>> “Jack’s Bookshelf: Julian of Norwich” with Dr. Grace Hamman, Pints with Jack: The “Jack’s Bookshelf” podcast series explores the authors and books that influenced the life and writings of C. S. Lewis. Hosted by David Bates, this episode covers Julian of Norwich (ca. 1343–after 1416), an English anchorite and mystic who authored what editors call Revelations of Divine Love or The Showings, the first English-language book by a woman. The most famous quote from this work is “Sin is behoovely, but all shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well.” Medieval scholar Grace Hamman [previously] unpacks the quote and discusses other key passages and themes from Julian, as well as what little we know of her biography. An excellent introduction!
>> “Ben Myers—The Divine Comedy,”Life with God: One of the many gifts my parents have given me over the years was a four-month study-abroad stay in Florence during my junior year of college, where one of my courses was devoted to reading and studying—in its original Italian and in the author Dante Alighieri’s hometown!—the masterful trilogy of narrative poems known as La Divina Commedia, or The Divine Comedy in English. Moving through hell, purgatory, and heaven, it is an allegory of the soul’s journey toward God. I enjoyed hearing Dr. Benjamin Myers [previously], director of the Great Books Honors Program at Oklahoma Baptist University, discuss this deeply influential work from the early fourteenth century, and sharing one of his own poems, “Listening to Reggae at the Nashville Airport.”
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VIRTUAL TOURS OF CATHEDRALS:
Cathedrals are, among other things, repositories of sacred art. I’m so appreciative of digitization initiatives that seek to make some of those treasures available to global publics online. Here are two admirable examples.
>> The York Minster Stained Glass Navigator:York Minster in northeastern England has the largest collection of medieval stained glass in the UK, with the earliest pieces dating from the late twelfth century. On behalf of the Chapter of York, the York Glaziers Trust is undertaking to photograph it all. These photos are available for viewing online through the cathedral’s “Stained Glass Navigator,” which enables you to hover over panels to identify the scenes, zoom in for higher resolution, and see where each panel in situated in the context of the window’s larger narrative.
I especially recommend exploring the extraordinary Great East Window, which depicts the beginning and the end of all things. The top section opens with the seven days of creation, followed by other select scenes from the Old Testament, but the bulk of the window—and my favorite sequence—consists of scenes from the book of Revelation. The bottom row depicts historical and legendary figures associated with the history of York Minster.
John Thornton of Coventry (British, fl. 1405–1433), St. John Takes the Book from the Angel (Rev. 10:8–11), 1405–8. Stained glass panel from the Great East Window, York Minster, York, England. Photo courtesy of the York Glaziers Trust.John Thornton of Coventry (British, fl. 1405–1433), The Dragon Gives Power to the Beast (Rev. 13:1–3), 1405–8. Stained glass panel from the Great East Window, York Minster, York, England. Photo courtesy of the York Glaziers Trust.John Thornton of Coventry (British, fl. 1405–1433), Satan Chained in the Bottomless Pit (Rev. 20:1–3), 1405–8. Stained glass panel from the Great East Window, York Minster, York, England. Photo courtesy of the York Glaziers Trust.
>> Life of a Cathedral: Notre-Dame of Amiens: Located in the heart of Picardy in northern France, Amiens Cathedral is one of the largest Gothic churches of the thirteenth century, renowned for the beauty of its three-tier interior elevation, its prodigious sculpted decoration, and its stained glass. This website put together by Columbia University’s Media Center for Art History offers a detailed virtual tour of the cathedral, drawing attention to its architectural features and artworks, from the many stone relief sculptures over its four portals (my favorite) to the octagonal labyrinth that adorns the marble floor in the nave to the early sixteenth-century misericords in the choir stall.
Detail of voussoirs from the south transept portal of St. Honoré at Amiens Cathedral, ca. 1240, featuring Adam working the ground, Noah building the ark, Jonah being disgorged from the fish, Hosea marrying Gomer, and other biblical figures and vignettes
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SONG: “Adon Olam,” performed by the Maqamat Masters, feat. Nissim Lugas: The well-loved text of this traditional Hebrew prayer in five stanzas probably originated in medieval Spain, having been first found in a thirteenth-century siddur (Jewish prayer book) from Andalusia. Drawn from the language of the Psalms, it praises God for both his transcendence and his immanence. He is incomparably great, the ruler over all, and yet he’s also a personal God, a refuge for those who call on him. The prayer’s title and opening phrase translates to “Master of the Universe” or “Eternal Lord.”
