wood and brushed with warm “hide glue.” It smells like a rabbit, having come from the cartilage of one, and it dried until taught. Then it was stroked with the silvery lead white paint with the odor as distinctive and earthy as autumn leaves; like butter made by one who discovered the earth and milked her.

The brush loaded with the lead white paint both heightened and smoothed the nubs of the canvas, as if guided by the tender hand of a lover. Then a wash was applied—paint thinned with turpentine—evaporated to leave behind a glow that will illumine from behind the blue sky. Maybe it’s yellow ochre, a color Van Gogh favored as being complementary to blue. Or maybe a transparent crimson, or just the subtle violet tone of the lead white surface itself.

All of that in preparation for the creation of this landscape which is the spectrum of color—a prism of a Northeast autumn.

There are trees against a startlingly blue sky made conscious of their many leaves by their dying, bled of chlorophyll to reveal their true colors. If theses colors were pulverized into pigment and mixed with oil into the paints my own hands have handled, there are cadmiums that are red, yellow and orange; alizarin, rose madder and other crimsons.

There are purples that are impossible to mix from the pigments that the earth, and now laboratories, offer up. These purples must have been teased out of the various refractive properties and combinations of pigment, varnish, and oil: lain across each other and dried, sometimes over and over, to appear in glory.

The prism of the Northeast autumn applied by the unseen hand is trees and sky, also with mountains behind, and a creek in front of them. Complete, the painting jumps into life.

There comes a boat with a man and child inside. I am watching from the bank opposite to the one behind the boat. I see a lion emerge, turn and face me. Every hair from the stubble on his nose to his mane catches the prism of colors and sends them straight to my eyes. He is beautiful. He sees me too, in some way.

The boat floats before him. The man looks curiously at the lion and seems obliged to point him out to the child, as if they are in a zoo. Then the lion bends down and rips away a chunk of the man’s knee, his jaws dripping blood as he uprights himself. The man looks down at his knee, confused.

And thus the dream ends, and here we are. Here I am, confused and affected. With my dream, the choice being mine of how to receive it—as gift or mere muddle, perhaps the after-affect of too much coffee—also comes the choice of whether or not to contemplate it. Is it worth it? Am I worth it?

If I allow that it is worth the time and effort, and if I am able to receive it as a gift from God, I might see my dream as a prayer of my subconscious. Then I might be able to see myself as a creative being by nature, made so by God, before the art school and all else that transpired—as one of many beings made so by God to roam the earth and bristle with creative potential.

Bristling as that lion—perhaps made in His image and fed by the same spiritual milk that fed C.S. Lewis, that great Christian writer and dream-maker who imagined Christ as a lion.

I found early in my life, as I began to study art, that Christ is beautiful. But now it seems to me that believing in Christ at fifteen was like finding Him in a zoo (free admission). I thought there was an entrance and an exit. I was wrong. I did not realize that He roamed free.

No one told me about the story in Genesis of Jacob wrestling the angel and becoming wounded when they asked me if I wanted to become a Christian. (Why have I never heard of this story used as a tool for evangelization?) The Book of Revelation was picked up to put the fear of hell in me. No one told me then what I later learned from an Episcopal priest—that it is a poem for helping the early church cope with persecution.

So we return back to the beginning, but conscious that there are poems and dreams to help us when we realize that we are dealing with more than we bargained for. Thanks be to God.

…..Weep not; lo, the Lion of the tribe of Judah, the Root of David, has conquered, so that he can open the scroll and its seven seals. (Revelation 5:5)

Lions of Contemplation: Part 1

Ignatius reads in bed during recovery from his injury, print by Peter Paul Rubens

I have been asking myself since the start of the pandemic, how can one be contemplative in the midst of crisis? It is a question that any busy person might have that becomes larger when daily experience includes emotional and physical stress.

Dreams are one way—particularly vivid ones may force us to contemplate, suddenly awakening us to forces within we did not know were there or had been suppressing. Dreams that seem linked to vocation are the ones I remember. When I understood my vocation to be pointing to contemplation, my dreams began to contain wild animals.  Last week my dream had a lion, but it feels more accurate to a contemplative mindset to say that the lion had me. It still does.

