Category: Art and Culture

Christ in the House of Martha and Mary: Martha Scunnered in the Scullery!

^{I'm spending a lot of time thinking about this! I am writing a paper on the recepetion history of this passage, and looking at how it has been portrayed in art, as well as explained in recent exegesis.}

^{Luke 10.38-42}As Jesus and his disciples were on their way, he came to a village where a woman named Martha opened her home to him. ³⁹She had a sister called Mary, who sat at the Lord’s feet listening to what he said. ⁴⁰But Martha was distracted by all the preparations that had to be made. She came to him and asked, “Lord, don’t you care that my sister has left me to do the work by myself? Tell her to help me!”

⁴¹“Martha, Martha,” the Lord answered, “you are worried and upset about many things, ⁴²but few things are needed—or indeed only one. Mary has chosen what is better, and it will not be taken away from her.”

For the best part of two thousand years Martha has been remembered as the woman who got a row from Jesus for her pan rattling annoyance at having to do all the work while Mary just sat there.

Well, to be fair, she didn't just sit there, she was listening to Jesus, paying attention to what he was saying. Ever since, the contrast has been persistently made between contemplation and action, between prayerful devotion and practical service, between sitting at the feet of Jesus and standing at the kitchen sink. Such a dichotomy has created a devotional dualism, a hierarchy of spiritualities ranging from the contemplative love of God, with its attentiveness, love of silence, and single focus on the love of God, and descending towards an energetic busyness in the service of others as a much more practical, physical and material way of loving God, by love for the other. And it is the hands clasped contemplative that is deemed the more spiritual, and the busy hands on activism considered lower league spirituality. The contrast is mistaken, and the dualism is damaging. It pushes apart the two commandments which are the distillation of all Christian obedience – love of God and love of neighbour.

Luke's telling of this story, (and his is the only Gospel to record this incident), is clearly intended to make a point. But is it the point that seems so obvious, that Jesus rebuked Martha for being overbusy, and for complaining about Mary's absence from the kitchen? Along with careful study of the text itself, I'm also interested in Luke's literary skill, and wondering why he placed this story right here in his Gospel. Think of what comes immediately before; the story of the Good Samaritan, told to answer the question, 'Who is my neighbour?" So the second of the great commandments is illustrated in practice – the Samaritan demonstrates love for neighbour.

Now, who will demonstrate the first great commandment, love for God, wholehearted and total devotion by the whole self? Luke has told us often enough; it is the one who hears Jesus Word, who listens to the Word and does it. The disciple is the one who not only listens but hears, who not only looks but sees, the one who is all eyes and all ears in the presence of the One who comes with the Word of the Kingdom of God. So, following the story that illustrates love of neighbour, we have this story of Mary, sitting at the feet of Jesus listening to what he said. And while Jesus undoubtedly affirms and defends Mary's attentive listening, the question is whether his words to Martha are rebuke for her actions, or answer to her complaint about her sister.

"She has chosen the better part" is certainly a hard saying to hear, but think of Martha preparing an elaborate menu, when simple food is all that's required, says the courteous guest; and hear the sympathy of Jesus is in the playful affection with which he says Martha's name, twice, and acknowledges she's distracted and upset; and somewhere in all the relational dynamics of a home charged and electrified by the presence of the most honoured of guests, we have two women, not vying to show who loves the most, but expressing each their individual devotion and love as fully as their own personalities, skills and experience will permit. That they collide in the intensity of the occasion is no surprise; but nor is it a reason to devalue Martha's work or uncritically embrace Mary's choice of the better part.

These are initial thoughts. The painting above by Velazquez (around 1618) is a study in the ambiguities of the story. Is Martha the one who is red faced, upset, pounding garlic, and wishing she was elsewhere? And is the older woman pointing at the scene through the serving hatch, at Mary not pulling her weight. Or is she the maid frantically trying to get things done, and in the scene through the hatch we see Martha behind Mary complaining at her inactivity at the very time the house needs to be busy if they are to honour their guest? Either way, the painting captures powerfully the unhappiness and resentment of unappreciated hard work. Velazquez doesn't idealise the interior of the kitchen, nor does he paint Martha as anything other than an overworked hassled woman, with neither time nor energy to worry about her appearance, and near the end of her tether!

Velasquez' painting reflects the popular Catholic piety of his times in the context in early 17th Century Spain. Forty years earlier Teresa of Avila had published The Interior Castle, even by then a virtual handbook on the contemplative life. In that book the story of Mary and Martha is the subject of long meditation about the one thing necessary, and contemplation as the better part, and Mary emerges as the ideal contemplative, and Martha the lay Christian called to the lesser role of ordinariness. But in the next post we'll look at a painting altogether less partial to Mary and more generous to Martha.

