Haiku on a Favourite Picture
Beauty in repose,
eyes gazing wonderingly
at futures unknown.
This is one of my favourite images of the Virgin Mary. An early European sketch by Rogier Van der Weyden. Alongside much more developed images this near neutral sketch exudes mystery, beauty, and an all but tangible intimation of the sacred.
I don't mean in any soft, unreflective devotional reverie, those responses that are best summed up as "nice". Art like this communicates the inner meanings of faith through those hints and clues of tone and technique, the power of form and capacity to set off those inner resonances which are prompts to recognition; that what we are looking at is more than we see, and signifies deeper than we can often feel, or think.
Mary's "Yes" at the Annunciation is one of the pivotal points in salvation history. Maybe so. But what makes it so, is it is also one of those moments when a human heart transcended the limits of human possibility and said "Yes" to an unknown future, not out of mere resignation, but from a willed act of costly obedience.
The art that surrounds the Annunciation is an embarrassment of masterpieces; but this small sketch has its place amongst the most theologically focused, because the face, understood in human encounter, is the mirror of the embodied self, the reflection of our inner being, the outward expression to the world of our most personal self.
The beauty of repose is therefore a profoundly reassuring image of God's modus operandum in the loving of the world.
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