How can a waking person be contemplative in the midst of crisis? The answer “Through art,” comes readily. Poetry or fiction such as the Chronicles of Narnia are like dreams. Much of art is born of or within crisis. This was part of my reasoning behind my suggestion we read Art + Faith: A Theology of Making by Makoto Fujimura for the current season of the Dean’s Forum. I did not know the book centers on the idea of brokenness transformed, exemplified by the life, death, and new life of Christ and by Kintsugi tea ware in which shards of broken vessels are joined with lacquer and gold—transformed and newly treasured.

While waiting for the Forum to begin, I read Joy Unspeakable: Contemplative Practices of the Black Church by Barbara A. Holmes in anticipation of Holmes’s latest book which is now out, Crisis Contemplation. I appreciate her work in identifying contemplative practice, not only within the Black and Africana church, but also within the variety of religious experience that is Christian worship in America.

Holmes describes how Africana contemplation happens in community with word and sound in contradistinction to Eurocentric models of contemplation and contemplative prayer which tend to center on silence and private reflection, e.g., “Centering Prayer.” (I think that the art of our Cathedral interior and its liturgy also holds contemplative space in community—not unlike what I have felt in Black churches that hold a tradition of contemplation.)

Holmes is herself a poet. She coined a word, “griosh,” to mean Afrocentric midrash (“midrash” being the Jewish tradition of interrogating the silences in God’s word) and “griot” which is the word which refers to African storytellers, the sh in griosh being the “symbolic marker of the hush arbors where Christian diaspora faith perspectives were honed.” (94)

She writes that hush arbors were where “deep in the hollows, under dense brush, the contemplatives gathered. They cleared soft places in the dirt so that they could kneel in comfort during the long prayers and songs.” According to Holmes, “Although slaves particularized this practice, there were also brush arbors that served whites.” (59)

Enslaved people had to hush and not be found, often keeping a large kettle to catch their prayers. Creative, contemplative prayer was protected to bless those under threat of torture and death as they sought God’s wisdom and developed their theology and methods of biblical interpretation.

Holmes writes, “Like lectio divina, griosh is a contemplative reading of Holy Scriptures, a method of interpreting the incomprehensible situation of slavery. I have no doubt that it will be equally efficacious in the incomprehensible situation of post modernity.” (95) She mourns the loss of contemplation in church to the cult of celebrity preaching.

In her chapter titled, “In the Beginning: the Spirit Broods,” Holmes writes in griosh mode:

“When Genesis begins, the earth is a pulsating womb that shelters deep waters and undifferentiated powers of light and dark. Then the Spirit broods and blows, and in accordance with divine purpose expressed as “Let there be,” goodness is declared. Goodness is not superimposed on the cosmos. In the beginning, “good” is offered as potential. It is the word, the orality of God, that differentiates and orders natural phenomena into integrative categories in preparation for the beginnings of an earth community.” (96)

In Art + Faith, Fujimura also seeks to offer something to post modernity from his culture and his training in traditional Japanese painting called Nihonga, and Kintsugi, seen through the lens of his conversion to Christianity. Throughout the book, Fujimura connects Creation and the New Creation, depicting us and what we make as living inside the relationship between the two.

In the third chapter, in the section, “The Beauty and Mercy of Co-creation” Fujimura writes a parable of a father who is an architect watching his child make a sand castle at the beach. The father rejoices in the creation. The tide washes the child’s castle away, and years later the child is amazed to see his design in a permanent structure that the father himself built…..

