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This prayer was written for the worship Service I was leading tonight:

 

Eternal God and Father,

Whose infinite yet intimate love

shared from all eternity between Father and Son,

is the love you have poured into our hearts by the Holy Spirit.

 

We pray for those whose lives are broken for lack of love:

Children whose safety and health come second to adult demands;

Friendships ended by exploitation and backstabbing;

Marriages shredded by unfaithfulness and broken promises;

Families fractured by social pressures, whether poverty or affluence;

Neighbourhoods where love is thought weakness, and compassion is despised.

 

We pray for those we’ve only heard of on television,

Whose lives disintegrate under pressures of hate and violence

People who are in different ways, damaged, diminished, defeated,

by the absence of love, the vacuum filled by the power of hate.

The baby thrown from a bridge by an enraged jealous father

The 23 year old man whose reckless driving killed a local pensioner

The 82 year old man jailed for attempted murder in a retirement home

The pensioner kicked to death for refusing to hand over cigarettes

These and so many more, human lives caught in the crossfire of fear and hate,

we hold them before your healing mercy

 

God of love and hope,

Fill us with compassion for the poor, the hungry, the lonely

Like Jesus gives us eyes to see Zacchaeus hiding in shame;

Courage to ask the name of violent terrified Legion,

and to stand between the sinner and those holding the stones;

Compassion to touch with tender risk those who like the leper are feared and excluded,

and to see the attentive care of the Samaritan, and go do likewise –

Generosity to open our arms in welcome like the prodigal father,

and to bring our loaves and fishes to be belssed for blessing of others.

 

We dare to pray to be perfect, as our Heavenly Father is perfect,

whose sunlight love gives life to all within its radiance,

whose rain of mercy falls with life giving refreshment,

who reaches out with a love that warms and waters,

embraces, holds and heals, broken worlds and broken hearts alike,

and all this in Jesus name and in the power of your Holy Spirit,  Amen

The film Mr Turner is an intriguing, at times annoying, but always fascinating attempt to answer Elizabeth Jennings question: What were the bonds and limits, the constraints and disciplines that enabled such innovative art to establish itself as a profoundly new but powerful form of seeing the world? The inner vision of the artist is part of the mystery that may even elude conscious capture by the artist himself. The film never answers the questions of motives and origins, refusing to attempt an explanation by source criticism of the emotions, experiences and relationships which deeply engage the mind and heart and find expression in creative art.

Jennings poem simply celebrates the reality. Such form is there, and most there when invisible. The artist's self-expression, paradoxically, is at its most visible when the self is eclipsed by the actions and inner impulses which strive towards something as yet imagined, but no less real for that. As a matter of fact, this poem would be a good critical framework within which to ask the question, Is this a good film? What does it achieve? Do I understand more about how the artist works within limits but always pushes them, to the limit of of the limits. 

Tribute to Turner

What were your bonds and limits? It is hard

For us to see them yet there must be some

Since art can only flourish locked and barred

By form. However inward; it must come

 

To keep off sprawl and chaos. Out of sight

Yours are but they are firm. Within your craft

The storm, the tides are held by day and night,

Leashed strongly in and so the looker's left

 

With fire and blood and steam. There is no fear

For us but only wonder. Nature is

At your command when you most disappear

 

And so we're caught up in your ecstasies

And large delight that's present everywhere

And what seems peril has the power to please.

 

 

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