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Van Gogh painted a series of Sunflowers pictures. Such powerful images of sunlight, yellows and golds, large and exuberant , larger than life, expansive and exaggerated intimations of joy, what happiness might look like if it could be painted. I stood for a while in front of this painting in the National Gallery. Some paintings request our silence, because whatever is said is rendered down into irrelevant chatter, interpretive nonsense, bland commentary on masterpiece.

What was fun about this painting is that people who came to look were keen to talk, to comment, to make noisy pilgrimage to one of the great images of one of the finest artists. And the irony of such enjoyment and conversation with total strangers, some who had no English and I had no Korean!, is that we stood in front of this painting, like pilgrims who had just arrived, knowing it was painted by a man who walked often in the valley of deep darkness, and eventually death's dark vale.

There are moments in our lives when our own hard journey seems somehow not to be just as hard as we thought. How did such exhilaration and creativity survive the bleak inner climate of van Gogh's illness? Where did the confidence and in your face unembarrassment of this painting come from? The answer, or part of it, is in the letters Van Gogh wrote, where he spoke of those flowers expressing gratitude and hope for the future. They are two key words that are essential to human happiness. Gratitude is predominantly backward looking, reflecting positively on the past; hope is primarily forward looking, trusting the future still has gift and grace to be given and received. Dag Hammarskjold's couplet says much the same: "For all that is past thank you; for all that is to come, yes!"

I know Lent is about prayer and fasting, and a penitential demeanour. It's just that I also think there are times when we need to repent of ingratitude and lack of trust, and our inability sometimes to say yes to our future. And by repent I mean the biblical meaning – to change direction, to turn again towards life, conversatio morum, to turn again towards the sunrise, or the sunflowers. That day standing in front of Van Gogh's painting, I understood his need to paint them. Like throwing a grappling hook up into the future, taking hold, and beginning to climb again towards the sunlight. And the constant cluster of people jostling in front of it seems to suggest Van Gogh's defiant yellow sunflowers resonate with a 21st Century longing for that same hopefulness and trust in our shared future.

Amongst the aha moments on the recent London trip was a visit to see the Raphael cartoons at the V&A. In our own age of flickering images, CGI's and global publicity our eyes and imagination are overloaded even overwhelmed by visual data. There comes a point when we begin not to notice, when attentiveness is attenuated, and when we are weary of technological cleverness.

So to stand in front of half a dozen very large panels, and gaze on these hand painted images, meticulously detailed, richly woven with biblical allusion and imaginative reconstruction, is a sight for sore eyes.

Raphael is one of the great biblical exegetes. The cartoons are now faded with age, but the mellowing of colour, itself impossible to achieve by mere technique, gives them an aura of old truth still to be told.

One of my favourite Raphael paintings (not in London, but in The Vatican) is "The Transfiguration" in which the whole story is collapsed into one picture. Including the failed exorcism of the disciples. One of Mark's more telling one liners is uttered by the boy's father, "I asked your disciples to cast it out, but they couldn’t." (Mk 9.13) Against the backdrop of glory and Trasfiguration, the failure of the disciples to exorcise the evil spirit is a startling and intended contrast. And failure is an interesting theme in Mark's gospel, and in the lives we all have to live!

Failure, if taken rightly to heart, is an education in humility, in self understanding, an opportunity to grow. But not for the disciples in Mark’s Gospel. Having failed to exorcise an evil spirit themselves, they then become the self-appointed Regional Quality Assurance officers for Exorcisms. Not surprising, that desire to regulate others, control the boundaries,  – they’d just been having an argument about who is the greatest. Reminds you of years ago, a kind of Blair – Brown ambition-fest as to who would be the leader of the disciples. Jesus had just given the kind of answer that only works in the politics of the Kingdom of God, ‘Whoever wants to be first , must be last of all and servant of all.’ And like the self-preoccupied movers and shakers they believed themselves to be, they didn’t, as John Reid another used to be politician would say, ‘get it’.