“…..A new reality that surpassed the creative capacity of a child on the beach…..the castle would not—could not—have been built unless the child had initiated building it, even though that child never assumed it would be permanent. The lesson here is that God takes far more seriously than we do what we make, even in ‘inconsequential play’ and every day realities can be enduring materials through which the New Creation is to be made.” (36)

Fujimura and Holmes have advanced degrees and have read theology, and while this lends to their authority to lead others, this is not what gives them license to creatively contemplate faith—it is Christ who gives them this authority, just as Christ gave it to His disciples. Like the New Testament writers, Fujimura and Holmes are able to see and articulate how, within the theologies of their cultures of origin, Christ was always present and waiting, just as the Bible says, “He was in the beginning” (John 1:2) and “Behold, now is the day of salvation.” (2 Cor 6:2)

Friends

William H. Johnson, Three Friends, ca. 1944-1945, screenprint on paper, Smithsonian American Art Museum

Let us live with uncertainty

as with a friend

to feel certain

means feeling secure

to feel safe is unreal

a delusion of self

knowing we do not know

is the only certainty

letting the self be lost into Christ.

From “Seeking God: The Way of St. Benedict” by Esther deWaal (82)

When I began this post, I selected the above quote because I found it challenging. The following day, I looked at the news before I returned to finish and found the quote hard to swallow. On that day uncertainty was what I wanted least—uncertainty seemed to be my enemy. Being told to befriend uncertainty felt like receiving a blow and being told to turn the other cheek, or to pray for my enemy.

Whether the urge for fight or flight comes from engaging with others or from within, Jesus seems to insist that we confront what is hard with our impulse to turn away, and embrace uncertainty. His commands to take up our cross or to take his yoke upon ourselves imply that true stability comes from relying on God as we cannot always rely on any other, including ourselves.

Introspective prayer helps us with the struggle within, which in turn effects our relationship with others. Being with others is necessary for us to have the material with which to fulfill Jesus’ commands. We cannot do unto others as we do unto ourselves if we do not embrace one or the other—we need both. Working at holding them together to “work out our salvation” (Philippians 2:12).

Hence the existence of cathedrals, churches and monasteries and the quote above inspired by St. Benedict. His life’s work was leading people to Christ through obedience to the Rule he developed around prayer, study, and work—bringing body, mind, and spirit together in communion with God and others. His Rule from the fifth century is still in wide use among rules, many feel, for how it deals with human frailty and uncertainty.

Father Leander S. Harding, the Dean of our cathedral, recently published an account of being led by a bishop who worked with his priests in the spirit of St. Benedict. The article invites a read from anyone concerned about the role of bishops or who wants an example of St. Benedict’s teachings in action—click HERE to read it.

Dean Harding’s article also adds a resource to a recent Cathedral Arts program--a group of us are working on developing a rule of life for ourselves. This is why I began reading Esther deWaal’s book Seeking God: the Way of St. Benedict, a copy of which I found in the Cathedral offices, from which the quote at the top of this post comes.

“David Ball” is written on the inside of the front cover this book. I never met him, but often I feel a sense of the his presence. Bishop Ball and I share an office--I work where he did after he retired. It is a dark corner office, but my sense of prayer in the green-gray walls makes it light.

The paperback copy of Seeking God was published in 1984, the same year Albany’s seventh bishop, The Right Reverend David Standish Ball, was consecrated. When I noticed the inscription and realized from whose hands the book had come, I felt touched. I imagined Bishop Ball in his new role, his mitre pitched at an angle while studying the words of the contemplative laywoman with our diocese in his heart.

Esther deWaal wrote the book during her much-interrupted life of teaching, raising children and incessant hospitality as the wife of the then-dean of Canterbury Cathedral, an ancient Benedictine monastic site that welcomes pilgrims from all over the world, as it has since since the assassination of Archbishop Thomas Becket in 1170, two centuries before Chaucer’s time.

As a child and teenager, my community was the books that spoke to me, such as Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales with its intriguing characters. I did not know Bishop Ball in his lifetime, but from the stories I have been told it seems to me that one thing he is remembered for is his hospitality—both how he extended it to a variety of people and how he received hospitality from others.

I think this relates to my comfort in imagining the Bishop present in our office when I enter it. On the days I feel unsuited to working in a cathedral, I walk into our office and look at where I hung curtains over some remaining unimportant books and papers that seem to have belonged to him. Sometimes I say something before I wait for prayer to come from God through the walls and reach me, and eventually it does.

