Justluckie

Emotion and Serenity in Religious Imagery

Towards the end of his life, while on his journey through Asia, Thomas Merton experienced a powerful spiritual awakening at an ancient Buddhist site in Sri Lanka. Here is how he described the impact of the massive statues of the Buddha at the 12th century rock temple of Gal Vihara in the city of Polonnaruwa:

...the silence of the extraordianry faces. The great smiles. Huge yet subtle. Filled with every possibility, questioning nothing, knowing everything, rejecting nothing, the peace not of emotional resignation but of Madhyamika, of sunyata, that has seen through every question without trying to discredit anyone or anything - without refutation - without establishing some other argument. For the doctrinaire, the mind that needs well-established positions, such peace, such silence can be frightening.
...I was suddenly, almost forcibly, jerked clean out of the habitual, half-tied vision of things, and an inner clearness, clarity, as if exploding from the rocks themselves, became evident and obvious.
...All problems are resolved and everyting is clear, simply because what matters is clear ... everything is emptiness and everything is compassion.
I don't know when in my life I have ever had such a sense of beauty and spiritual validity running together in one aesthetic illumination.
I don't know what else remains but I have now seen and have pierced through the surface and have got beyond the shadow and the disguise.

This is a wonderfully lucid description of a state of serene detachment, of deep awareness and of illuminated unity. Such a state is not a rarefied moment of attainment by a spiritual master but an ordinary experience available to all who simply give themselves to seeing things as they are, who place themselves gently in the presence of Life, of God. It is the gift of peace that seems to be such a running motif in the resurrection stories.

So it is interesting that Merton describes the experience as an aesthetic one. Merton was a keen and accomplished viewer of art and he knew that the act of looking well at an image is an act of contemplation. What is interesting to me is that the images that might lead one to the kind of awakened experience Merton describes here are not easily found in Western religious art. The artistic canon of the Western Christian tradition is much more given to depicting depth of emotion and capturing movement than it is to drawing one into serene contemplation. The role of icons in the Eastern tradition is closer to this contemplative aspect. When I think around the images in the cathedral where I work, it is hard to think of one that is not a piece of frozen narrative, that might lend itself more to explication than to contemplation. Even the space itself is oriented towards a liturgical drama rather than a gathered stillness although it is always possible to find a quiet corner.

Having said all of that, Merton's spiritual awkening was one that was rooted in his practice of Christian prayer, personal and liturgical, though I am not sure if it would have come to fruition had it not been for his sense of the value of solitude. As always, he leaves me with much to think about.

The Deep Cave of our Consciousness

In Kathleen Jamie's wonderful book of reflections, Sightlines, one chapter captured my imagination more than any other. She describes a cave in Spain with palaeolithic and neolithic paintings of animals in the most simple and evocative lines - horse, bull, ibex. She describes the experience of going deeper into this cave as a journey to the beginnings of human consciousness. When people found the urge to make images of what they saw, they had entered a new place of awareness of the world around - interpretive, mimetic, perhaps awe-filled, perhaps fearful, perhaps simply delighting in the ability to reproduce and create. In any case, this is an expression of the early days of human knowing and seeing.

She describes two kinds of knowing. When the guide invites the party in the cave to see other forms in the stalagmites - castles, people - he is inviting one kind of knowing that is also, in part, represented in the paintings. This is knowledge by comparison, simile. It is the expression of connection and likeness, of knowing by association and kinship; 'The connective leaps, the careful taxonomies, how our minds work.' This is like that, I am like you. Jamie describes this kind of knowledge as inherently joyful, but presents another kind of knowing as less benign. There is also a kind of knowing based on discrimination and separation and this is represented by a part of the cave system that was possibly accessed only by a few for ritual purposes. This knowledge is, perhaps, like the knowledge of the specialist, only for a few intiates and is inevitably more terrifying. This is a kind of knowing that is only able to say 'this is not like that'.

