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Incarnational Theology and the Conceits of Art

The recent visit to Edinburgh and the National Galleries I was looking for nothing in particular except the Botticelli mentioned in a previous post. But I came across a couple of other paintings including this one, a work by the enigmatic and mysterious artist (or artists) known as the Master(s) of the Embroidered Foliage.

Close inspection shows why the name has become attached to paintings in this style. The foliage is painted to make it look like embroidery, and the effect gives the work a depth and texture that sets the central figure in what looks like a living landscape, and yet which is so different in style the human figures are made to appear more real, more immediate. The landscape intentionally appears as a human contrivance, embroidered foliage, a conceit that depicts the miracle of natural growth as the natural response of an organic creation to the One who gives life, calls to life, indeed is born as living flesh into the world.

But then, by placing the Virgin and child in the centre, on a bench with a richly embroidered back, and set against a landscape painted also in embroidered patterns, the realism of the mother and child, captured in subtle delicacy of colour and expression, is further emphasised in a way that carries profound incarnational implications. The real natural world is depicted through an artificial conceit, and the supernatural birth is depicted with realism and a degree of artistic sensitivity that it forces a contrast, and thus compels attention to the living centre of the painting.

The child's hand turning the page, pointing to the text, suggests the child and mother in a joint act of reading, interpreting, fulfilling. But it seems it is the child's hand turning the page, an act of precocious, even authoritative guidance – and the mother is looking at the child, not the book. Perhaps to the mother the child is the real text, the subject of whom the book speaks. The developed theology of the incarnation wrestles with immense and complex questions of humanity and divinity coinciding in the birth of Jesus. Nicea and Chalcedon stand as formulaic and historic statements, as the best the tradition could offer in words, reconciled to the limitations of language and vocabulary, and recognising that intellectually construed concepts always fall short of the divine realities expressed in the central doctrines of Christian faith. Incarnation and Christology, the relations of the Triune God, the initiating and inviting grace of God reaching out in a love impassioned purpose, eternal and yet scandalously specific in historic occurence. "The word became flesh and dwelt amongst us….God was in christ reconciling the world to himself…but when the fullness of time had come, God sent his son, born of a woman…."

13 July 2010
The Amazing Ubiquity and Ambiguity of “Amazing Grace”

The hymn Amazing Grace is amazingly ubiquitous. I've no idea how many renderings of it there are. But without straining a single mental muscle I can list the following which I've heard at least once, and one or two of them countless times

The Pipes and Drums and Military band of the Royal Scots Dragoon Guards

Judy Collins

Jessye Norman

The Blind Brothers of Alabama

Elvis

Susan Boyle

Paul Potts

Aretha Franklin

Mahalia Jackson

But the most spectacularly over the top rendering I've ever heard is on the Lesley Garrett CD Amazing Grace. By over the top I mean no criticism whatsoever. For once a full orchestra, a soprano showing off, and creative choreography does justice to a song written out of appalling human abuse, and yet which celebrates a faith in which the gift of God is the power of love to restore and renew human brokenness, to break down dividing walls of hostility, to begin the work of the reconciliation of all things in Christ.

I know no better portrayal of John Newton's lifelong sorrow for his own actions than Albert Finnie's anguished and sympathetic portrayal in the DVD of the recent film. The sorrow and anger of the converted slaver, the inability to erase the past, the felt insufficiency of personal forgiveness from God to complete the circle of reconciliation, until there is forgiveness from those who have been wronged, and until the wrong itself is abolished, highlights a crucial theological and pastoral insight. Forgiveness by God can never exclude the necessity of that kind of repentance that brings us to those we have wronged to state the wrong, to confess our sins against them, to say we are sorry, to ask what would heal or help restore a relationship so damaged, and to give ourselves to the abolition of such patterns of behaviour as caused the wrong in the first place.

Given such human misery inflicted by the slave trade, and a Gospel of utter surprising love, and the tragedy of human history that can never be reversed, more is required in the singing of Amazing Grace than anodyne and safe renderings that are musically competent, even brilliant. I'm not even sure that the hymn is best sung as a congregational praise song, unless there is an awareness not only of its provenance, but of the complicity of Christianity in human trafficking, and an open knowledge that such trade was providing the economic sub-structure of an empire that still shapes contemporary attitudes to the worlds and cultures of other people. Something needs to jolt us awake to what is being sung, and to our capacity to be blind, culpably and callously blind to the suffering of others, often enough only because it is culturally approved and economically convenient.