Various tunes have been used for the singing of this prayer over the centuries. The Maqamat Masters perform it here with a melody based on the traditional Armenian folk tune NUBAR NUBAR, arranged by Elad Levi and Ariel Berli. They also add to the prayer a few lines from the ghazals of the Persian Sufi poet Saadi (1210–ca. 1292), about the burning fire of God’s love; Lugas sings this Farsi passage from 3:06 to 4:08.
“Maqamat Masters is a unique group of musicians that coalesced around their work together teaching at the Maqamat School of Eastern Music in Safed, Israel,” 12 Tribes Music writes. “Each of the musicians is a master in a different traditional musical genre from the Middle East, and they bring their personal voices and decades of explorations together, to create a magical, new and innovative sound.”
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VIRTUAL EXHIBITION: The Faras Gallery: Treasures from the Flooded Desert: In 1960, Faras, a small town in Sudan near the Egyptian border, was one of the archaeological sites designated for flooding by the waters of the Nile to create Lake Nasser. Responding to an international call by UNESCO to preserve the area’s cultural heritage before it would be buried beneath the new reservoir, a Polish team led by Professor Kazimierz Michałowski proceeded with salvage excavations in 1961–64. Their efforts uncovered the wonderfully preserved ruins of a medieval cathedral, active from the eighth to fourteenth centuries (it was built on the remains of an early seventh-century church) and containing over 150 religious paintings, a trove of Nubian Christian art. By agreement with Sudan, half of the findings went to Poland’s National Museum in Warsaw, while the other half are kept in Sudan’s National Museum in Khartoum.
Wall Painting with Bishop Marianos under the protection of Christ and the Mother of God, early 11th century, excavated from Faras Cathedral in modern-day Sudan. Secco tempera on plaster, 247 × 155.5 cm. National Museum, Warsaw.
Curated by Paweł Dąbrowski and Magdalena Majchrzak and hosted by Google Arts & Culture, this virtual exhibition spotlights the wall paintings and artifacts from Faras that are housed in Warsaw. It discusses the importance of the discovery of the cathedral and the technical challenges of detaching the paintings (tempera on dry mud plaster) from the walls. It also includes digital reconstructions of the cathedral’s interior and exterior in 3D stereoscopy, as well as video elements. Here is one of the four videos from the exhibition:
Crucifixion with bas-de-page scene of Christ leading figures from the mouth of Hell, from the Taymouth Hours, England, second quarter of 14th century. British Library, Yates Thompson 13, fol. 122v.
ORIGINAL MIDDLE ENGLISH:
Loue me brouthte, & loue me wrouthte, Man, to be þi fere. Loue me fedde, & loue me ledde, & loue me lettet here.
Loue me slou, & loue me drou, & loue me leyde on bere. Loue is my pes, For loue i ches, Man to byƷen dere.
Ne dred þe nouth, I haue þe south, Boþen day & nith, To hauen þe, Wel is me, I haue þe wonnen in fith.
MODERN ENGLISH TRANSLATION:
Love me brought, And love me wrought, Man, to be thy fere. [companion] Love me fed, And love me led, And love me fastens here.
Love me slew, And love me drew, And love me laid on bier. Love’s my peace; For love I chose To buy back man so dear.
Now fear thee not; I have thee sought All the day and night. To have thee Is joy to me; I won thee in the fight.
Trans. Victoria Emily Jones
This medieval passion lyric is from the Commonplace Book of John of Grimestone, compiled in Norfolk, England, in 1372 and owned by the National Library of Scotland in Edinburgh. It was transcribed by Carleton Brown in Religious Lyrics of the Fourteenth Century(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1924), page 84.
Adv.MS.18.7.21, fol. 121r, with “Love Me Brought” poem highlighted. In this manuscript, the Franciscan friar John of Grimestone jotted down miscellaneous verses and quotes to use in his preaching.
In the poem, Christ addresses humankind from the cross, professing his great love for her. He was begotten in love by the Father, and it’s love that brought him to earth. Love nourished and guided him, and for love he stayed the difficult course, all the way to the end. Satan had stolen Christ’s beloved, and to win her back, Christ went into battle, to redeem her who was rightfully his. His decisive move: spreading out his arms across a wooden beam, so as to embrace the world, and submitting to being nailed there.
He died for love of his lady. Love is what drew him to and secured him to that cross, what kept him there when the physical and emotional agony begged he desist. And because of his persistence in seeking us, his courageous endurance as the enemy assailed, he attained ultimate victory. “Well is me!” (Blessed am I), he exclaims, “for you are mine and I am yours.” Let nothing stand between.
