Living Wittily

The transformative power of beauty, the longing of the heart, and contemplative prayer

 Have a friend who recently took time to gaze on the original Vermeer masterpiece, The Girl with the Pearl Earing, made famous in the novel and the subsequent DVD. Of course the novel and the DVD are at least two interpretive moves removed from the original, and affecting as they are they leave us at a distance from the thing itself. To search out an original masterpiece, like this Vermeer, and to contemplate its detailed loveliness, is to allow yourself to be taken into an immediacy of experience that permits great art to disarm you, render your mind and heart and spirit vulnerable to beauty, and open your being in responsiveness to the power of beauty to recreate and renew the way you see the world. 

Theologians have long known that beauty, one of the three transcendentals, sets off deep in our human consciousness, reverberations and affinities with those feelings of longing and spiritual yearning we associate with prayer at its most inarticulate yet intimate. We can't find the words, but we recognise the pull towards that which is beyond us and yet which beckons, and that powerful undertow draws us away from ourselves and towards God. Simone Weil, French philosopher, mystic and marginal visionary of life, wrote about some of this:

the beauty of the world is almost the only way in which we can allow God to penetrate us...for a sense of beauty, though mutilated, distorted and soiled, remains rooted in the heart of humanity as a powerful incentive. It is present in all the preoccupations of secular life. If it were made true and pure it would sweep all secular life in a body to the feet of God... 

The paradox of beauty is that it has the power both to break the heart and to restore it; it tells us both what we have lost and what we long for; it shows the world in its actuality as flawed and imperfect, and also provides a vision of an alternative world where perfection need not be impossible; it reminds us of our finitude by allowing us to glimpse that which is beyond our knowing, that which is defiant of calculation, that which radiates with those other two great transcendentals, Truth and Goodness.

My own recent sorties into the realm of the beautiful include patient waiting before several paintings like this, the first hearing of and then repeated listening to Tallis's Spem in Alium, an encounter with a perfectly formed white rose, and a re-watching of an old film in which human life was explored with generous compassion, thespian genius, humane sentiment laced with just enough realism to remind me that life has its anguish as well as joy. In each experience, there was a sense of being taken out of myself, invited, persuaded, coaxed perhaps even catapulted, out of the mundane ordinary routine of a life more or less interesting, and for a few brief moments, taken to a new level of awareness - that life, this life, my life, is suffused with splendour if only I could see it. We are dust, but dust of glory. We are finite, but with eternity in our hearts. We settle for the possible, but then beauty awakens desire for the impossible, teases us with intimations of the perfect, tantalises us towards the fulfilment of all we have it in us to be. That's what great art does, like this Vermeer painting of The Girl with the Pearl Earing. And that's what God the master artist does - persuades us with beauty, invites our gaze, opens our eyes to splendour, and wounds the soul with that which only ever finally heals us, love.

Von Balthasar's birthday & Frederick Buechner: the wordless truth of who we are and who God is...

Today is the birthday of Hans Urs Von Balthasar. I know it's Buechner week, but wanted to show the catholicity of my spirit by celebrating two such different voices! And also, you get two posts rolled into one! :))

Mark McIntosh is one of the most lucid and penetrating interpreters of Von Balthasar. Here is a brief extract from his essay on Von Balthasar's christology, with a quite stunning couple of sentences from Von Balthasar on the Cross:

Thus the space, the 'room', which God had made for the creature to respond to divine life was either collapsed into idolatrous creaturely self assertion or else distorted into an angry distance or fearful and bitter alienation. And with that distortion, all the other differences within the created order became toxic and antagonistic divisions.

On such a stage the human being could never pursue the calling which would lead to relationship with God and thus to authentic personhood. But Balthasar's christology re-situates human being within its true acting space, upon a stage whose structures and rhythms have been purified and reconfigured by Christ. In Balthasar's view this is possible because the divine Persons have themselves, on the Cross and in the Resurrection, revisited the alienated distance between humanity and God, emplotting it once more within the 'space' between the Father and the Son:

"The extreme distance between Father and Son, which is endured as a result of the Son's taking on of sin, changes into the most profound intimacy...The Son's eternal, holy distance from the Father, in the Spirit, forms the basis on which the unholy distance of the world's sin can be trnasposed into it, can be transcended and overcome by it."

(Cambridge Companion to Hans Urs Von Balthasar, chapter 3, 'Christology', Mark McIntosh, p. 35)

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Buechner imagines the preacher ready to preach, and the congregation ready to listen, or to be bored. And what is the preacher to say?

Who knows what this time, out of the silence, he will tell them.

Let him tell them the truth. before the Gospel is a word, it is silence. It is the silence of their own lives and of his life. It is life with the sound turned off so that for a moment or two you can experience it not in terms of the words you make it bearable by but for the unutterable mystery that it is. Let him say, "Be silent and know that I am God, saith the Lord". (Ps 46.10). Be silent and know that even by my silence and absence I am known. be silent and listen to the stones cry out.

Out of the silence let the only real news come, which is the sad news before it is glad news, and that is fairy tale last of all. The preacher is not brave enough to be literally silent for long, and since it is his calling to speak the truth with love, even if her were brave enough, he would not be silent for long because we are none of us very good at silence. It says too much. So let him use words, but, in addition to using them to explain, expound, exhort, let him use them to evoke, to set us dreaming as well as thinking, to use words as at their most prophetic and truthful, the prophets used them to stir in us memories and longings and intuitions that we starve for without knowing that we starve. Let him use words which do not only try to give answers to the questions that we ask or ought to ask, but which help us to hear the questions thast we do not have words for asking, and to hear the silence that those questions rise out of and the silence that is the answer to those questions. Drawing on nothing fancier than the poetry of his own life, let him use words and images that help make the surface of our lives transparent to the truth that lies deep within them, which is the wordless truth of who we are and who God is and the Gospel of our meeting."

I don't know about you, but I would love to have such a preacher for my pastor. One through whom we are enabled to share the sacrament of words and the sacrament of silence, and one wise enough to know the difference between them, and the right time for each. Preaching is now far too readily dismissed, diminished, downgraded and de-centered in our quick sell-out to the post-modern critique. In these lectures, delivered more than 30 years ago, when post-modernity was still a philosophical and cultural adolescent worldview, Buechner was already pointing to a way of preaching that can never be reduced to informational exchange, disembodied exposition, practical how-to spirituality, intellectual wrestlings with doctrinal fankles. This is an appeal for preaching that is existentially honest, spiritually adventurous, pastorally compassionate, rooted in the lives and losses of an all too human and all too loved community. Preaching that is unafraid of truth because unafraid of questions; preaching that waits for words out of silence, and then only breaks that silence in order to speak those words out of love for the privileged ministry of the cure of souls, beginning with the preacher's own soul.

The picture is by Holman Hunt, "The Shadow of Death". The weary carpenter strectches in the satisfaction of hard work done, unaware that his shadow is cruciform, and therefore a fore-shadow of Calvary. Mary sees it though. I saw this painting at the Holman Hunt Exhibition in Manchester, and sat and looked at it for a long time.