18 October 2016
Rublev and Vermeer as Conversation Partners.

This Vermeer painting hangs beside my desk. Above it is the Rublev Trinity icon. Vermeer and Rublev, a century or two apart, but at cultural poles; and as two of the greatest exponents of their particular art forms, they took their gift and technique to new levels in these two paintings.

Sometimes art can be devalued by too much scrutiny. If something strikes us as beautiful or meaningful, at that precise and gifted moment, analysis is quite literally, a waste of time. We are arrested by a painting, summoned from well practiced but desultory routine by an interruption which demands and receives our full attention. Questions why or how can wait as we attend to the encounter itself.

Once a painting becomes familiar, because it has been gazed upon a thousand times, glanced at or noticed thousands more, and has become a piece of the mental furniture in our personal space, there is little need for analysis. That annoyingly banal, or dismissive phrase so beloved of celebs and sales executives comes into its own as an aesthetic recognition: "It is what it is".

I've lived with the Rublev for decades, and the work of Vermeer for near twenty years. The biggest book in the house is Serena Cant's Vermeer and His World, 1632-1675. It's 45cm x 35cm x 2.5cm! It provides thoughtful, deeply informed comment of each of Vermeer's paintings. His technique, colour choice, extraordinary detail in portraying the ordinary, human interest,innovative and astonishing brushwork – all of that and much more are explained and pointed out.

From this book that requires a large coffee table to read it, I have learned much of the how, and perhaps a little of the why, of beauty, and found some kind of explanation for the 'won't take no for an answer' quality of those paintings that appeal to us, summon us, require of us a degree of attention we reserve for those people and places and objects we truly and finally love.

Art is such a personal thing, a matter of taste we reckon. Which is why there is all the difference in the world between a nice picture, and a painting that is not primarily there for decoration, but for conversation, and at some deeper levels of emotion and thought, communion. These two paintings are not there as conversation pieces, but as conversation partners, from whom I learn much and whose presence is gift in the present continuous.

30 July 2015
Leaving University In Debt or Indebted? The Long Term Cost of Student Debt.

I posted these thoughts of Chomsky the other day on my FB page. At the time they seemed to be saying something important about education. Reflecting further they are also saying something about human formation and the processes that shape our values and our way of looking at the world. Then as I've gone on thinking about it I have the uncomfortable feeling that his words are a warning that we are well on our way to losing any conception of education as humanising gift, social capital, cultural treasury, creative possibility for the future, imaginative empowerment of the minds, affections and commitments of the recent and coming generations of pupils and students.

Trying to pinpoint the precise nature of unease isn't easy. Education does have to be paid for by somebody. Schools and Universities are expensive places where learning is impossible to measure in the pounds it costs, saves or will ultimately make. Chomsky's warnings ring with the alarm notes of a social prophet – trapped in debt, no time to think, thus unlikely, unable to think about chnaging society because of the burden of debt and the urge to earn. These two phrases "unable to afford the time to think" and "unlikely to think about changing society" are chilling outcomes of an educational process which requires the student to mortgage much more than large amounts of money. A burden of debt, and a sense of having been burdened, is deeply corrosive of social capital, and ultimately fatal to that altruism that springs from gratitude and instils a commitment to the common good.

An education bought at the price of long term debt, knowledge and know how purchased on a mortgage, a relentless focus on employability and the market as key drivers in educational aspiration, reduces education to commodity, pupil and student to customer, and having paid for my own education I am entitled to exploit it in the market place. When that happens what are the chances of intellectual energy focused on making life better, imaginative thinking towards new possibilities, creative and critical reflection on change and opportunities for others, and fundamental to each of these is, ironically, the feeling of indebtedness. A person's fundamental attitude to the culture in which they have grown and been nourished, allowing for all the social inequalities and diversities of life chances, is defined largely by how that word is used.

If indebtedness means I have been supported through my education, and if I have been enabled and empowered by the processes of learning and formation and growing, then I am likely to be a net contributor to my community. If I live in a culture that takes for granted the right to education towards fulfilling and living into my potential, and if that gift implies sacrifice for others on my behalf, and part of the educational process is a deepening awareness of such gift, then a sense of indebtedness will solidify into gratitude. The giving and receiving of co-operative and communal resources in the education of each person is one of the essential pillars of social security and the common good.

Indebtedness for a gift is very different from being in debt for £50,000 and seeing my education as something I bought and out of which no one has any further claim. Employability, career trajectory, personal development, earning potential, plus the debt I now have to pay off, have become the values that will drive my thinking and acting and sense of social responsibility. I have become through being in debt, someone who has no sense of indebtedness. My education is my possession, and my product with which to play in the market. I have become "an efficient component in the consumer market."