Katharine Blake, the founder and musical director of Mediæval Bæbes, wrote a setting of “Love Me Broughte,” in medieval style, for the group’s 1998 album Worldes Blysse. Sweet and vigorous, it features, besides voices, a zither, pipe, recorder, tambourine, and drums.
Did you enjoy this poem? For more like it, come on out on November 23 to “Christ Our Lover: Medieval Art and Poetry of Jesus the Bridegroom,” a lecture by Dr. Grace Hamman that I’ve organized for the Eliot Society in Annapolis. Learn some of the ways Christian preachers, poets, theologians, mystics, and artists in the late Middle Ages, both male and female, conceptualized Christ’s passionate love, drawing from the Song of Songs, courtly love poetry, and more—often in quite imaginative ways!
NEW BOOK: Everything Could Be a Prayer: One Hundred Portraits of Saints and Mystics by Kreg Yingst: Released on October 15, this book features one hundred color block-print portraits by Kreg Yingst of folks in the family of God across time and place, along with one-page biographies. Get to know a wide range of Christian civil rights activists, scientists, environmentalists, social service workers, hymn-writers, artists, poets, evangelists, and monastics and the gospel impact they’ve made. The lineup is a mix of familiar and less familiar names, canonized saints and noncanonized. Examples include Brigid of Kildaire, Ignatius of Loyola, Satoko Kitahara, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Mamie Till, Pandita Ramabai Dongre-Medhavi, and Black Elk. Click here to look inside.
The title of the book is taken from a quote by Martin de Porres (1579–1639), a Dominican friar from Peru and the first Black saint of the Americas: “Everything, even sweeping, scraping vegetables, weeding a garden, and waiting on the sick, could be a prayer if it were offered to God.”
Related events:
October 10–November 16, 2024: Art exhibition featuring the block prints from the book at The Gallery of Art, 36 W. Beach Dr., Panama City, Florida
October 26, 2024, 1:00–3:00 p.m.: Book signing at Barnes & Noble, 1200 Airport Blvd., Pensacola, Florida
Through November 1, Yingst is offering 25% off all original woodcuts and linocuts that were used as illustrations for the book; view the discounted pieces in the “Mystics, Saints & Poets” section of his Etsy shop. These are not inkjet-printed photographs of original artworks (which is what some artists misleadingly call “prints”) but are themselves original limited-edition relief prints hand-pulled on an antique proof press from carved blocks; they are made with black oil-based ink and watercolor. If you want original art in your home or to gift a friend or family member for Christmas, Yingst’s work is a great and affordable option!
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SONGS:
November 1 is All Saints’ Day, a feast for commemorating the lives and witness of our siblings in the faith who have gone before us. Here are two songs for the occasion.
>> “I Sing a Song of the Saints of God,” performed by Wendell Kimbrough: This charming little children’s hymn was written by Lesbia Scott and was first published in her native England in Everyday Hymns for Little Children (1929). In the United States the song first appeared in the Episcopal Hymnal 1940 with a tune that John Henry Hopkins, a member of the hymnal committee, composed for it, capturing the childlike cadences of the text.
>> “When the Saints” by Sara Groves: This song from Groves’s album Tell Me What You Know (2007) draws encouragement from the faithfulness of God-followers throughout history, from Moses, Paul, and Silas to Harriet Tubman and Mother Teresa to the martyr Nate Saint and his sister Rachel Saint to rescuers of sex-trafficking victims. It is a call to hearers today to pick up their cross and follow Christ into places of hurt and injustice, pursuing liberation of body and soul for all. The refrain quotes the traditional Black gospel song “When the Saints Go Marching In.”
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ART EXHIBITION: Bruce Onobrakpeya: The Mask and the Cross, National Museum of African Art, Washington, DC, June 21, 2024–January 21, 2025: A father of African modernism, Bruce Onobrakpeya (b. 1932) [previously] is one of Nigeria’s most celebrated artists, and I was thrilled this month to visit his first solo show in the US, which, as it turns out, is centered on his Christian-themed linocut prints! (The artist is Anglican.) Onobrakpeya’s career spans over six decades, and this Smithsonian exhibition is not meant to be representative of the breadth of his oeuvre, which also includes painting and sculpture and various subject matters; rather, it presents two foundational bodies of work from the late sixties, both commissioned by the Catholic Church, that helped launch the artist’s long and esteemed career.