The track in the Garrett version begins with African voices singing Alleluia but in rhythms reminiscent of the workforce, the clanking of irons is heard here and throughout the first sections, and the first bars introduce the wistful sound of wind instruments rising in aspiration and longing before the first words are sung. The slow build of the song towards the climax begins with solo voice, then the rhythm and clicking of African percussion, before a soprano descant and then the choral voices offer a supportive base for soprano pyrotechnics which are not the least out of place – there is a soaring hopefulness and triumph that simply defies the inhumanity out of which this hymn emerged.

Amazing Grace is one of the few hymns that needs more than one rendering to come anywhere near doing justice to the ambivalence of its provenance and the intensity of the personal experience of conversion out of which it came. For quite other reasons the version by the Blind Boys of Alabama is equally compelling – arranged and sung to the tune House of the Rising Sun.
It too explores the ambiguities and certainties of a hymn which it seems is popular well beyond the evangelical circles out of which it came and within which it still resonates in personal experiences of God. And it does so within the musical idiom of African American people, for whom the words touch deep into their personal and social history. How there can be congruence between a hymn written by a converted slave trader, and the great, great, great, great grandchildren of people stolen from their home of land and family, is one of the mysteries of that grace that is sung about in this hymn. Maybe there is no congruence in grace – it doesn't fit with our human standards of guilt, just deserts, cruelty, inhumane thoughtlessness – it contradicts and seeks to transform them.

I reckon a whole seminar could be built around exploring the text and sub text of this hymn, based on the way people have sung it, and hear it. A time of learning when we are honest and open to the ambiguities out of which this anthem of grace came, which emerged from such tragic times. yes, and which is sung in times still tragic, with our own sins of oppression, and perhaps our own blindness to our complicity in the structures of sin that condemn countless millions to the slaveries that are essential to globalised markets on the current models.

Does anyone else know renderings of Amazing Grace that you have found are as richly textured in musical and spiritual reach? Just decided I'd like to do such a seminar or retreat evening.

11 July 2010
Prayer and the humility to shut up.

This has been on of those weeks that we all have to work through once in a while. Been in Fort William, Paisley, Elderslie, Westhill, Manchester and now back in Westhill. Each place on that list represents a different bed each night! No wonder I is confoosed and discombobulated 🙂 But what a rich and full week. An Induction of David, one of our students, at Fort William at the start of the week, and a meeting with UK College Principals in Manchester the last two days. And in between the Graduation ceremony for 8 of our students. Now that is some considerable compensation for the past week's experience as a nomad, a man of no fixed abode. That said it's a miracle I haven't walked into a wall, or fallen downstairs, or walked by accident into the wrong room. So after the next week i have a lengthy holiday much of which will be at home getting used to Aberdeen again for longer than a few days at a time.

Here's a Mary Oliver poem for no other reason than I read it on the plane earlier and know exactly what she means.

Praying

It doesn't have to be

the blue iris, it could be

weeds in a vacant lot, or a few

small stones;just

pay attention, then patch

a few words together and don't try

to make them elaborate, this isn't

a contest but the doorway

into thanks, and a silence in which

another voice may speak.

(Thirst, Bloodaxe, 2006), 37.

She is right. Praying isn't only, perhaps isn't primarily, our voice speaking. It may be, perhaps it must be, another Voice speaking and us listening for it, and to it. The willingness to not speak, to be silent, and to listen, is a disposition requiring more humility than we can often manage. So how many times have my words, my praying, interrupted and overspoken that other Voice? How many times has God told me to shut up and listen, but I couldn't hear the whisper for my own chatter?

9 July 2010
Haiku and appreciation of a beautiful rose.

Still in the process of choosing roses for our garden, and have bought a couple as gifts for friends as well. The photo below is of one recently bought and given to a home where roses are loved, and flourish under appreciative eyes. The name of this variety is Strawberry Hill and it is a David Austin rose.