The word “hospitality” can seem old-fashioned. Before I understood that following Christ is impossible apart from community, the word conjured for me only clean sheets. More recently hospitality meant buying curtains and covering the few books the Bishop or someone else left behind in my office, imagining that from the other side of the veil hospitality was also being extended to me. In my office I have felt an invitation to take up space and to be myself.

I imagine that those of us who have used my office over the years entrust our prayer, work, and study to each other as faith communities do the world over, and as our group thinking about a rule of life is doing now. Living apart, we do not have a monastery to define the nature of our work, prayer, or study, so we use some tools to look at where we have been and where we are to help us discern what is ours to do now.

We need a good Bishop and we need good leaders, but if we each take upon ourselves the understanding that Jesus has commanded us to each “take up” and know ourselves and to lead in the roles we have received—we will have more peace and our relationships and the world will benefit. If we learn to abide uncertainty as a friend, we will not lose ourselves to the chaos around us. Allowing our delusions of certainty to be lost into Christ is to allow God to help us move forward.

I will run the way of thy commandments, when thou shalt enlarge my heart.

Psalm 119:32

We shall run

On the path of God’s commandments,

Our hearts overflowing

With the inexpressible delight

Of love.

(Prol. 49, from the “Rule of St. Benedict,” (quoted by deWaal,44))

Sacred Seeing

Wendy Ide Williams, “After Reading Horae Canonicae,” Mixed Media on Paper. This painting is from her show Spiritual Roots at the Laffer Gallery opening July 10.

I am one of those blessed with high spirits from “getting out” as restrictions have loosened and the outdoors is warm and blooming. When I sit myself down to reflect—taking a stance somewhere beyond where I usually find myself as one does when one goes to write or paint or pray—I hear lines from a poem by Emily Dickinson:

Inebriate of air – am I – 
And Debauchee of Dew – 
Reeling – thro' endless summer days – 
From inns of molten Blue – 

This is not the frame of mind which I find most easily leads to contemplation and writing this blog. Looking at myself, I think I look rather stupid and happy at this moment. High and low circumstances are level ground for me as long as they have flowers on them catching dew. But “inns of molten blue” do seem cathedral-like, somehow, and lead me inward.

Why try to be so reflective when it is hard to think this way now and to do it with regularity ever? It only happens regularly by way of intention—maybe only on Sunday—due to siege of distraction or because of being busy trying to survive. We might prefer to find beauty and gratitude in a less self-conscious way through liturgy and the sacraments than by contemplation or creative practice—it can be heavy digging to find the sacred within.

Why do I use “I” as if I am a good subject to write about? Well, it is because I am trying to make a piece of writing here, and like a painting or any metaphoric world one tries to create, it needs a subject. (I would argue that even abstract art has a subject—a “spiritual root.”) I found myself sitting here happily thinking of flowers, and thought I would not be offended if I used myself, which also has the advantage of sparing something or someone else from being written about by one not well-focused on the task.

Debauchee of dew am I, but, sedentary and content as a vase of flowers, I could not hope for a better subject at this moment than this (my) self. There is no better explanation for why there are so many self-portraits in the world than readiness of the subject. It is curious to think that Rembrandt made so many because people enjoyed buying them, as if a window into his self-reflection led them to their own discovery.

All of the above—contemplation, poetry, painting, writing, liturgy and sacraments—can lead us to God and to our true selves. These things can mirror and reveal each other. And even for the busy, artists and non-artists alike, there are creative ways of learning to see the sacred in the profane, and of learning to bring what we regard as profane in ourselves and directing it to what is sacred.

Allowing yourself to be drawn to a thing for no particular reason, allowing questions to loom (as the poet Rainer Maria Rilke advised a younger poet to do), not distracting yourself from why a particular thing won’t leave the mind (flowers!) and taking it as a sign—not in superstition, but as a way of taking yourself and your responses seriously as gifts from God among God’s other gifts—this is receiving your own authority, that which is born of your experience, and the significance of how you see. It is declaring your life (whatever it is) to hold sundry and good things, good at least in that they signify and point in a direction.