The exhibition displays rare artist’s proofs of the biblical illustrations Onobrakpeya made for Ki Ijoba Re De (May Your Kingdom Come) (1968), a Yoruba-language textbook for students in their fifth and sixth years of Catholic primary school (it was part of the Nigerian National Catechism), as well as a complete narrative series of prints titled Fourteen Stations of the Cross, produced in 1969. I blogged about the artist’s Stations cycle back in 2014, when I saw a different edition at the SMA African Art Museum in Tenafly, New Jersey; you can view better photos on the High’s website. For more on the work of Fr. Kevin Carroll, the Catholic missionary who commissioned Onobrakpeya to paint a church mural of the Stations that became the basis of these linocuts and who helped facilitate the May Your Kingdom Come publication, see here.
Curated by Lauren Tate Baeza, Bruce Onobrakpeya: The Mask and the Cross first opened last year at the High Museum of Art in Atlanta. This is Baeza’s first exhibition as curator of African art at the High, and I’m so pleased that when she dug through the High’s extensive archives, it was a set of Christian prints by a leading Nigerian artist that most compelled her, that she could imagine building a unique exhibition around and that she felt must be pulled out of storage for more people to see. Hear Baeza discuss the exhibition from 23:28 to 35:58 of the video “African Modernisms: A Legacy of Connection.”
Bruce Onobrakpeya (Nigerian, 1932–), Station I: Pilate condemns Jesus to death, 1969. Linoleum block print on rice paper, 24 × 34 in. (61 × 86.4 cm). High Museum of Art, Atlanta, Georgia. Photo: Victoria Emily Jones.
For his Stations of the Cross, Onobrakpeya “incorporat[ed] the rich patterns of Yoruba gelede and epa masks and stylized geometric patterns found in northern Nigerian architecture. Then he added generous adire motifs and his signature elongated figures and distortions of scale,” reads one of the gallery wall texts. He also embedded a critique of British colonial rule, portraying the Roman soldiers of Christ’s passion as British officers. (Nigeria had just attained independence from Great Britain earlier that decade, in 1960.) Pilate, though, is shown as a local Nigerian magistrate doing the bidding of the British government, highlighting a deeply felt tension in Nigeria’s then-recent political history.
I really appreciate the video components of the exhibition. One screen plays a compilation of clips from interviews Baeza conducted with the artist, and another displays a two-dimensional animation commissioned from Sadiki Souza specially for this exhibition, which brings to life Onobrakpeya’s fourteen Stations. Neither is available online, at least not that I can find.
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ZOOM EVENT: “Celebration of New Global Church Music Resources,” November 14, 9:00 a.m. CDT (12:00 p.m. ET): From Baylor University’s Dunn Center for Christian Music Studies: “We are excited to announce the launch of two website projects on November 14th! In collaboration with the Nigerian Baptist Theological Seminary, the third edition of the Nigerian Christian Songbook will be updated with new songs and content. In addition, a new project, the Global Church Music Bibliography, highlights underrepresented voices in church music scholarship. This is an interactive dashboard and map that features church music scholars writing about their own traditions outside of North America.” At the Zoom event on launch day, you will hear from various project participants. [HT: Global Christian Worship]
Emil Nolde (German, 1867–1956), Dark Red Sea, ca. 1938. Watercolor. Nolde Museum, Seebüll, Germany.
Mon Dieu, protégez-moi, mon navire est si petit et votre mer si grande!
Lord, help me . . . Because my boat is so small, And your sea is so immense.
This anonymous prayer collected from a Breton sailor—or fisherman, as some anthologies cite—is found in Émile Souvestre, Les derniers Bretons (The Last Bretons), vol. 1 (Paris: Charpentier, 1836), page 121. The English translation is by Robert Bly and is from the anthology The Soul Is Here for Its Own Joy: Sacred Poems from Many Cultures (New York: Ecco, 1995), which Bly edited. He identifies the prayer as “French medieval” but doesn’t provide a source. The prayer also appears as #422 in The Oxford Book of Prayer and on page 80 of 2000 Years of Prayer; the latter places it in the “Celtic Christianity” section, as Bretons are descendants of the Celts who emigrated from the British Isles to Armorica, the northwestern extremity of Gaul (now called Brittany, part of France), after the Anglo-Saxon invasions.
Though “boat” and “sea” were likely meant first and foremost literally, there is a long tradition of boats being used as metaphors for our fragile selves, afloat the vicissitudes of life, or carried about by the divine will. Living outside a maritime context, I pray this prayer in that metaphoric sense.
I’m one of the artistic directors of the Eliot Society, a faith-based arts nonprofit in Annapolis. I’m really looking forward to our next two events this fall! If you’re in the area, I’d love for you to come out to these talks by a musician and a medievalist. They’re both free and include a time of Q&A and a small dessert reception afterward.