In debt or indebted. Resentful or grateful. Owing my community nothing, or owing it my life and my living. Education as product or as gift. University as knowledge supermarket or as school for life and living. I know. I'm fully aware of the issues of funding, grants, loans, part time work, sacrifice and sheer toil for very many of our students; and equally aware of Government spending priorities and the need for viable economic strategies of affordability in the economic realities in which we are enmeshed on a global scale. But training generations of our students to think of their education as purchased employability, rather than enabled humanity, is short-sighted and will have its own economic, social and ultimately political consequences. And they will be different from what might have been, had these same generations of students come out of University, not in debt, but nevertheless indebted, grateful, still employable and ambitious, but with an undertow of indebtedness, gratitude and acknowledged responsibility. Or so it seems to this erstwhile theological educator, who came late to University, and whose own personal story is of education as grant aided, as gift, and as otherwise impossible.

28 July 2015
Epiphany, Adoration and the Harsh Realities of Power

St Columba Altarpiece. Triptych showing Annunciation, Adoration and Presentation.

(Central Panel Enlarged)

Epiphany is an eye-opener. God incarnate welcomed by the humble is visited by Magi, the scientists and economists, the advisers and private secretaries of the powerful. And they bring gifts, which Christian imaginations have interpreted as gold for wealth and splendour, myrrh for sorrow and suffering and frankincense for its cosmetic and aromatic value. All three were luxury items, gifts fit for only the most powerful. The adoration of the Magi is Matthew's invitation to costly discipleship, worship of Jesus, recognition of the Saviour. So this devotional take on Matthew's story goes.

But Epiphany isn't a devotional reverie, nor a mere enlightening moment of touching reverence. Here the great are humbled, the mighty kneel, earthly wealth and worldly wisdom bow in acknowledgement of a greater wisdom and a different wealth. In this nativity which is the epitome of poverty and powerlessness, Epiphany is the revelation that something of unprecedented upset is taking place. And in the background, power growls. Herod perfectly portrays the paranoia of power. Cunning, suspicious, unprincipled apart from the prime directive of tyrants to eliminate opposition and second guess providence.

The coming of the Magi spooks Herod, and from the that moment infant lives are forfeit, and human anguish guaranteed. The murder of the innocents is a direct consequence of these Magi coming to pay homage. Their astrological know-how, their technical and technological skills in the art of knowing, give their words an authoritative imprimatur. If they say a king has been born, and with a star as celestial confirmation, then this is a political crisis, and emergency event, an invasion by another claimant, a nascent threat to Herod's power. He does what any good tyrant would do. Identify, locate and destroy.

Well we know that the Magi gave him the slip. Robbed of that indispensable tool of the oppressor, reliable intelligence, he moves to plan B. Seeing the birth of a child as a cancer, he marks the parameters and performs surgery on his population "all the boys two years old and under, in Bethlehem and surrounding districts…". The slaughter of the innocents was a poltical prophylactic, preventative medicine to keep his power base healthy. This too is an Epiphany. The Magi kneeled and adored; Herod seeks and destroys. The Magi bring gifts recognising the royal status of the child; Herod's recognition goes even deeper. He sees the implications of a royal birth for his own future, and does what totalitarian governments do, suppress dissent, execute those who challenge the hegemony of the state, perform radical surgery not on the body politic but on the people.

The painting is by Rogier Vad Der Weyden. This painting is from the Columba Altar Triptych. In contrast to much previous art, Van der Weyden sets the nativity not in a heavenly scene with Mary the Queen, but in an exposed outhouse. The focus of the painting is not the splendour of the gifts but the adoration of the givers. On the central pillar a crucifix, linking Bethlehem with Calvary, Incarnation with Atonement, and human celebration with human suffering. The star, "symbol of divine glory" is largely obscured by the roof of the outhouse, and those looking on are dressed and presented as ordinary folk of Van der Weyden's time.