I understand and share Jamie's discomfort at this other kind of knowing, because a form of it may lie behind some of humanity's more unacceptable aspects - segregation, imbalanced power, the weilding of terror as a weapon. But there is another aspect of 'unknowing' that is much more positive. Perhaps these ancestors of ours were aware that the metaphors only get us so far, and when they come to the edge of their usefulness, a different kind of knowing is needed. One way of putting this is to ask what we do when we confront this fearful abyss in our knowing; do we quickly retreat to a place where comforting similes take us back into the company of the familiar, or do we discover an inner disposition that allows us to abide with the not-knowing for a time, an outlook that is content simply with consciousness itself in all its nakedness.

I suspect that what I am trying to describe is not quite the same thing as Jamie's segregating knowledge because the ability to rest in unknowing is not reserved for the cognoscenti. It is, perhaps, the disposition that we only discover when facing such fearful mysteries as those Christians set before themselves in Passiontide - the mystery of death, of sacrifice, of love, of life.

Missing Icons

I remember falling off my seat when a clerical colleague said to a study group looking at the Apostles' Creed, without any awareness that what he was saying might be contentious, that the reason the creeds said nothing about Jesus' life, miracles and teaching was that they were not important. The creed contained all that we needed to know. I meekly suggested that perhaps creeds were there in part to settle matters of dispute and, more importantly, that they could not be seen isolation from other key texts, not least the Gospels. However, he had a certain amount of precedence for his view. Christian art has not always given much prominence to parts of the Gospel narratives that are not concerned with the 'mysteries' of faith - nativity, presentation, transfiguration, passion, resurrection - although there are very many honourable exceptions to that general tendency. All the same, there are some notable gaps.

The first and most signficicant gap is that there are very few depictions of Jesus doing what the synoptic gospels all agree that Jesus did - we went to a place apart by himself to pray. To my limited knowledge, there are very few depictions of this in traditional Christian art, East or West. When I was travelling in Thailand and Cambodia last year and visiting many Buddhist temples, it struck me that the key piece of Buddhist iconography, the meditating Buddha, gave a focus that is curiously absent from Christian churches. When we pray, would it not be wonderful to have an icon of the one who taught us to pray, the one who communed with the Father, doing what he he taught us to do? I have seen one or two examples of Buddha-style image of Jesus meditating, but it would have been nice if Christian history had provided us with our own iconography for this most vital of Christian spiritual practices. The closest I can think of is this famous painting by Bellini of Jesus praying the Garden of Gethsemane:

The other image that is not well represented in art, though has rather more success in getting into the artistic canon than Jesus praying, is the 'cleansing of the temple' - the incident in all four Gospels when Jesus drives the money changers out of the Jerusalem Temple. I know of versions by El Greco and Giotto, and this one in Edinburgh's National Gallery by Bassano:

Although much better represented than the image of Jesus praying, it is interesting to me that this key moment in the gospel narratives receives less treatment than other parts of the story of Jesus. Perhaps the image of a revolutionary Jesus overturing established religion is a little too risky an image to present in church...

Returning to my first and more significant 'gap', I wonder if it is not too late to establish an iconography of Jesus in silent prayer as a focus and encouragement for Christian contemplative prayer. If anyone wants to take up the challenge, please let me know!

 

 

Bring Back the Dragons

After singing the praises of imaginary beings yesterday, I felt a pang of sadness for the loss of dragons from our biblical translations. In particular, the old translation for one of the Psalms sung at the late night office of Compline, Psalm 91, says 'the young lion and the dragon shalt thou tread under thy feet.' More modern translations speak prosaically of 'serpents'. But these beasts are more terrible than any mere serpent. These are the tannin who appear in Genesis 1:21 and Psalm 148:7 as 'sea-monsters', as 'monsters' in Psalm 74:13 in the New Jerusalem translation. 'Monsters' of whatever sort get us closer to a sense of mythic, archetypal terror but they're still not quite as close as 'dragons'. You might hear zoologically categorised beasts referred to as 'monsters' in the more sensational brand of wildlife TV programme, but 'dragons' are something else entirely.