>> “A Place to Be: Gospel Resonances in Classical Music” by Roger Lowther, October 26, 2024, Redeemer Anglican Church, Annapolis, MD: “At its most basic, music is a collection of sounds. How those sounds are organized varies by country and culture and reflects their values, history, and heart-longings. Join Tokyo-based American musician Roger W. Lowther on a journey through the landscapes of Western and Japanese classical music and explore their unique and fascinating differences. Roger will lead from the piano as he demonstrates the musical languages of each tradition and show how they contain hidden pointers to gospel hope in a world full of suffering and pain.”
I’ve heard Roger speak before, and he’s very Jeremy Begbie-esque in that he does theology through instrumental music. As a bicultural person, a New Englander having lived in Japan for almost twenty years (ministering to and through artists of all disciplines), he brings a unique perspective. In addition to discussing the defining features of the Western versus Japanese classical traditions, he’ll be performing a few piano pieces from each.
>> “Christ Our Lover: Medieval Art and Poetry of Jesus the Bridegroom” by Dr. Grace Hamman, November 23, 2024, St. Paul’s Anglican Church, Crownsville, MD: “If there was a ‘bestseller’ book of the Bible in the European Middle Ages, it would be the Song of Songs. When read allegorically, in the manner of medieval theologians like St. Bernard of Clairvaux, the book tells the story of the romance between Christ and the soul that culminates in Christ’s love shown on the cross. This is a story of mutual pursuit, the pain of desire and sacrifice, sensual delight, and true union. The idea of Jesus as a longing lover of each individual soul appeared everywhere by the later medieval period, in art, poetry, sermons, and the devotional writings of men and women alike.
“These themes and images can strike us as strange, even uncomfortable. An illustrated poem for nuns depicted the Song of Songs like a cartoon strip. Prayer books of wealthy nobles portrayed Christ’s wounds intimately. Poets wrote Christ in the role of a chivalric, wounded knight weeping and waiting for his lady. And yet, examining this ancient imagery of Jesus our Lover together can challenge us to greater vulnerability with our Savior, to refreshed understandings of God’s hospitality, and, in the words of Pope Gregory the Great, can set our hearts ‘on fire with a holy love.’”
Grace is a fabulous teacher of medieval poetry and devotional writing, one whom I’ve mentioned many times on the blog before. Her Jesus through Medieval Eyes was my favorite book of 2023; read my review here. She has encouraged me to move in toward the strange and imaginative in medieval theology and biblical interpretation, because there’s often beauty and wisdom to be found there if we give it a chance. She has a keen awareness of the body of Christ across time and an appreciation for the gifts they’ve bequeathed the church of today, be they words, art, or whatever else.
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VIDEO: “Poet and Pastor: Christian Wiman and Eugene Peterson”: In this four-minute video from Laity Lodge, poet and essayist Christian Wiman and pastor and spiritual writer Eugene Peterson (best known for his Bible translation The Message) talk about prayer and spirituality. They each share a poem they’ve written: Wiman’s “Every Riven Thing” and Peterson’s “Prayer Time.” “People who pray need to learn poetry,” Peterson says. “It’s a way of noticing, attending.”
ARTICLE + PLAYLIST: “Latin American Fiesta!” by Mark Meynell: I always appreciate the selections and knowledge Mark Meynell [previously] brings to his 5&1 blog series for the Rabbit Room, each post exploring five short pieces and one long piece of classical music. This Latin American installment features Kyries from Peru and Argentina, a candombe air, a four-part Christmas anthem in Spanish creole from Mexico (I found an English translation!), an Argentine tango, and a dance chôro (Portuguese for “weeping” or “cry”) from Brazil. What diverse riches!
“Classical music, as conventionally understood, is not often associated with Latin America,” Meynell writes, “though, as we will see, this is a situation that needs rectifying. Some extraordinary soundworlds were being created long before the Conquistadores arrived from European shores, and together with the cultural impact of the transatlantic slave trade from Africa, the musical mix that resulted is unique. To put it at its most simplistic, we could say that the two key musical influences were the Catholic Church and the complex rhythms of percussion and dance; and often, it’s hard to tell where one ends and the other begins.”
ARTWORK: The Old Man and Death by Pedro Linares: Last month I visited the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art in Hartford, Connecticut, for the first time and was delighted to stumble upon an exhibition that had just been put up, Entre Mundos: Art of Abiayala. On view through December 15, it highlights collection works made by artists with personal or ancestral ties to Mexico, the Caribbean, and Central and South America. The title translates to “Between Worlds,” and “Abiayala,” I learned, is a Guna (Kuna) word that means “land in its full maturity” or “land of vital blood”; it’s used by the Guna and some other Indigenous peoples to refer to the Americas.