Reflection on this part of the Christmas story isn't an exercise in warm mystery and sentimental hopes, but in cold reality and political pragmatism. The coming of the Magi exposed the terror unleashed by threatened power, even when that threat is powerless. And yet. The Magi come as the Gentiles to a Jewish baby. Herod is eclipsed by Isaiah. Isaiah 60.1-7 is a vision of community transformed and enlarged, of wellbeing and welfare, of enmity forgotten and friendships created across barriers, cultures and races. As a Christian, I read these old texts of the Prophet Isaiah, and ponder the Gospels and the mission of Jesus, and I look around for whatever it is I could bring. Not gold, myrrh and frankincense, but in a masterpiece of rhetorical anit-climax, perhaps what Christina Rossetti suggested at the end of In the bleak mid-winter', my heart. By which I mean including but not limited to, my faith, my yes, my imagination, my energy,

2 January 2015
Art and the Unselfing of Our Looking.

Impression: soleil levant ( Impression: Sunrise) Claude Manet

This painting was exhibited in the first Impressionist Exhibition in Paris in 1874. Whether or not it gave its name to the movement, it exudes a confidence in the inner responses of the viewer that could without much exaggeration be called revolutionary.

I post the painting only to point to another of Elizabeth Jennings poems, this time her tribute to C V Wedgewood who taught her how to look, see, enter and inwardly absorb the vision of the artist, and the gift of his and her art. This may well be an example of contemplative prayer, the unselfing of our looking in order to see that which is beyond us, and calls us beyond ourselves.

Looking at Pictures

In Memory of C V Wedgewood

Your presence lit the paintings for me but

Only to show more radiantly how each

Impressionist, say, in his own way caught

A slant of sun, a pool of shade. To teach

Like this is not to teach at all but fill

Another's eyes with your own way of seeing.

You let the biggest buffet go so still

That I too entered the painter's being.

And so we walked from galleries to see

A world transformed. That every visit went

When you were picking paintings out for me

Making the shortest time a large event,

Now I'm alone but you have set me free

In all art's history by those hours we spent.

17 November 2014
The Artist, the Poet and the Country Western Singer.

Jean Baptiste Simeone Chardin "A Vase of Flowers"

When Jesus said, and I quote the language of the King James Version, "Consider the lilies how they grow", Matthew uses a word that means to learn thoroughly, observe well, consider carefully. This lovely painting shows the artist has done that.

The peremptory summons of Jesus, to "consider the lilies", is a wake-up call. I know. I also resist the overuse of that cliche. Except this time the metaphor fits the occasion, and sends a text message into our lives. Life today leaves many chasing after their own life just making a living, cramming time with activity, with no time to see, or to be. Our society leaves people with few choices but to get on with it. Still. Jesus words, "Consider the lilies…." are an invitation to be still. Just now and then, stop. Look. Consider, observe well.

Elizabeth Jennings, that so careful observer of things, loved this painting and wrote a brief poem in tribute to the artist:

Chardin

Is it the lack of self that most of all

   Challenges eyes to stay

And linger over the petals that will not fall

   Although they have some way

Of suggesting that Chardin, had he wanted to, could

   Have moved the steady light?

Here is still-life that tells us Nature is good,

   Here is a seize of sight.

It takes three quarters of the poem to ask the question about contemplation, and the power of beauty to take us outside our selves. The last line is brilliant. It says exactly what happens when loveliness in all its fragility demands to be attended to, not ignored.

Another artist, Johnny Cash, (yes he was an artist and one of the greatest in his field), was arrested in Starkville Mississippi for picking flowers by the side of the road. Mind you it was 2am. But the satire of Cash's Song, Starkville City Jail, nites deep into a culture where armed police, handcuffs and a jail cell are needed to deal with someone picking flowers. Wonmder what would have happened if he had quoted Jesus and said he was just considering the lilies……….

16 November 2014
Book Burning, Political Correctness, and responsible Freedom of Speech

"Books are not absolutely dead things, but do contain a potency of life in them to be as active as that soul whose progeny they are; nay, they do preserve as in a vial the purest efficacy and extraction of that living intellect that bred them…

We should be wary therefore what precaution we raise against the living labours of public men, how we spill that seasoned life of man preserved and stored up in books; since we see a kind of homicide may be thus committed…whereof the execoution ends not in the slaying of an elemental life, but strikes at… the breath of reason itself, slays an immortality rather than a life.

John Milton, "A Speech for the Liberty of Unlicenced Printing". Quoted in The Joy of Books, Eric Burns, page 63.

Burns goes on to show that context is everything, and later in life, in the Areopagitica Milton made numerous excpetions to this passionate opposition to censorship, amongst other exceptions being obscenity, libel and atheism – these should have no place in print and further, Milton argued "no book be printed unless the printer's and the author's name or at least the printer's be registered. Those which otherwise come forth, if they be found mischievous and libelous, the fire and the executioner will be the timeliest and the most effectual remedy that man's prevention can use."

Burns sardonic comment isn't unworthy of Milton's own reasoned sarcasm: "It is as if Milton had written a stirring defence of pacifism, and then gone on to explain that war is justified on special occasions, say if your country wants more land or more gold or better-looking women or better bred animals or it's a day of the week ending in "y"!"

