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I posted on Van Gogh's Sunflowers on March 12, you can chase it here if you want. I am now starting a near scale version in tapestry which is both a piece of unhumble cheek and an act of devotion to Van Gogh. I know perfectly well that any attempt to portray, construe, replicate a masterpiece is doomed to failure, and seems an act futile and foolish.

But. And there are several buts. First, I am not seeking to replicate but to contemplate. The scaled drawing on canvas, the choice of coloured thread, the slow building up of stitches, the immersion in the images and colours, the combination of freehand stitching and the constraint of Van Gogh's shapes and colours, all combine in a disposition of attentiveness.

So, second, I know that multi-tasking is the thing, do more than one thing at a time, even do three at a time and each of them well – that's the ideal, I know. But  not with tapestry. I can listen to music, but can't watch televison while doing this. So far from showing any disrespect or trivialising these glorious* paintings by trying to copy one of them, I am taking time and trouble to follow the artists hand and eye.

Third, if you look at the previous post you will see that Van Gogh painted Sunflowers to show forth gratitude and hopefulness. They are studies in yellow, because that is the colour that radiates from the sun, the centre of all life and the source for Van Gogh of all positive hopefulness and thankfulness. The miracle is that Van Gogh painted such dazzling exuberance while struggling with inner turmoils that would eventually close in on him in a self-destructive cycle of despair. Add to this recent research that shows Van Gogh used compounds in his paint that means some of the most vivid and brilliant yellows have turned brown with age and, irony of ironies, by exposure to sunlight.

So my tapestry is not an attempted replica of the painting in the National Gallery. It will be an impression of an Impressionist; the vivid yellows and contrasting brilliances of colours which are a study in yellow, I'll show in brightest stranded cotton. I'm not trying to reproduce Van Gogh's painting; I'm trying to capture in colour his courage, his vision of hopefulness, his immense humanity and passion for life, the tenderness and intensity with which he looked on created things and saw to the essence of existence, and believed at the centre of all things goodness could be found.

 It's one of the neglected facts about Van Gogh that he was a man of intense Christian faith earlier in his life and career. He moved away from Evangelicalism of a Reformed style to a much less personal form of theism. His loss of religious faith, or at least his move away from certainty and dogmatic convictions, was never a loss of belief in life itself. Whatever else the Sunflower sequence of paintings express, they affirm for Van Gogh the reality of light, the vitality of life, the vibrancy of colour and the radiance of existence – and it is to his credit as a courageous human being, that such affirmation was possible only by the most costly and creative defiance of which he was capable – to paint the opposite of what he felt inside.

So his Sunflowers make real and vivid the human life that is the alternative to death; they announce the hopefulness that argues against despair; they radiate the riotous energy that gives the lie to the lethargy and ennui of his depression, and yet those same flowers caught in a still life, celebrating beauty captured and released in its living essence, contrasts with the inner agitation and mania of a man whose emotional life burned with consuming passion. To read Vincent's letters about these flowers, and sense the joy he took in painting them, is to begin, only begin, to understand the vision that saw within the anatomy of this perfectly named flower of the sun, realities that he might never grasp fully, but which he sensed were sufficient to grasp him, and perhaps save him. Van Gogh's Sunflowers are above all else a spiritual, personal and deeply existential statement, hope made defiant by magnificent art which construes the world as a place where the sun shines on the righteous, and the unrighteous.

Got caught up in lots of other stuff to be done, so didn't get the chance to post the second excerpt from Archbishop Rowan Williams lecture on theological education. here it is

"I think that we have suffered a great deal from visions and models of education that have not sufficiently directed us to the centrality of the body of Christ, as the theological theme, as that which more than anything else holds for us the newness of the new creation, the difference of where we are and how we relate. We have a very long way to go in making our Anglican church a coherent, communal, obedient, renewed family of congregations. And yet we share the reality given in Christ by our baptism, the reality of Christ's body. The theological education we need, I believe, in the Communion is something which will make that come alive for us, which will make us literate in reading scripture and doctrine and church history, which will deepen in us those skills of discernment that we need in respect of our own calling and the calling of others, which will set us free from being simply an ecclesiastical organisation preoccupied with policing itself in various ways which will perhaps make us a more effective servant of the world into which God calls us. The world in which God invites us to recognise him, respond to him, praise, be glad in him, a world which is on the way to becoming that new creation which is really the context, the locus of any theology worth the name."

……………………….

And not only in the Anglican communion. This entire lecture is a contemplative commendation of theological education as articulated doxology, thinking in the context of worship, wonder finding words to praise, and an obedience of the heart and mind to the mystery that calls us to attentiveness, attempted articulacy and when necessary to unembarrased silence as study stills itself into prayer.

Not suggesting for a moment that what we have in the Tolstoy story quoted below is a comprehensively orthodox account of the Triune relations of Father, Son and Spirit. What we do have is a story that cuts through our speculative hesitations about God and with gentle humour reminds us of the rich relationality that is the life of God and the life of God in communion with created beings like us.

(The painting is by Chagall, the visitors to Abraham and Sarah with the promise of a child, and the same story of course underlies Rublev's icon of the Trinity. Chagall of course was more interested in this foundational story of Jewish faith and identity.)

Three Russian monks lived on a faraway island. The bishop visits them, and is disturbed they don't know how to pray the Lord's Prayer. He devotes all his time to instructing them on the Our Father. When he is leaving in his boat he sees the monks running  across the water towards the boat, "Father", they say, "we can't remember the Our Father". Amazed he asked, "Well how do you normally pray". "Well they say, "Dear God, there are three of You and there are three of us, have mercy on us"! The Bishop is struck by the simplicity of their holiness and tells them to go and be at peace.

As I said, not the last or most sophisticated word on Trinitarian realities – but the simplicity of holiness is the way in which we know God as the subject of theology, so that theology becomes doxology, and theologising becomes worship, and theological reflection blends and merges with contemplative prayer and loving discovery. 

One of the higlights of the visit to London for my big birthday was half an hour spent in the V&A, gazing at the Raphael Tapestries and Cartoons, particularly the two that show Jesus post-resurrection appearances. They are the most beautiful portrayals of biblical narrative and for me represent one of the high watermarks of imaginative exegesis of the stories of Jesus during the Renaissance.

To read the story of the miraculous catch of fish in John's Gospel, and then to look carefully at Raphael's painting, is to be transported from the slick glitz and technological tyrranny and cultural malaise and economic anxiety and intellectual aridity and spiritual confusion of the world we inhabit, to another world – every bit as challenging. And I suppose it's a nonsense comparison to ask which shows the greatest genius of human achievement – a Rapahel Cartoon  or an Ipad, a Sistine Ceiling or a Hubble Telescope. And I do recognise the gross exaggerations in the comparisons I made in the first sentence of this paragraph. But there are times when it just seems right to contemplate beauty and provide an aesthetic critique of what the contemporary mind finds beautiful, humanising, and to be wondered at. Gazing on beauty as a visual form of vespers, evensong and benediction all in the one act of contemplative attentiveness.