Advent is my favourite liturgical season. The cycle from First Sunday through to Epiphany is redolent with the great Christian virtue of hope. My favourite book in the Hebrew Bible is Isaiah. The combination of promise and patience, yet the contrast of waiting with urgency, and the simplicity and complexity of what is going on in the heart of God that will invade the heart of the world, all come together in six weeks of growing anticipation and impatience for celebration.
In recent years my interest in art and theology, and in art as a theological and spiritual resource has grown into a questioning of all kinds of iconoclasm. The iconoclast sees a significance in art that is sinister, subversive of Christian truth as they see it. Maybe that is because they read art rather than see it, analyse it rather than gaze at it, are scared of its beauty rather than filled with wonder and caught up into the sheer splendour and loveliness of that which is beautiful, true, and good.
In any case, for myself, I now spend time looking, gazing, contemplating, – and yes questioning, wondering, imagining. And what I find is that as I look and question, gaze and wonder, contemplate and imagine, I pay attention to my feelings and emotions and allow them to come into friendlier conversation with those processes of intellect and thought that insist on understanding. And in all of that I come to recognise that understanding isn't about 'getting it'; but rather, 'getting it' has little to do with understanding and much more to do with response.
And to that extent perhaps transformative learning is that kind of learning that integrates the informed mind with the responsive heart, enabling thought to be affective, and feeling to be thoughtful, but not getting hung up on which is which, but simply accepting the response of who we are, to that which is transformatively Other. And if the Other is indeed transformative, then who I am is changed in the encounter. That, I think, is why I want to go and see art in its beauty, truth and goodness. That's why the art gallery is for me a place of deeply human and pervasively spiritual encounter.
And for Christians some of the greatest art, and the most transformatively evocative painting has given expression to those subterranean aspirations of the human heart which run in the theological depths of the nativity cycle, from annunciation, to the visitation, to the nativity and beyond. In such paintings thoughtful emotion, contemplative wonder, imaginative exposition and human creativity inspired by devotion, coalesce in the creation of such beauty as reconfigures our worldview.
Leave a Reply