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I hadn't really thought much about Elizabeth Jennings poetry on art and artists till reading through her collected poems it becomes obvious – this woman loved art, and deepened her heart gazing at it. As a poet familiar with the inner ambiguities and tensions of creativity, she imaginatively entered the inner life of the artist, perhaps by asking the question, "Where does this painting come from? And, what goes on in the heart and mind, the fluidities of human experiece in an artist who paints this picture, and just like this?" Her poem on this painting is a moving and understanding reflection on prayer, the mystery and the anguish, the uncertainties and the occasional assurance, the fragility and necessity of that risky trust that enables us to say, or not say, the fears and longings and joys and hopes of our lives.

In his young years Van Gogh was an Evangelical fiery Gospel preacher, and sent home to his brother some copies of English hymns that meant a lot to him. Two are worth quoting because they help us understand the painting above, with its darkness and shadows, the crooked building, the lone figure going dutifully to prayer in a church with no lights on at night.

"Thy way not mine, O Lord, However dark it be; Lead me by thine own hand / Choose out the path for me." More poignant and significant still,

Nearer my God to Thee, nearer to Thee.

E'en though it be a cross, that raises me.

Still all my song shall be, nearer my God to Thee,

Nearer my God to Thee, nearer to Thee

There's a really good chapter on Van Gogh's Evangelical phase in Disenchanted Evangelicals. Nine Portraits of Faith and Doubt, David Hempton, Yale, 2008. It shows Van Gogh's transition towards a faith much less secure, far less explicitly Christian, but clinging to an elsuive sense of some ultimately benevolent Onlooker whose purposes transcend his own grasp of things. Elizabeth Jennings' poem on the painting above redeems a more hopeful portrait from the remnants of Van Gogh's earlier faith commitments. This is a beautiful poem, revealing a deeply pastoral sympathy for those in life who struggle to make sense of why it is, sometimes, that it is indeed a cross that raises them nearer to God, and who then use that so dearly bought proximity as opportunity for protest. Van Gogh understood better than perhaps we allow, the need to articulate that cry of the heart, "Why?"

The Nature of Prayer

Maybe a mad fit made you set it there
Askew, bent to the wind, the blue-print gone
Awry, or did it? Isn’t every prayer
We say oblique, unsure, seldom a simple one,
Shaken as your stone tightening in the air?

Decorum smiles a little. Columns, domes
Are sights, are aspirations. We can’t dwell
For long among such loftiness. Our homes
Of prayer are shaky and, yes, parts of Hell
Fragment the depths from which the great cry comes.

One of the miracles of Renaissance art. It is presumptuous to comment, critique, expound or even praise. It just is, or to use our so unpoetic reality cliche, "it is what it is". Elizabeth Jennings' poem "Michaelangelo's First Pieta" is a contemplative appreciation, and one with the precise and essential tone of prayer that has taken shoes off in recognition of holy ground. 

Michaelangelo's First Pieta.

Carve a compassion. Older than you are

He lies upon your lap. What can you do

But hold him with the trust you also fear?

       Thus Michaelangelo

Saw what a girl may do for gods. O we

Have mercy on this man a woman holds,

God in the grip of our humanity.

       All this the sculptor moulds.

But more. It is a prayer that he is saying

Wordless, except that written on her breast

He writes his name. The girl he is displaying

       Has also brought him rest.

Two frescos by Giotto, the artist whose genius and contemplation of the Christ story opened up new ways of artistic expression, pushed the boundaries of aesthetics and religious sensibility, and pushed out new trajectories in exegetical imagination.

Again Elizabeth Jennings gives every impression of having gazed and wondered at the human experiences depicted in these paintings. And from them she has articulated the inner life and emotion of those caught up in the drama of redemption. She was a devout Catholic, and her poetry has a remarkable quality of sophisticated simplicity about the the things of faith. And she manages this while also articulating that creative frustration of the poet who is trying to expound mystery, and finds herself ultimately rendered inarticulate by that which is incomprehensible yet has to be contemplated.

In that sense Giotto and Jennings, (there names have a fitting alliterative sound!) are artists of mystery, prophets in search of a medium adequate to their message, which is what makes their work so attractive to those who also contemplate the incomprehensible with eyes that wonder, hearts that gasp and a mind made humble by immensity.  

In Praise of Giotto

Giotto, lover of tenderness, you were

The first great painter who showed man as man

Not icon or pure spirit but entire

For through the flesh the best compassion ran.

You taught this, when you painted Joachim

And Anna, Mary's parents, standing with

Their faces close and intimate. In him

Was gratitude, in her, surrender. Death

You also knew was glad surrendering

Without a dread. So God himself was laid

Gently in his tomb, all suffering

Wiped from his face. You understood men prayed

And found right peace when they could speak and sing

As Francis did for whom the birds delayed.

Elizabeth Jennings

John chapter 13 shows Jesus at his most dangerously embarrasing. There's something scary about someone who picks up the esablished social norms as if they were our Iphones, Ipads and laptops and puts them in the dishwasher for the full cycle, with the stated intention of purifying and re-setting them to a different set of apps and programmes. I know. That sentence is ludicrously overwritten. But ordinary reasoned exposition can't get near the smack in the face reality of what Jesus did that night.

John the Evangelist has argued, hinted, illustrated, spelled out the truth of who Jesus is. The Word made flesh. The Light of the World the darkness cannot extinguish. The Good Shepherd, Heaven's Door, Living Water, the Resurrection and the Life, the Son of God. How many images and concepts does it take? So, by chapter 13, there's no ambiguity, no excuses for even the thickest disciple. Jesus is the great I AM.

Now before the feast of the Passover, when Jesus knew that his hour had come to depart out of this world to the Father, having loved his own who were in the world, he loved them to the end. ² And during supper, when the devil had already put it into the heart of Judas Iscariot, Simon’s son, to betray him, ³ Jesus, knowing that the Father had given all things into his hands, and that he had come from God and was going to God, ⁴ rose from supper, laid aside his garments, and girded himself with a towel. ⁵ Then he poured water into a basin, and began to wash the disciples’ feet, and to wipe them with the towel with which he was girded. (John 13.1-5

Jesus had just put the IPads in the dishwasher. All the carefully installed apps have just been wiped. New songs have been downloaded from Itunes. New direction finding apps now point in a different direction,  Golgotha, the empty tomb, a world changed forever by the kenosis of God. The basin and the towel, the kneeling Jesus, point upwards, to the downward movements of Love and Light into a world darkened by the sin that refuses to touch the other with service and love and recognition of the human. "He did not count equality with God a thing to be clung to, but emptied himself, took on the form of a servant  and humbled himself…..(Phil 2).

Graham Kendrick's greatest hymn has the memorable paradox, "hands that flung stars into space, to cruel nails surrendered." John's Gospel knows and tells of the nails; but before then he gives us this unsettling and disorienting story. The Son of God washes feet. The great I AM kneels before disciples. The Living Water pours Himself out. Hands that flung stars into space, dry between the toes of his disciples' feet, washing away the sweaty grime of those who follow Him as their Lord and Teacher.

One of the finest people I've ever known loved fireworks. Every year there was a wee party at his house with warm soup, home baked bread, hot chocolate and fireworks. These pictures from the other night are a way of remembering Stewart, who combined great wisdom with a child's heart, and who burned with an inner brightness that illumined life around him.