The Borderline

"love dares you to care for
the people on the edge of the night".
From the song, Under Pressure by David Bowie and Queen.

Strange times.
I heard today how an anti-theist is challenging religious folk to show a particular kind of 'evidence' to thereby validate the premise that God could exist. It brought to mind a statement by C S Lewis - "God is the only witness who has to remain silent until proven guilty".

The uncomfortable truth, of course, is that He does not remain silent.

Walking home from work today, some favorite tunes playing on my CD as I imbibed the splendor of a spring afternoon, the world bursting into life in gorgeous displays of colour and fragrance - it made me realize just how squashed human existence has become, when apparently people are fortunate to be happy for a maximum of eight seconds a day!

We're a broken people, but there's still a world, however hard we've scratched to de-face it, which shouts at us regarding the glory of our maker - that's why the bark of the materialist has no bite - it denies the entire purpose of the glory which surrounds and penetrates our deepest reflections when we allow it do so. They speak of a Creator's power and marvelous provision, and a longing, a yearning, for a brighter day...

The darkness and the pain are terribly real, but the light is radiating on the horizon,
from just across the border.

Seeing Faith

"These all died in faith, not having received the things promised, but having seen them and greeted them from afar, made it clear that they were looking for a better homeland".
Hebrews 11:13 & 14.


"If only in this life we have hoped in Christ, we are of all people most to be pitied but in fact Christ has been raised from death, the first fruits of those who have died".
1 Corinthians 15: 19 & 20.

In the early 1500's, at a monastery hospital in Isenheim which cared for the incurable, Mattias Grunewald created two altarpiece images for the aid of the dying, one of the crucifixion, showing Christ as the bearer of our diseases, and one of the resurrection, conveying that something wonderful was beyond this present suffering:



















It poignantly speaks to the question which would dominate that era - "how can I be saved?", one that often seems strange to many of the popular trends and views of our age, but as we look at these images and consider our own mortality, we can begin to see afresh that the faith which inspires such passionate art and deep considerations is not that foreign or alien at all - it is as necessary as our next breath, and something which actually causes us to become troubled, to question, when we become too at ease with our place in the world.

The 16th century would become a harbinger for both the necessity and the vitality of such issues, especially in the work of Martin Luther.
Luther, as one scholar notes, became an 'ardent proponent of the sacred, spiritual nature of the material', not just because Creation was the good handiwork of God, but because it was the 'Unique means of God's intimate presence in the world - the means of God's redemptive and justifying activity" (Hendel - Luther's radical Incarnational perspective). Whilst this allowed Luther to renew an Apostolic approach to ministry (in use of both the Word and the Sacraments), it also informed a fresh approach towards faith and art.

The first common German Bible, translated by Luther, included numerous woodcuts by Lucas Cranach (the Elder), but as the genuine tangibility of faith was no longer defined merely by 'religious' practices, so all of life itself became the purview of artists who drew from faith in the redemptive work of God amidst creation, and thereby gave birth to a new realism in many schools and movements which arose across Europe.


















By truly looking at the beauty of the created order, artists were seeking to make statements about the true 'weight' of these things, by seeing them inherently as good, in spite of the ruin of the fall, for just as they had been made good by God, they were equally redeemed by Christ, and therefore, the richness of common life becomes a foretaste of the splendour of resurrection life.

In his masterful depiction of God's creation of Adam on the ceiling of the Sistine chapel, Michelangelo challenges us with revelation of God's character, not remote from us, but right here - the true source of all life and living, of all care and renewal, of all beauty, in it's deepest expression.

On a day when, by such faith, we can look to a crucial reality of our history - that Jesus rose bodily from the tomb - that can indeed be the well-spring that heals us in life, death, and the new day which is fast approaching.

(Images: Luther preaches Christ by Cranach, The Resurrected Christ by Grunewald, Venus by Cranach).

Seeing Straight

We're dreamers in castles made of sand,
The road to Eden's overgrown,
Don't you sometimes wish your heart was made of stone.

Cher - Heart of Stone

I seem to be only like a boy playing on the sea shore, and diverting myself by every now and then only finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay still undiscovered before me”.

Issac Newton.

Hindsight.
It's often spoken of as a wonderful thing, which has often struck me as odd.
In most cases, to 'edit' another famous phrase, another statement would seem to apply -
"If history teaches us anything, it teaches us that we learn nothing to change history".

And why should it not be so?
Gaia enthusiast James Lovelock spoke candidly on British radio this week regarding the issue of global warming, noting that just as, of necessity, we 'pulled the hammer' (caused what is currently deemed climate change by our actions), so we will have to live with whatever comes next, and to seek to propound the notion that we can just resource our way out of such a crisis, somehow turn back the clock, is plain nonsense.

The thing is broken, and no amount of hindsight or even sober thinking is going to change things - we all eat due to sweat and toil, bruised by the thorns of briers of this life, until death claims us,
so why not just forget the past, live for the moment, and 'burn out rather than fade away'?

As an artist, I know well how the desire to somehow draw alongside the deep, profound undercurrent of reality resonates. Like Newton on his beach, holding the few things gathered in a lifetime, I can look with wonder at the future, because there are 'pointers' in what's discovered about who and what we are, and these truly make a person both tremble and laugh at their very core.

On the night of His betrayal, Jesus used a very simple, common moment in a meal to announce the astonishing event that was about to happen. Through what He was about to do and undergo for us, what seemed totally beyond repair was about to be eternally fixed - God would once again 'tabernacle' with humanity, not just on brief moments, or tents, or via other means of mediation, but by living with us in our decimated world, redeeming our very death-struck lives and making us ready for the great age that is closing - a world made anew by Christ.