A painting is like a life—it is a metaphoric or symbolic world with a subject and other elements such as color, shape and line thrown in. The verb for “throw” in Greek leads to our word “symbol” from the Greek for “thrown together.” As the signs in the sacraments—bread, wine, water and oil—are thrown in with liturgy and its meaning they point beyond themselves, making real symbols which unite us with God and each other. With time for reflection we can see the signs in our lives by which God draws us in and connects us.

Such as that time when…….fill in the blank, often with a line of scripture, maybe a dream or a grace such as the sudden ability to love or accept or forgive. When lost we can remember this sign and sit with it. If we take ourselves as seriously as scripture and the sacraments tell us God takes us, our lives become worlds that are both real and symbolic that demand reflection—works of art. We gain mastery in them as we seek guidance from the hand of our Creator—the original Old Master.

If this kind of discussion draws you or mystifies you, please join me and others while we sit with what scripture, saints, and artists have said about how to use our creativity and imagination to have real lives that communicate with God. Click HERE to register for my two-part workshop on Zoom in August.

You might also like to join Evan Craig Reardon and me for our next deep reading group on Paradise Lost, stretching from October through December on Zoom. These groups lead us, through Evan’s expertise as a poet and gentleness as a guide—to learn about elements of poetry while living poetry through personal response and reflection together. Click HERE to go on this new pilgrimage through John Milton’s classic poem.

Our Cathedral Dean, senior priest and pastor, The Very Rev Fr Leander S. Harding, PhD, and I will be offering reading notes and a discussion on Art + Faith by contemporary painter Makoto Fujimura on Zoom starting in September—click HERE to join us for the Dean’s Forum.

And please check our calendar for other events, such as a workshop in the Cathedral with Diane Cameron juxtaposing The Ignatian Spiritual Exercises with The Twelve Steps of AA preceded by our Blessing of the Animals service with pet portraits, both October projects of Cathedral Arts, The Cathedral of All Saints’ mission to help people fall in love with God. Also go to our YouTube channel for services and offerings from the Music Department where our current organ fellow, Owen Reid, has been posting music from the contemplative beauty of the Cathedral.

Blessings and Peace to you all,

Brynna

Being Visited, with Questions

Romare Bearden The Visitation. 1941. Gouache, ink, and pencil on brown paper

“Blessed are you among women, and blessed is the fruit of your womb. And why has this happened to me, that the mother of my Lord comes to me?  For as soon as I heard the sound of your greeting, the child in my womb leapt for joy. And blessed is she who believed that there would be a fulfillment of what was spoken to her by the Lord.”

(Luke 1:42-45)

It is the visitation of Mary to her cousin Elizabeth today in which Elizabeth asks, why has this happened to me? It must not have been the first time she asked why, as she became pregnant after barrenness and advanced age, and her husband Zacharias had been struck dumb by the altar by something or someone he had seen.

Had he asked why in unbelief? What is a faithful way of asking why and with appropriate awe?

We read that Zacharias faced the angel Gabriel and asked, how can I know? He could not muster enough awe to suspend the need to know and needed help. He was driven to contemplation through losing his speech, as many of us have been driven to it by illness or disability or loss—some of us recently in pandemic isolation.

When Zacharias spoke again, he was able to speak simply what he had heard, “His name will be John.” Then his tongue was freed to declare praise.

Still participating in gestation, Elizabeth said to Mary, you are blessed for believing the word that was spoken to you. This word was spoken in obscurity. It was growing in Mary obscurely—being only recently spoken, there may have been no physical evidence yet that it would come to pass. But Mary was able to rejoice with her cousin Elizabeth at her pregnancy and this affirmed her faith about what was happening in her young body which led to a song of praise.

Some feel it is the gift of women to believe more easily. It may be the humbling and earthed experience of fertility cycles, pregnancy and birth that has something to do with this idea. We pray the process goes as easily as we can accept the changes and stay above the sea of fear in how these things get viewed as problems.

But change often feels like a problem. Maybe Zacharias’ old bones recoiled at the thought of chasing a toddler. Who can blame him for that?

Some of us are experiencing fear over going out again after the pandemic shut-downs—there are many articles on this. As someone with a certificate in spiritual direction (which is spoken of as spiritual midwifery), and a master’s degree in pastoral studies (after one more paper), and writing from this platform, I have been tempted by the idea that I am to speak wisdom about what the future will be. It is as if I have built myself an altar and demanded like Zacharias over it, “How will I know?”