It's named after Strawberry Hill, an 18th Century Gothic villa (detail of it in the photo), built by Sir Horace Walpole, and now incorporated into St Mary's University College, London. The rose is a vision of loveliness, and the colour begins as deep pink slowly changing to pale at the outer rims.

Decided to do a one stanza Haiku in appreciation.

Strawberry Hill Rose,

gathered petals of pink dusk,

sun-flushed clouds of dawn.

7 July 2010
Biography as Theology – communal self scrutiny

Talking with Stuart yesterday about our mutual interest in biography as theology. McClendon's book, Biography as Theology, may not be the first use of the phrase- there's a chapter title in the William Stringfellow anthology that uses the same phrase, possibly earlier. No matter. My own interest in biography as theology was quite unintentional and for years I was unaware that was what I was doing. I've read biographies all my life. Hundreds of them. From Rowan Williamsto Yehudi Menuhin, Mahatma Gandhi to Vincent Van Gogh, George Macleod of Iona to Einstein, Dorothy Sayers to Thomas Aquinas, Emily Dickinson to Marilyn Monroe, Baron Friedrich Von Hugel to Martin Luther King, George Eliot to Elie Wiesel, Shirley Williams to Rembrandt, Katherine Hepburn to Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Diana Princess of Wales to Sir Alec Guinness, Dorothy Day to Abraham Joshua Heschel, Beethoven to Bernstein to U2, and so on. Poets and trade unionists, artists and politicians, inventors and theologians, novelists and engineers, celebrities and explorers, travellers and stay at homers, doers and thinkers, the nice and the not nice, historical and contemporary.

Biographies can be hagiography or muckraking, tragic lives (a whole new genre) and blessed lives, authorised and thus sanitised, or unauthorised and sometimes destructive. Not all biographies are good – by which I mean accurate, fair, dealing with significant experience, contributing to our understanding of human life by examining and telling the story of a particular human life. And then there are the autobiographies, written to self advertise, or as catharsis, or as serious life evaluation, or as either perpetuating self-importance, or genuinely offering experience that is reflected on, assimilated into a new and mature self-awareness, with lessons learned and gratitude not absent.

Biography as theology is a way of reflecting with critical sympathy, believing that in the living of a human life, there is the raw material that helps us understand what it means to encounter God, and for life to be changed by that experience. The underlying premise is simple – how we live is the demonstration of what we hold as our convictions. If we don't practise it we don't believe it; our practice exposes the convictions that move us to such actions. The life we live is the expression of those convictions that do indeed, practically and decisively, shape and form us. Not what I say; not what I think; not what I believe – well, all of these, but all of these translated into human practice in that performance of daily life that is the final, convincing evidence of what it is we actually do, when it comes down to it, believe.

More about this later. Here's McClendon:

"Undertaken in Christian community, biography can be a mode of communal self-scrutiny…the exercise in which the community holds a mirror to those it finds its finest in rder to discover what God has been doing in its midst…- if such communal self scrutiny is undertaken under the eyes and in the light of God, then it may be a prime example of what we prioperly call theology. This is biography as theology."

5 July 2010
A new reading chair for the study – wise stewardship or consumer extravagance?

My study isn't a big room. And I have a lot of books divided between home and College. A study needs a desk, computer and printer, and a reading chair, and wall space for pictures and other sources of inspiration, and a sound system for music. And my study isn't a big room. So choices have to be clever, because I don't want to be "cabined, cribbed and confined" in the very place where mind and heart should relax with space and time for thought.

And yesterday which was supposed to be about something else entirely, I came across the very chair. Comfort, appearance, size are all yes, and I've measured carefully and checked that it would fit. So reserved till later today till I make up my mind. When does "not cheap" take second place to just right? Is that primarily a financial calculation or an aesthetic one? See this stewardship thing, it complicates the process of deciding what you really want – the thing itself, or the knowledge you've used money responsibly and wisely. I mean, how many chairs are there, and why does this one matter? For some people shoppping is uncomplicated transaction. For some of us not quite so. How many decisions do we make in the process of any particular consumer choice? Or how many choices have to be made before we can reach a responsible decision about money? Don't know. But I need a chair. And by the end of the day I might have one….or not. Then I might regret my decision…or not. And then there's the need to change the car………….any shopping advisers out there?