Borges talks about the ubiquity of dragons across world cultures and impishly observes that 'science distinguishes several kinds' from subterranean to terrestrial and celestial varieties. Of the sea dragons (such as those created on the 5th day in Genesis 1), he notes that they have the ability to boil up a mighty feast of fish with the heat of their breath and that they can whip up whirlpools, typhoons and storms. A prize if you can spot the dragon in this picture which lives down the road from me in Edinburgh:

In banishing dragons from biblical texts, we play right into the hands of the boringly literal-minded, taxonomically accurate sorts who think we ought to read scripture in the way we read a school science text book. But biblical texts offer us something much more than mere fact - they offer food for the imagination and a rich source of archetypes. Our imaginations don't simply cook up images out of nothing - they draw on deep sources of human experience, creativity and emotion to offer us images of true (sic) terror and wonder. A dragon is more terrifying than a serpent because it comes from an unseen, untameable place and it is the unseen, untameable places of our deeper consciousness that are the breeding grounds for our most ancient sense of dread where the stability of existence itself feels to be under threat. It's our appreciation of what lurks beneath the surface that gets banished when we are embarrassed by talk of dragons.

Thankfully, human culture is too robust and flexible to lie down in the face of the onslaught of the literalists. And if all else fails, we can be fairly sure that no one will dare paint over the more fanciful output of Hieronymus Bosch with stills from the latest Attenburgh series...

 

Imagine

Some forms of religious thought have been hostile to the human imagination, seeing it as little more than a lie factory and an instance of human arrogance. Curiously, some forms of empirical thought seem equally ill-at-ease with this most human of faculties. Therefore, it seems worthwhile to offer some words of praise for the imagination as something essential to human flourishing and, I will suggest, to the wellbeing of religion.

Of course, not all religious thought has been hostile. It would, for example, be impossible for Ignatian spirituality to function without the use of the imagination in its spiritual exercises, and if you would like a practical and creative guide to this, you could do worse than consult Anthony de Mello's timeless Sadhana. But I want to make my case for imagination as a vital spiritual faculty by a more sideways route, and that route is one that takes in the realm of mythical creatures. There is a very good reason for this, which is that I am hugely enjoying Borges' Book of Imaginary Beings at the moment and it has encouraged me to see weird and wonderful beasts in all sorts of surprising places. There are, for example, unicorns in the old translations of the Psalms, and this is not surprising given that the thought world of their 16th and 17th century translators was the thought world of people like Thomas Browne, who was not shy of describing creatures hitherto (and evermore) unknown to science as we would describe it today.

So we don't need to go back as far as the Cherubim, Behemoths and Leviathans of the bible to find the human need to populate the outer reaches of the known world with strange beings - hybrids, creatures with extra limbs, eyes or mouths, beings inhabiting the unseen world of the spirit, monstrously large beasts, strangely coloured or eerily perscient versions of 'normal' animals. And I suspect that this fecund outworking of the human imagination says something important about imagination itself. Imagination allows us to describe and explore realities that cannot adequately be expressed in conventional terms. It gives us a safe place to confront terrors and a generous space in which to play with dangerous ideas about identity, change and the limits of our knowing. Emotions and insights that might otherwise remain well suppressed are given a bit of a longer leash when the imagination is brought into play. Any fan of Haruki Murakami's novels will tell you how many new worlds of inner reality are opened up by his bizarre menagerie of talking cats and not-quite-human characters.

For the religious world view, such imaginative digressions provide a fertile way of approaching insights that lose their full strength when described prosaically. Faith comes to when life when we are not shy of employing metaphors, symbols and other imaginative constructs to engage with the world we are seeking to communicate. And I wonder what happens when we become a little less concerned about the boundaries between these imagiantive genres and other more empirical ones. What, for example, would happen if we were to introduce an angel into a historical discourse....?