This has not worked well for me, either. I think it is time to rather pray to receive the future from God, whatever it will be.  We can be as Mary and say “let it be with me according to your word.” We can willingly stand by others who invite God’s will to be with them according to the word they have received.

But we might have to first remember what that word was, because the pandemic changed things. Not who God is or who God has made us to be, but the word spoken to us that we thought we were being faithful to might sound different now.

It might have been that our task was to care for someone who has since left or died. It might have been to do a job that has since changed. The injustice and violence we have witnessed are things we may feel we can no longer tolerate as we did. Our abilities and desires may have shifted and we might not know yet how. There is a din in which we must hear, a sea of fear on which we must walk ahead.

The fecundity and desire that belong to God have not changed. God’s word has not changed. They were hearkened by baby John, grown up as prophet. They are manifested in Christ Jesus walking across the sea of our private and shared anxiety over the future. They are in the sea if we could see it clearly.

If we stay in awe and contemplation for a span of time before God, maybe like Zacharias we will able to see and name our task anew, and then proceed with its care and feeding in hope of what its growth will bring.

"Why Poetry?" by Evan Craig Reardon

Note: This post concludes our Hidden Cathedral Poetry Celebration 2021. For all the poetry readings from this event with Marly Youmans, Malcolm Guite, Michael Joyce, Leonard A. Slade, Jr, Luke Stromberg, and more, click below.

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A few months ago Brynna asked that I contribute some thoughts on poetry for the Cathedral Poetry Celebration. In my usual fashion I tarried and dithered, began several projects and aborted each one a day later. Although capable of talking about poetry at length and pausing only to breathe, I found myself unable to piece together any coherent thoughts on this. So I’ve decided to try and answer a basic question that I struggled to answer two months ago.

             The question is quite simple: why poetry? A friend asked this because she experienced, as anyone who speaks to me for any length of time has also experienced, that I am utterly and incurably obsessed with poetry. It has been the entire focus of my life since I was a teenager: determined the course of my studies in both undergraduate and graduate school, and is the thing I wake up to do and go to bed thinking about. It is the without-which-not of my being; and doing, pursuing, and reading poetry have quite literally determined the course of my life. That I was unable to answer the question at the time was puzzling to me; on reflection, the difficulty is that it feels a bit like trying to describe why one loves a spouse or parent. It can be done but feels like something is missing, as if there’s something that can’t be translated about it.

             Just as a relationship makes one feel a certain way, the answer to the question isn’t capable of being expressed in points or propositions. It’s phenomenal, an experience. Like being in the Cathedral itself, being inside of a poem (for that is what one does when one reads it) is a full body sensation: the rhythms of the lines mimic the rhythms felt in music or dance, the sounds of words creates a music that is heard when spoken aloud and sensed when read silently, the interplay of syntax and semantics can create a felt force of meaning as in a violin concerto or in a painting. Poetry, I think I’m saying, is something that has to be lived.

             Those of us who live poetry are what I and others in this lifestyle refer to as “poetry people.” Poetry people are delightful. Capable of fantastic polemics over the merits of small presses versus large publishing house, they have felt the pull of poetry, felt the things I’ve described, learned to inhabit the poem and known it to “be the finale of seem.” And we do inhabit a poem when we read it, making of it our own until the “poem is you.” The poem is “an eternal pasture folded in all thought” and we are able to return to it at will, able to find a friend (and often a new friend) each time we come back to it. Wallace Stevens’ “Idea of Order at Key West” is a poem I’ve had memorized for close to ten years now, a poem perfectly describing poetry and the act of creation and the impossibility of poetry. Each time I read it again I am thrilled all over as if reading it for the first time. Perhaps that is poetry.

            The poet Mary Ruefle has written an essay about how she became a poet, and which everyone reading this should immediately read after finishing my own little piece. She writes that she became a poet for a “single, simple reason: I liked making similes for the moon.” Ted Berrigan once wrote “Now what is a poet? A poet is someone who writes poems,” a lovely account that cuts through the mysticism often present in discussions about poetry.