The ingenious chair pictured is the ultimate reading chair, eh? it's on the Scottish Poetry Library website. Not sure how comfortable it is – anyone ever sat on it, maybe the poets and poetry readers who come in and out of this blog?

2 July 2010
Theology, Mizzle and Joy – Resurrection faith and getting on with our lives.

It is a grey mizzly day here in Aberdeen. Not cold, but a day of vague vision, no horizons to give perspective, no sense of distance and space. The view from our bedroom looks across to the line of hills that sweeps round to Bennachie. But not this morning, The view ends within a few hundred metres and fades into a gradual opacity, like flying through grey clouds.

A good metaphor mizzle,(collation of mist and drizzle) for those times we live with opacity, lack of perspective because of restricted horizons, when life has no comforting clarity of view. Does anyone know any good modern praise songs / hymns that deal with the spiritual experience of mizzle? Having seen the view from here on a sunny day, I know what lies beyond the mizzle. But long term mizzle would be a different story. And the Christian response is also a different story.

Just been reading Moltmann's Theology & Joy. The title is not an oxymoron but a blessed juxtaposition. And here's Moltmann's antidote to the grey mizzle that can descend overnight on us, and can have many a cause.

"All liberation movements begin with a few people who are no longer afraid and who begin to act differently from what is expected by those who are threatening them.

That would suit many a Lord just fine…

But a resurrection is coming

It will be quite different from what we expect.

A resurrection is coming which is

God's revolution against the lords

And against the lord of lords, against death,

wrote Kurt Marti. Here already we find ourselves right at the centre of theology, the liberating game of faith with God against the evil bonds of fear and the grey pressures of care which death has laid upon us. For resurrection faith means courage to revolt against the 'covenant of death' (Isaiah 28.15), it means hope for the victory of life which will swallow up and conquer life devouring death." (Theology & Joy, London: SCM, 1973), pp. 37-8.

Mizzle, and "the liberating game of faith". The idea that faith is a game, not trivial but serious play, with rules but freedom of expression, with purpose and uncertain outcome, to be played with skill, co-operation and initiative, and finding in such a way of life liberation for ourselves and the liberation of others. That is what resurrection faith means. Wonder if Moltmann during his months in Ayrshire after the war, experienced a damp mizzly Scottish day or two? A kind of West of Scotland summer school in theology? And how about a course entitled, "Theology, Mizzle &Joy?

The bronze is "Christ Rising, by Frederick Hart, 1998. The cruciform shape combines the sense of liberation, welcome and openness to the future that the resurrection guarantees, and yet recalls the suffering love that enfolds a broken creation in the redemptive intentionality of God.

1 July 2010
Botticelli’s “Virgin Adoring the Sleeping Christ Child”:

Yesterday I was at the National Galleries in Edinburgh. At one point I was standing within twenty feet of Monet, "The Poplars on the River Epte", Van Gogh "Garden with a Path", and the Singer Sargent portrait of "Lady Agnew". And the odd Gaugin, Renoir and Degas within sight. How good is that then?

But it was the Botticelli I went to see first and longest. "Virgin Adoring the Sleeping Christ Child". This masterpiece of art is also a richly theological and devotional statement. The idea that devotional is in some sense sentimentalised theology, or worse still, non-theologically controlled spirituality, is one of the less clever assumptions of those dismissive of those appropriations of art that combine aesthetic pleasure, thoughtful prayer, and theological reflection.

I'll want to make more of this painting later – but for now. What is the significance of the child surrounded by thornless roses? Very rarely is the Christ child portrayed as sleeping. The use of blue for the sky, the robe and the swaddling cloth, and blue as a symbol of heaven, is surely intentionally significant. The contrast of roses, organic thornless beauty, and the geometric sharpness and hardness of the rocks, suggests the meeting of life and lifelessness, fruit and barrenness, garden and desert rock.The roses and the Virgin's dress share the same colour and the child's feet rest on the soft velvet and satin.