Pedro Linares (Mexican, 1906–1992), El viejo y la muerte (The Old Man and Death), 1986. Papier-mâché and mixed media. Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford, Connecticut. Photo: Victoria Emily Jones.
For me the standout piece from the exhibition is The Old Man and Death by Pedro Linares, a dramatic tableau in the medium of cartonería (papier-mâché sculpture), a traditional handcraft of Mexico. Commissioned by the Wadsworth in 1986 for the artist’s MATRIX exhibition, it reinterprets Joseph Wright of Derby’s 1773 painting of the same name, one of the most popular works in the museum’s collection.
Joseph Wright of Derby (English, 1734–1797), The Old Man and Death, 1773. Oil on canvas, 40 × 50 1/16 in. (101 × 127 cm). Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford, Connecticut. Photo: Victoria Emily Jones.
masterfully combines Wright’s ability to depict a literary narrative with his skill in rendering a natural setting with accuracy and keenly observed detail. The subject of this painting is based on one of Aesop’s Fables or possibly a later retelling by Jean de la Fontaine. . . . According to the tale, an old man, weary of the cares of life, lays down his bundle of sticks and seats himself in exhaustion on a bank and calls on Death to release him from his toil. Appearing in response to this invocation, Death arrives. Personified here as a skeleton, Death carries an arrow, the instrument of death. Illustrating the moral of the tale that it is “better to suffer than to die,” the startled old man recoils in horror and instinctively waves him off, reaching for the bundle as he clings to life.
The Linares piece and its inspiration are placed side-by-side in the gallery, which also displays an alebrije by the same artist, papel picado, painted skulls, an ofrenda, and Diego Rivera’s Young Girl with a Mask.
The Destruction of Sodom, 1175–90, mosaic, Monreale Cathedral, Palermo, Sicily
Even to the nameless dog I said farewell. Madness took him long since, but I remember his sharp bark, how he warmed my feet on cool evenings. I nursed my father in that city, raised a cup to his lips the night he died. We laid him near the fig tree, its twisted trunk his monument.
Now ash marks his place, and Mother’s too, and all the others whose bread sometimes burnt, whose clay pots shattered, who wept with me. They were not good people, and yet . . . Lot’s back was not enough to see. I turned. One sign, one glance for all we left behind. My faith is strong— yea, stronger even than salt. I wait for God to forgive my love.
From To Love Delilah: Claiming the Women of the Bible by Mary Cartledgehayes (San Diego: LuraMedia, 1990). Used by permission of the author.
Lot’s wife, unnamed and unvoiced in scripture, was probably a native of Sodom, the thriving city where Abraham’s nephew had settled. But the people there harbored sin. They were prideful, and did not share their wealth with the poor (Ezek. 16:49–50). To say they lacked hospitality is an understatement: they tried to gang-rape two visitors (Gen. 19:1–11; cf. Jude 1:7). For their persistence in doing evil, God destroyed them.
Genesis 19:12–29 records the story of Lot’s family’s escape. Two angels warn them of the coming judgment, tell them to run and not look back. But in their sudden flight, as the fire and brimstone are raining down behind them, wiping out the life they’ve known together, Lot’s wife turns to see. In an instant, she’s transmogrified into a pillar of salt.
This narrative is often preached as a lesson against looking back on one’s old (preconversion) life with longing, or clinging to the things of this world. Typically Lot’s wife’s reason for turning, disregarding the angels’ instruction, is interpreted as unbelief or covetousness.
But in this poem Mary Cartledgehayes cuts through the moralistic framing of the story and taps into its human emotional component. She suggests that the backward look of Lot’s wife was her taking a moment to mourn the loss of the people she loved and the only home she ever knew—could this be wrong? In To Love Delilah Cartledgehayes writes, “I don’t think she was motivated by greed or stupidity but by love: the love she felt for others, the love of a hometown that was a place of relationship, the love of the security in seeing the same faces at the well day after day, of sharing the births and deaths of children, of hearing the same chickens scratching in the dirt and the same dogs barking for a bite of food” (34).
For Cartledgehayes, Lot’s wife was a pillar of faith, strength, and compassion. Anna Akhmatova (“Lot’s Wife”) and Natalie Diaz (“Of Course She Looked Back”) imagine similar qualities in their poems on the subject. I’ve heard at least one commentator suggest that the salt Lot’s wife becomes is metaphoric, representing the salty tears she shed for her city, her being encrusted by grief, a monument of grief.