            Brynna has said (accused?) that I desire to heal the world through poetry. I think my goal is more modest: I want to heal you through poetry. I want you to experience the fullness of time and thought that poetry brings; to read more poetry, good, bad or indifferent; to feel and know that in this transitory life there are objects made, “eternal lines to time” that hold more than we can ever know. Poetry teaches. Obliquely it instructs in the full measure of human life, from the ecstasy of despair to the agony of beauty, poetry incorporates all aspects of thought and experience and makes of them objects to be delighted in. Instruction in these experiences is essential, at times, for really feeling and understanding them. And poetry demands of us that we think with it, move from word to word and line to line with it. By inhabiting the poem we make of it our own, and our life is thereby made fuller with this additional force behind it.

             My life has been made immeasurably fuller through poetry. I have personally experienced this and felt poetry working on me to expand my mind and consciousness. Through the poetry of people different from us, such as the poetry of Wanda Coleman, Adrienne Rich, or CAConrad we gain a perspective and a way of thinking that’s not ours. This perspective gives us a new way to live and think, which is a new way to be beyond ourselves.

             And getting beyond ourselves is the point of poetry. Poetry gives us news, the news that “men die miserably” for lack of. I have been helped by this news more times than I can count. A few years ago when I was going through a difficult time in my life, I picked up John Ashbery’s book-length poem Flow Chart. Reading that long poem brought me out of myself and into a new place of life. It opened up new environments and ways of thinking. I think poetry can do this for you too, that it can help you when you don’t know you need it. That it can open, create, new worlds and pictures of understanding. Poetry can lead you through much that you “would not understand” and give you a new place to look from, a new vantage point to sight life from.

             I hope that you’ve enjoyed the Hidden Cathedral Poetry Celebration. I hope that you’ve seen a bit of what poets toil for, that you’ve read a bit of the news they publicize, and that it’s helped enrich your life. I know it has mine.

             Oh, I’ve not answered the question of why poetry. As I said, the question can’t be answered in propositions and neat solutions. It can only be answered in life, for that is what poetry has to offer: life. It offers life in words and thoughts, life in sensations and experiences, and life in poetry. But sometimes I like an easy answer to the questions I ask. So I’ll try to answer the question simply, and without the debris of a felt lifetime.

 Why poetry? Because it is new life.

Evan Craig Reardon is a poet and librarian. Evan is the archivist and poetry consultant for the Cathedral of All Saints. He is completing a Master’s in Library and Information Science at SUNY Albany where he researches archives and records management, and is completing a Master’s in English literature where he researches poetry and poetics, also at SUNY Albany. He is the librarian and archivist for the Flow Chart Foundation, and an associate librarian for the North Chatham Public Library.

Idols of Youth - Fr. Sam Bellafiore on Auden

W.H. Auden

“No, God has placed me exactly

where I’d have chosen to be”

(“No, Plato, No,” May 1973)

A priest encounters some odd patches of human life, ones that run against the grain of society’s supposed autobiography. People may think God is for the old, who have always been old. Fun is for the young, who will always be young. The more scientific we think ourselves, the more we seem to accept this fantasy, against which biology continually testifies. 

Instead, I meet people at the end of earthly life, often in extreme physical disfigurement, and later see the obituary photos of their gorgeous bloomed past. The now-devout tell me the stories of their wild youth. And teenagers talk about prayer.

W.H. Auden in his old age struggled with death’s impending, sensed his body’s decay, and bore through it with verse. “No, Plato, No,” which he wrote four months before his death in September 1973, cherishes the unity of his body and soul: 

I can’t imagine anything

that I would less like to be

than a diincarnate Spirit,

    unable to chew or sip

or make contact with surfaces

    or breathe the scents of summer

or comprehend speech or music

    or gaze at what lies beyond.

While he can’t imagine something so boring, he writes that…..