Hindsight, then, is good, at least in one context - when it placards how we were created, how we fell from there, and how we were rescued from that plight.

Like some of the disciples, no doubt, who dined with Jesus that very night, I often don't understand the mechanics of how the cycle can be broken amidst all the overgrowth, the dreamers in castles, the sheer callousness we can convey,
but Easter Sunday is close by, and after the desolation of the garden, of Good Friday,
it tells me that I can look beyond the here and now,
and to do so isn't pie in the sky.

Easter Thinking

"If our flesh is not renewed, then the Lord has not actually redeemed us with His life and death; then the Eucharistic cup does not make us sharers in His blood, and the broken bread, sharers in His body.
The heart of the truth is that the Word of God actually became flesh, and it was with that body, He actually redeemed us in His life, death and resurrection. As Paul puts it, 'In Him, though His blood, we have been redeemed".
Irenaeus of Lyons (2nd century Christian theologian).

With many thanks to Kayceeus for permission to use her image.

Isn't it lovely, wrote an artist friend to me today, to sense the regenerative power of Spring in the air again?
We all know there's something pretty amazing about this time of year - the days becoming longer, warmer, the earth bringing forth a plethora of colour and richness. Everything speaks of a fresh encounter with the marvel of life, which breaks out from the coldness and seemingly iron grip of winter. It's not much of surprise, then, that many ancient religions cycled around the 'magic' of nature's fertility, but as the wise Epimenides pointed out to the Athenian Greeks around 600 BC, to reside at such a level is to stay in ignorance of the One behind such marvels.
The 'natural' victory of life over death we see creation play out every year whispers loudly concerning a deep reality at the heart of things - death is a usurper, preying upon our current demeaned "life", but things were and will be very different.

The heart of Christianity is an event that truly staggers us. The God who made us was not prepared to leave us in a state of futility and destruction when we walked away from His care, but this God Himself came to us, became as us, to suffer, to draw the sting of sin and death, to overcome these, and to give us a new life as real as the renewal of spring.

C S Lewis puts this so well - a quote which came swiftly to mind when I viewed the image above this morning:

"One has the image of a diver, stripping off layer after layer until naked,
going down through the green, sunlit water into the pitch black, cold, freezing depths,
down, to the very mud and slime,
and then, up again, lungs almost bursting, breaking back into the sunshine,
holding the dripping thing taken from the depths...
The thing is us, but with it, all of nature - the redeemed creation"

(The Grand Miracle).

As the flowers bloom, and the beauty clothes our world, that's worth thinking about...

Getting it...

"It's not the Sun up in the sky.... It's the Son of God".
Uhura - Bread & Circuses.

A faith that is based on love - revealed by God's Son,
that enables unity that transforms the world....

James T Kirk is right - won't it be wonderful to see that come about in it's entirety?

Twixt the Pain and the Passion

Faith, which springs from charity is so very necessary to this present life,
that without it, we cannot continue in the world". Martin Luther



Last summer, amidst some very sorrowful weather, the gray days were suddenly warmed
when a new drama was shown on national television. Whilst providing a somewhat embroidered rendition of its subject, it spoke loudly of how, amidst the mess and chaos of this world, we can all be touched by the unmistakable, and on occasion overwhelming beauty and grace which we see woven into so much, especially amidst the pain and passion of our lives.

This superb video, taken from images from the drama and focusing on one strand of the story, which was certainly about the great need for redemption, reflects something of the delight of this production.

Desperate Romantics, which reveled in the highs and lows of the Pre-Raphelite artists, resonated deeply regarding the roots of my own artistic inspiration, and spoke well of how, amidst my work as a photographer now, artists are commonly seeking the deeper gems.

Christ, in His nature and work, shows the world how faith, working through love, transforms the tatters of our splintered existence to radiate something restored and whole - as with the light seen through a rainbow. Perhaps our gaze is still often small, only seeing a reflection of this, in a puddle on the ground, but once that 'rainbow' is there, the promise of a day when our sight is clear, our heads look up, is certain and sure.

Beauty can be a balm to our weary journey, when true faith and love are at home in our souls.

ears to hear, eyes to see.

"The God who made the world and everything in it...He Himself gave to mankind life and breath and all we see". Acts 17:24.

Why is it that 'religion' can be little more than candy floss, which is employed for all the wrong reasons, to cover the cracks?

I was reading a book today, supposedly giving a 'christian' insight into beauty. The introduction jogged along about our living 'between' awakening and sleep (birth and death), and how we found our ground of meaning, our shelter, here, by observing beauty, which granted some insight to the divine - the beauty of God. The author referred to the ancients, especially the Greeks, as an example of that, but there's the problem.

The Greeks certainly had a notion of the order of things, and sought to emulate that in their religion and art, but it was a beauty which alienated, not genuinely esteemed the value of the world. Women were viewed as an ultimate embodiment of evil - the physical incarnation of all that was vile- the physical world itself, and artists were only tolerated because of their skills to express the true goal - to step beyond the immediate to the spiritual perfection beyond.
It amazes me just how much Christian spirituality still hankers after this dualistic nightmare, but Paul before the Greeks speaks of a very different beauty - a God who works with the earth, and redeems only by the salvation of all He has made, for this is His work.

Genuine truth and beauty can never be divorced from the 'common' life we have been given - the bestowal of charisma, notes Paul, to all men because of God's grace. It is amidst the bare breath, the whole of life that we are to see something of His work, not merely in some ecstatic moment of gnostic transport.

Beauty of any import is found here, amidst the trial and the joy.
Philosophy or religion may wish us to divorce God from such a vision, but life teaches us differently.