It’s common for those displaced by disasters to look back on their hometowns, both literally and in remembrance, and grieve the destruction, the loss of life, property, and possessions, and all the memories held there. In the case of Lot’s wife, God explicitly tells her and her family, through two angels, not to look back, so it’s her disobedience that’s punished. There’s no indication in the story that she engaged in the unrighteous behaviors of her Sodomite neighbors and relatives, or that a prior life of indulgence is what she yearns for. And yet because the punishment seems harsh, many of us try to read some kind of nefarious motive into her looking back. Or else we receive this simply as a cautionary tale about the severe consequences of defying God’s word.
Because Lot’s wife is given no backstory or dialogue (external or internal) in Genesis, nor does the narrator explain, we don’t know why she looked behind her as she fled. (The Polish poet Wisława Szymborska provides a whole list of options in “Lot’s Wife”!) I’m thankful to poets, like Cartledgehayes and others, who poke the trope of the “worldly” wife of Lot in an attempt to find the multidimensional woman beneath.
Mary Cartledgehayes is a writer and an ordained minister in the United Methodist Church, living in Louisville, Kentucky. Possessing an MFA in creative nonfiction from Goucher College and an MDiv from Duke University, she has led workshops across the US on writing and spirituality and enjoys mentoring other writers. In addition to numerous essays, poems, and sermons, she is the author of Grace: A Memoir (Crown / Random House, 2003), about love, death, praxis, fury, and entering pastoral ministry as a middle-aged woman.
Have you been delighted or inspired by the Art & Theology blog this year or its Instagram offshoot, @art_and_theology? If so, please consider donating to the work through a secure online form or PayPal, or by buying me a book from my Amazon wish list (my address is privately stored). Thank you to my five regular monthly supporters, and others who have blessed me with one-off donations of funds and books. These gifts not only provide important material assistance but also serve as an emotional boost, a validation that my work has value and is worth continuing.
My blog-related expenses this year have included a replacement of my old laptop, a conference registration and travel fees, a trip to New York, museum admissions, books, licensing fees for two images (I occasionally pay for images when good photos are not available online), and the yearly WordPress Premium fee to keep this site ad-free and mapped to a custom domain. Donations will go toward covering these, and if there is any left over, toward a new camera lens that will enable me to take wider shots, great for cathedrals and for larger artworks in tight quarters.
SPOTIFY PLAYLIST: October 2024 (Art & Theology): Every month I create a digital mixtape of Christian and Christian-adjacent music that deserves attention, consisting of old and brand-new recordings alike. Two hours of beautiful, soulful expressions of praise, prayer, and lament for your ears and heart.
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VIDEO: Animal Service at Ely Cathedral: On September 22, Ely Cathedral in England held its annual animal service, attended by some 450 animal lovers and their pets and service animals, mainly dogs. “Our annual Animal Service is an opportunity to give thanks for the animal companions with whom we share our lives and our planet, to bring them into our Cathedral, to ponder how best to care for animals and to ask God to bless them.” Marley the donkey, from the Donkey Sanctuary, led a procession up the nave. The liturgy was led by Canon James Garrard, and, in addition to several congregational hymns, including “All Creatures of Our God and King,” the cathedral’s children’s choir, the Ely Imps, sang “The Barnyard Song” by Rhonda Gowler Greene and “Look at the World” by John Rutter.
In addition to a special prayer of confession, act of commitment, and benediction, the service included this litany from the Book of Common Prayer:
God said, “Let the waters bring forth living creatures, and let birds fly across the sky.”
We thank you for the teeming life of the seas, And the flight of the birds. Help us to protect the environment So that all life may flourish. God of life: Hear our prayer.
God said, “Let the earth bring forth living creatures of every kind.”
We rejoice in the variety of animal life. Grant us grace to treat all animals with respect and care; To protect endangered species, To preserve the variety of habitats, And to honor the delicate balance of nature. God of life: Hear our prayer.
Heavenly Father, you have filled the world with beauty. Open our eyes to behold your gracious hand in all your works, That, rejoicing in your whole creation, We may learn to serve you with gladness, For the sake of him through whom all things were made, Jesus Christ our Lord. God of life: Hear our prayer.
Two volunteer representatives from the charity Medical Detection Dogs were invited to share about the work of dogs who are trained to detect the odor of human disease.
Several churches worldwide hold animal services around this time of the year, the Feast of St. Francis (known for his love and care of animals) being on October 4. These are usually in addition to the regular Sunday morning worship service and are not eucharistic. UMC’s Discipleship Ministries provides a sample liturgy for “A Service for the Blessing of Animals.” Many such services are held outdoors, such as the one organized annually by Washington National Cathedral, which is taking place this Sunday, October 6, at 2 p.m.