“…..I can, however, conceive / that the organs Nature gave Me, / my ductless glands, for instance, / slaving twenty-four hours a day / with no show of resentment,” are maybe themselves a little bored. Maybe they “dream of another existence.” “Yes, it well could be that my Flesh / is praying for ‘Him’ to die, / so setting Her free to become / irresponsible Matter.”

The flesh lusts against spirit and spirit against flesh. Auden sees his spirit longing to pull the flesh toward itself, but the flesh would rather stay in bed. Yet while his flesh can pray only selfishly, for its owner’s death, his flesh can still pray.

On the occasion of visiting a friend in a nursing home, Auden chronicled the stages of elderly flesh’s decay. “Old People’s Home” assesses the “nuance of damage” to each old person’s health. He wonders if those fittest are the worst off, for

“intelligent of what has happened and why, they are obnoxious to a glum beyond tears.” 

What has happened? Those who “appeared when the world, though much was awry there, was more spacious, more comely to look at” have aged during the generation when Western cultures first chose to store their elderly in segregated homes. They are “stowed out of conscience” — out “from” a sense of duty and out “away from” their culture’s predominating sense of self.

Nearing his own death, Auden again engages in biological prayer:

“Am I cold to wish for a speedy / painless dormition, pray, as I know she prays, / that God or Nature will abrupt her earthly function?”

Yet as a theological term, “dormition” ushers the flesh beyond biological death, into a new and unforeseen life of blessedness. Job sensed its dawn: “Yet in my flesh shall I see God.”

The Cathedral’s Auden reading group read these poems for our final meeting in March. Over several months we tested the poetry with our own lives and experiences. This is one of writing’s great gifts: lest we suspect life of being mechanistic, it allows us to wonder at life.

Dormition of the Virgin, Pieter Bruegel the Elder, c 1556

Especially as he aged, Auden seems in his poems to test his own experiences, especially death’s approach. Yet an early poem we read for that last session shows a somewhat different Auden.

“May” (1934) differs from the aged Auden, who sees with clear eyes and with hope. The young Auden crying out here lauds the month of May, exuberantly, confidently, but with tinges of bitterness and less hope than the Auden who faced imminent death.

The real world lies before us,

Brave motions of the young,

Abundant wish for death,

The pleasing, pleasured, haunted:

A dying Master sinks tormented

In his admirers’ ring,

The unjust walk the earth.

Auden’s idyll captures the idol that youth always makes of itself. Why is it that the real world always “lies before us,” never with us? Why is “adulting” ever a few more milestones away? In other words, how can the elderly perceive “what has happened and why,” while the young slog along in the flesh?

Abraham Entering the Angels, Rembrandt, 1656

It was with felicitous coincidence that the weekend of our final meeting was Laetare Sunday, and the Roman Catholic lectionary read from Ephesians 2:10: “We are his handiwork.” Paul’s word there is the lovely ποίημα (poíema), cognate of “poetry.”

God has, in poíema’s basic sense, fashioned us. After Homer, the word took on the explicit sense of crafting poetry: God has wrought us, shaped each of our lines, “written you on the palms of my hands” (Isaiah 49:16). In the Septuagint, the word sometimes means “sacrifice.”

The Sacrifice of Isaac, Chagall, 1966

And is this not “what has happened and why” when it comes to life and death? If our lives are not our own, if we are fashioned and bought at a price, then even our death and decay may be made part of the authorial inscription, part of the poetic process we both engage and undergo.

Auden’s praying flesh — inscribed in his literal body and in his written corpus — testifies to life beyond biology, to a new and risen form we may fill by God’s greatest poetry and most awesome sacrifice, in the Resurrection of the Son.

Here is the strange flowering of all Auden’s puzzling over what temporary human lives should make out of time. “Easter” by George Herbert, Auden’s poetic Anglican forebear, complements Auden well:

Can there be any day but this,

Though many sunnes to shine endeavour?

We count three hundred, but we misse:

There is but one, and that one ever.

Fr. Samuel Bellafiore is a priest of the Roman Catholic Diocese of Albany serving in Troy.

If you have not subscribed to the Cathedral Arts Blog yet, if you do so during Eastertide of 2021 you will gain entrance to the online Hidden Cathedral Poetry Celebration 2021.

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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