Our Lady in a Bag of Flour

That terrible title was just a way of getting your attention. This is not, I'm afraid, one of those lovely stories about images of the Madonna appearing on your piece of toast in the morning, but is a story of how Christian faith always takes shape in particular times and places and is always a very practical matter of nurturing hope in hard times.

The picture I want to share is, in fact, painted on flour bags. It was painted by an Italian prisoner of war in a British POW camp in Sudan. The background of the triptych shows the huts of the camp where the prisoner, Giuseppe Baldan, was held.

It is in the collection of the Kelvingrove Art Gallery in Glasgow and is well worth a look if you're in the area. The painting's power lies not in its artistic quality but in its story and in the faith it portrays. What it says to me is that faith is not about giving simplistic answers in difficult circumstances but is about, quite literally, giving somewhere to turn, somewhere to give our attention. This triptych is meant to be prayed with. It was above the altar in the camp's mud chapel, so it was primarily an object of devoted attention. It says nothing more nor less than this: 'The Word of God takes flesh in this place too'. The painting doesn't provide an escape from the camp - it is right there in the picture. It doesn't explain how God is present or who God is or what the mechanics of incarnation might be. It simply says 'look this way'. Faith's response to difficult circumstances is not to offer explanations, but to offer a 'lifewards orientation'.

 

There are other places

In a recent BBC documentary exploring some themes from here new autobiography, Jeannette Winterson spoke of how she used to love to climb the hill on the edge of the town where she grew up in order to remind herself that 'there are other places'. She found that going up higher allowed her a perspective on life that lifted her view from the considerable constraints of her home life. She also found these 'other places' in her love of stories and her growing imagination was to become the place where she would find fulfilment as a writer. In speaking about her growing reliance on her inner life, she spoke of the time she realised that 'everything outside can be taken away'. Her adoptive mother burned her books, but could not burn away the narratives inside.

There are many ways in which we can 'go up higher' or 'go deeper inside' in order to gain new perspective. It is the fundamental stuff of the spiritual life and I grow more and more aware of how I simply cannot live well without these vital movements. One of the ways I do this is to look at paintings, which is a way of borrowing someone else's perspective on things for a while in order to see everything afresh. It's a way of becoming more attuned to the nature of ourselves as beings who have consciousness, who look out at the world. We are the-one-who-perceives so learning to see anew is a process of becoming more consciously the person we already are.

Landscape paintings give a particular kind of perspective, and it is a perspective like the one that Jeannette Winterson sought from her local hill. In a landscape, we get an overview - a view of many things at once and of the whole. There is a simple little landscape of a seaside town, Egmond aan Zee, by Jacob van Ruisdael that shows this nicely.

The slightly elevated viewpoint lets us see the whole town at once as well as inviting us to see its composite streets and its inhabitants going about their business. The viewpoint also puts the whole town under the cover of a beautifully captured sky with its muted light and textured clouds. Looking at this painting gave me a reassuring sense that 'there is more' at a time when I needed to feel that.

The Exotic Other

A little photographic exhibition in the National Portrait Gallery provides a fascinating glimpse into the way India was perceived by many of those who were involved there as part of the British colonial machine.  Fred Bremner's photographs include some scenes of village life and local crafstmen at work but also some examples of the technical prowess of the imperial power - railway bridges and tunnels - and some portraits of local leaders.  Among the latter is a portrait of Nawab Sultan Kaikhusrau Jahan, Begum of Bhopal.  She is depicted wearing an impressive array of British medals, presumably to demonstrate her loyalty to her imperial overlords.

Bremner has a slight tendency to exoticise his subjects, as if to say that these people, charming as they are, are not quite like us.  In so doing, he is hardly alone and I suspect he is more respectful of those he is photographing than many of his contemporaries would have been. 