What it all means? Incarnation is both mystery and miracle, yet there is in this painting a tenderness and vulnerability that does not suggest overwhelming power. The central image is of adoration as in the title; the loving gaze of a mother becomes prayer for her child, and merges in the mind of the viewer with our own knowledge of the story. This is unembarrassed Christian story, complete with Christian character, symbol and requiring a Christian hermeneutic. We know the tragedy that follows, but it is the tragic love of God intent on overcoming the tragic brokenness of a world where roses have thorns, and rocks crush, and doing so not in overturning power but through love incarnate, made human, surrendered to the same suffering and death that we all must face. And in that surrender, redeeming suffering, overcoming death and making possible new beginnings of life, the tragic is transformed into hope and a future in God. And all that concentrated in the birth of a child, a child asleep under the watchful love of a mother, whose hands are folded in supplication, the deep longing of love for what she has created, that which is part of her. And the scandal of Christian faith is that such a story as incarnation, love incarnate, is the story of the God we have come to know in Christ. The Word became flesh and dwelt among us…

29 June 2010
The virtues of slowness

An old postcard, found in a second-hand book and now a framed reminder on my desk of the meaning of study and rest as idealised in a different age. Notice the lack of a laptop, and I don't think he's holding his mobile phone to his ear, and it's a book not a Kindle or an Ipad.

It's a photo in sepia of Isaac Walton's commemorative stain glass window at Winchester cathedral. The author of The Compleat Angler, he is one of the celebrated writers in English prose and his book a vade mecum of fishing folklore, human observation and the detailed descriptions of fish and fauna which in an earlier age substituted for David Attenborough.

I have no interest in sitting beneath trees in the country reading a book on fishing, beside still waters and green pastures – but just now and then, in our very different unrelenting world, I do have a hankering to rediscover the virtues of slowness, and to do so without feeling guilty:) Takes lots of practice though, and I suspect a I would need a temperament adjustment, slowness not being one of my more obvious characteristics.

28 June 2010
Rhapsody in Blue: Holidays, roses, poems and sometimes, prayer

Just been to the most attractive Garden Centre right in the middle of St Andrews. It's up a close, roofed over, and filled with plants, shrubs, and assorted garden stuff – it also has what could be called a judicious selection of roses. There is beauty, delicacy, fragility and generosity in a rose – also vulnerability and poignancy, because such glorious extravagance of colour and scent is transient. Maybe such living beauty is only possible at the cost of permanence.

My father grew roses in every garden of each house we lived in – and that was quite a few. The one I remember with most affection was a huge white rambling rose that covered half a gable end of our cottage. Then there was the time I discovered the Peace rose, and for all kinds of reasons, emotional, theological, political and horticultural, I want one again. Emotional because of its story, political because peace-making is in my view the highest political goal, theological because every reminder, intimation, symbol of peace seems to me to touch the deep places in my understanding of God, horticultural because….well just because.

Mary Oliver has several poems about roses. Here are some lines from "The Poet Visits the Museum of Fine Arts".

For a long time

   I was not even

      in this world, yet

        every summer

every rose

   opened in perfect sweetness

      and lived

         in gracious repose,

in its own exotic fragrance,

   in its huge willingness to give

      something, from its small self,

         to the entirety of the world.

I took time today to look at a rose flower, not thoughtfully as in analytically, more observantly as in contemplative waiting. I've no idea how to guage perfection, but the rose I gazed at seemed richly formed, pink white and pale yellow shaped around petals more precisely fitted than any geometry could achieve, and to my eyes achieving what can only be described with the grammatically clumsy term unimprovable. Is it claiming too much to say that looking at and smelling such a flower gives the heart an emotional holiday, and then suggest that this act of recreative attentiveness can for each of us, sometimes, be compared to prayer. Not prayer as petition and intercession; not prayer with words at all; just the willingness to see in fragile beauty and extravagant if casual attention to detail, a miracle that argues against all the functionalism of our technology worshipping world. And in that miracle and argument the rose always wins – but not by arguing. Simply by being and by the beauty of that being, the rose through the utter functionlessness of its beauty, points us beyond our habits of calculation to a way of recognising in this God soaked world, that some things are invaluable in the sense of unvaluable, they are not amenable to the criteria of utility. Like love, kindness, and goodness, beauty, as Mary Oliver says, exists in gracious repose, extravagant self-giving, and encounters us with transformative grace. Or so it seemed as I spent two or three minutes in contemplative waiting before, of all things, a rose.

The blue rose is called Rhapsody in Blue – a David Austin variety that will soon be in our own garden.

27 June 2010