 So failed exorcists with a lust for leadership, presume to disqualify others from their ministry in Jesus name, and in doing so disqualify themeselves. The same John  Reid would say, ‘Disciples not fit for purpose’. How dare any of us erect boundaries around compassionate ministry exercised in Jesus name. And before we become all self-defensive, ‘Well of course not all services done for people is done in Jesus name’, we do well to listen to Jesus reply, generously inclusive, ministry affirming, and welcoming compassion wherever it rears its beautiful head …"whoever is not against us is for us."

That is an ecumenicity of the heart, and it is only possible when being first is an irrelevance, and being servant of all is a priority; whoever is not against us is for us, gives not only the benefit of the doubt, but the benefit of trust; to live with such an attitude of openness to goodness, to see each act of kindness as Christ serving, to believe each costly casting out of evil wherever it lurks collaborates with God’s Kingdom, to recognise, acknowledge and celebrate compassion wherever it radiates into human lives, is to take on the generous inclusiveness of Jesus who welcomes all the help the world needs for no one who does a deed of power in Jesus name will be able soon afterward to speak evil of him.

And one closing thought – identify that part in each of our hearts, that leads us to say, without thinking clearly what we mean, ‘we tried to stop him because he was not following us’.

Regular readers of Living Wittily will know that there aren't usually such long spaces between posts unless there is a good reason. How about a 60th birthday? And 4 days in London? A visit to see The Lion King, the National Gallery, the V&A, a Vivaldi concert by candlelight in St Martin in the Fields, the London Eye, the usual iconic buildings from the Palace to Parliament, and several expensive but indulgent patisseries!!

Where to start describing such a crowded temporal canvas. The highlights can't be chosen between – The Lion King was a stunning show – imaginative, African, colourful, funny, moving, musically throbbing and rhythmic – wouldn't have missed it and have seldom spent loadsa money to better prupose. The Sainsbury Wing of the National was for me an overwhelming encounter with beauty, religious devotion, history and some of the finest art of Europe gathered in one location. I've decided over Lent to do a series of posts on paintings in the National Gallery (two or three a week), as a way of distilling high points of experience into more permanently appropriated insight, appreciation, and that elusive golden strand that runs through all transformative aesthetic experience – joy in beauty. Ruskin wasn't wrong – a thing of beauty is a joy forever. I saw, and enjoyed so much – with time and a refusal to rush into gushing newsiness about it all, perhaps the impact of such lavishly displayed genius will have time to dissipate, leaving behind those wounds of knowledge that give permanence to those touches that change the way we are, and the way we view the world.

 
But as one example, and because I can't forbear – and don't want to anyway! Here is one of the works that made me go in the first place. I have a postcard of this, The Virgin on the Rocks, which is a more faithful representation of the depth and texture of the colours than any web page. But nothing prepares for the moment you stand in front of this and know yourself addressed by beauty, truth and goodness. You go all the way to London to appraise a painting, and find yourself judged and wanting in the everyday skills of perception and understanding, and not because such ability is inadequate – more fundamentally, I found they were not appropriate.

There are ways of knowing, levels of comprehension, modes of apprehension, that do not survive intact the authoritative demand of a work of art which threatens to revise the assuredness of all our previous knowledge, to ransack fruitlessly our existent vocabulary, and reduces to incidentals the absoluteness of much of our personal experience. To stand before this painting is to be relativised, to re-calibrate our criteria of judgement, to acknowledge yet again, as a necessary and necessarily recurring process of correction, that what we know, really and deeply know, is always and ever provisional, partial, limited, and therefore has to be open to the possibility of expansion, enrichment and newness in those places of encounter where previous experience leaves us unprepared, and thus vulnerable to wonder.

Viewing this painting was for me a religious experience in its own right. I've now read up on it and learned some important facts about context, technique and the artist's likely purposes. But these are secondary, the painting is primary; I am, and hope to remain vulnerable to its wonder.