The exhibition reminded me of two rather different approaches to portraying the lives of Indian people. One was a recent BBC series called Welcome to India which seemed to me to be more successful in allowing people to tell their own stories without too much romanticisation or outside interpretation. The other was the excellent William Dalrymple's last book, Nine Lives, in which he allows the stories of nine very different modern Indian religious devotees to be heard, again without the veil of exotic voyeurism. In writing about this approach to travel writing, Dalrymple signaled a shift from the distant musings of a passerby to the deeper reflections of one who stays put in order to hear what the 'other' is saying more clearly and to allow that voice to be heard on its own terms. If you like, it's about recognising the 'other' as another 'subject', another 'I', rather than seeing them simply as 'subjects' of an imposed colonial power. I fear that Britain still has some way to go in making this shift in perception in relation to its imperial past.

 

Enchanted Forests

For various reasons, I've been thinking a lot about trees recently and I hope to have something more substantial to write in due course. But for now, my attention was caught by Sara Maitland's new book, which is about forests and fairy tales and which issues a plea for a renewed appreciation of forests. There is no doubt that forests feed the human imagination in powerful ways as places of dark secrets, unknown worlds, mythical beasts, disorientation and enchantment. Walking back from a meeting in Edinburgh today, I popped into the National Gallery to refamiliarise myself with this painting by Meindert Hobbema, and was delighted to discover a temporary exhibition of paintings from Mount Stuart, which contains other forest landscapes by Hobbema's contemporary, Jacob van Ruisdael.

Hobbema's painting is rich in detail and draws the viewer into a wooded landscape where there are half hidden houses, meandering paths and seductive pools of light. The trees are things of beauty in themselves but also have a collective identity and make a natural structure when seen together, a structure that conceals, protects, nurtures and hosts a universe of life of its own.

Mystics are often drawn to forests, whether they be monks of the Thai Buddhist tradition or the forest-dwelling hermit, Seraphim of Sarov. As locations for a contemplative life, forests function in a similar way to the deserts of Egypt and Syria, as wildernesses far from 'civilised' life where the inner life can be nurtured in secret.

We already know something of the crucial role of forests in the world's complex ecology. It is time that we started to make more concerted explorations into their crucial place in humankind's imaginative and spiritual ecologies too.

Shared Images of Protest

Picasso's epic work, Guernica, is one of the 20th century's enduring images and I suspect this is partly due to its immense power to confront the viewer with the scale and reality of the destruction that took place thoughout that century. The exhbition I mentioned yesterday gives another reason for its widespread impact. The picture went on tour and was, therefore, seen by many thousands of people first hand. Good art always communicates more effectively in the flesh and the sheer physical impact of Guernica on the viewer must have been one of the reasons for its lasting impression.

At the time of the painting, there was a debate over the most effective way to use art to depict the appalling realities of modern warfare. I am not familiar with the content of that debate, but it seems that it was partly centered on the relative impact of realist and symbolic approaches. What interests me most, however, is that there was any kind of debate at all. I find it very hard to imagine such a conversation in our contemporary context where the instant global availability of still and moving photographic images means that only this one medium is used widely to depict the devastating effects of violent conflict. This strikes me as a sad impoverishment. Surely it is important that we learn to see these realities with our 'inner eye' as well as our more superficial senses. Our imaginations and our spirits must be engaged so that we begin to appreciate something more of the true nature of violence. The sole reliance on photographic images risks turning us into mere spectators of violence rather than those who dare to engage spiritually with its realities and its origins that are within us.

I do not doubt that some photography is able to engage us more fully, but I think that a work like Guernica can convey so much more of the complex inner structures of violence and suffering. And the use of such a work as a place of public meeting and engagement is a unique opportunity for shared exploration of these most difficult things. Guernica still stands as a challenge to us, but I wonder if a work of similar power could appear in this present generation.