So was Milton for or against censorship. Yes, and no. Sometimes. Depends on who is doing the censorship. But context is everything. The idea of freedom has to imply the freedom of ideas. But can that ever mean carte blanche for ideas, printed or spoken or online? Amongst the finest writing of the previous Chief rabbi, Jonathan Sacks, is his book, The Dignity of Difference. There and in a number of other books he argues not for a multicultural smorgasbord, but for a community of communities, respectful of difference, affirming human dignity, upholding of human rights, and much else that is rooted in the wisdom and faithfulness of his own religious tradition of Judaism.

Perhaps censorship of ideas is necessary for social stability as Milton argues, or intellectual homicide leading to oppression as Milton also argues. But in the use of words, written, spoken, online or digital, the criteria of respect for difference, affirmation of human dignity, the human right to ffreedom, and that controlled only by the human rights of all others to that same freedom, perhaps these are amongst the principles that at least enable us to evaluate, and yes to judge, the validity, viability and virtue of written, spoken and online discourse. This I think is very, very different, from an overscrupulous political correctness which applies the hermeneutic of suspicion with at times a wooden lack of moral insight. The polis is the city, the political is that which is about the welfare of the city. Politcal correctness is best served by political responsibility, political ethical principle, political imagination, political respect for persons; because in the end politics is for and about people. Language, written and spoken, is a humane and humanising gift essential for the health of the polis, the people, ourselves, others.

Lord Reith, that least politically correct broadcasting pioneer, nevertheless had these words engraved outside Broadcasting House.

Whatsoever things are true,

whatsoever things are honest, whatsoever things are just,

whatsoever things are pure, whatsoever things are lovely,

whatsoever things are of good report;

if there be any virtue, and if there be any praise,

think on these things.

These granite engraved words speak of the emotional, moral and intellectual biosphere out of which the best of human communication comes, best because it fosters community, creates space for communities of difference, and makes possible, across all the diversities of human culture, that deeper communion of those made in the image of God.

21 May 2014
S J Peploe Exhibition: An Uplift for a Dreich Day

It;s been a wet, wet, wete Aberdeen today. Started off tropical with drizzle and a warm breeze; The afternoon and into this evening unremitting rain. So we went into Aberdeen city this morning to the S J Peploe Exhibition at the Art Gallery. Superb! The Scottish Colourists are amongst my favourite artists, and the fact that they are Scottish adds to the pleasure of admiring, appreciating and enjoying their work.

This is a substantial exhibition with many of his best known paintings, gathered in one place, and exhibited in roughly chronological order, so that the paintings move from early, through experimental to maturity. Some of his latest art work is fabulous. The still life paintings, especially of flowers and tables and interiors are so subtle and atmospheric. Some of them I looked at for minutes on end.

I came away having had my eyes opened to how another person sees the world in the intimacy and immediacy of light and colour.

The exhibition is on till October. I'll be back – and the availability of a bright homely wee cafe with home baking, makes the visit all the more rewarding.

24 August 2013
Alexander Stoddart, Sculptor in Ordinary to the Queen in Scotland: The Unveiling of Coila at UWS Ayr Campus

Yesterday I did a round trip to Ayr for the unveiling of a statue. The new and stunning UWS Ayr Campus was opened last year and the University had commissioned a work of art by Alexander Stoddart, Sculptor in Ordinary to the Queen in Scotland. Sandy chose as the subject, Coila, the Goddess of the poetic charms of Ayrshire. The encounter between Coila and Burns is told in his poem "The Vision"

"…To give my counsels all in one,

Thy tuneful flame still careful fan:

Preserve the dignity of Man,

with soul erect

And trust the Universal Plan

will all protect

And wear thou this…she solemn said,

And bound the holly round my head:

The polished leaves and berries red

Did rustling play;

And, like a passing thought, she fled

In light away.

From "The Vision by Robert Burns".

The finished statue is quintessential Alexander Stoddart and is "a thing of beauty and a joy forever. " Keats' often over-quoted line was entirely appropriate as the response of the audience to the unveiling, and to the aesthetic and affective impact of the statue.

Here are some photos:

This is now one of the most important pieces of statuary in the West of Scotland. The University's association with the West of Scotland, spreading over four campuses, is both widespread and significant as a source of educational, economic and cultural investment. The statue signifies " the spirit of dedication and diligence that University of the West of Scotland embodies." Those of us who attended the unveiling of Coila are happy to acknowledge that role, and proud to share in it.

Here is a photo of the sculptor in full flow placing the work in context:

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25 July 2013