>>“There’s a Special Providence”by Seth Wieck, Texas Poetry Assignment:Seth Wieck [previously] is a writer from Amarillo, Texas. Published the week of the last US presidential inauguration, this poem muses on the impermanence of earthly empires, contrasting such with the steady, indifferent labor of birds, which continues on through administration changes and the passing of generations. The title and opening line are a clever rhyming twist on a line from the final act of Shakespeare’s Hamlet, “There’s a special providence in the fall of a sparrow.” For the poetic speaker, there’s a sense of comfort in God’s sovereignty and an orientation toward Christ’s lordship that puts election poll results, though not negligible, in proper perspective.
In a Substack post from February 2021, Wieck wrote, “I am no politician’s acolyte; they’re public servants, not saviors. I catch some heat in private conversation when I say that I couldn’t care less about national politics. That’s not a true statement, but the tense conversations in which I claim my ambivalence usually leave me no room for nuance. Those conversations demand my total wide-eyed attention to the firehouse of information being created by national elections. But as Mary Oliver said, ‘The beginning of devotion is attention.’ Forgive me if I am unwilling to develop devotion for those people whose only interest in my community is the exploitation of our devotion and resources.”
>> “Jesus Heals a Paralytic” by Ryan Keating, Reformed Journal: Ryan Keating is a pastor on the Mediterranean island of Cyprus (he preaches in Turkish and English), an academic writer and poet, and the owner of Exile Coffee and Wine. This poem retells the miracle from Mark 2:1–12 in the voice of the paralyzed man whom Jesus heals. Whereas many artists depict the episode with ropes used as a lowering mechanism, Keating says it’s much more likely, given the typically low ceilings of Middle Eastern homes, that the man would have been received by “a net of hands” raised up by the people in the room.
The poem repeats the word “temple” three times, remarking how the man was “suspended / in a temple by a temple / and landed on holy ground / as a temple . . .” The temple is the place where the crowd is gathered because Jesus is in it, and the four faith-filled friends who bring the paralyzed man there themselves constitute a temple, and the man too becomes a temple, a dwelling-place of God, after being made whole by Jesus. Drawing on Old Testament imagery of the garden of Eden and the exodus, the final stanza is one of restoration. The sea of people parts as the man steps outside into a garden, his friends buoyed by amazement.
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ARTWORK: Intra-Venus by Marina Vargas: October is Breast Cancer Awareness Month, so I wanted to share an artwork I encountered on the subject this summer at the New Worlds: Women to Watch 2024 exhibition at the National Museum of Women in the Arts. Intra-Venus is a nude self-portrait in marble by Spanish artist and breast cancer survivor Marina Vargas, frankly depicting her body after a mastectomy, chemotherapy, and radiation. Owning her scars and her baldness, she uses the language of classical sculpture to monumentalize a common female experience. (The chance of a woman in the US getting breast cancer in her lifetime is 1 in 8, and more than 100,000 US women undergo some form of mastectomy each year; global statistics are harder to come by.) Vargas lost the use of her left arm for a time during treatment, but here she shows herself with her left arm raised in triumph. The sculpture highlights the heroism of women who endure breast cancer and the dignity of their changed form.
Marina Vargas (Spanish, 1980–), Intra-Venus, 2019–21. Carrara marble, 77 1/2 × 26 3/4 × 26 in. Photo: Victoria Emily Jones.
Christianity has had a long and deep presence in Egypt. The art historical record is one means of exploring that.
From mid-thirteenth-century Egypt there survives an illuminated New Testament written in Bohairic Coptic with glosses in Arabic. It was copied in Cairo in 1249–50 by Gabriel III (born al-Rashīd Farajallāh), who would serve as patriarch of Alexandria from 1268 to 1271, for the private use of a prosperous lay patron of the Coptic Church. The images are most likely the work of a single artist and his assistant.
This Coptic-Arabic New Testament is divided between two locations: the Four Holy Gospels in Paris (Institut Catholique, Ms. Copte-Arabe 1), and Acts of the Apostles and the Epistles in Cairo (Coptic Museum, Bibl. 94). In this post I will showcase the art from the Gospels portion.
Drawing on Byzantine and Islamic artistic influences, Copte-Arabe 1 “represents the culmination of painting in Egypt and the allied territory of Syria for the Ayyubid period [1171–1260] as a whole,” writes art historian Lucy-Anne Hunt. [1] The manuscript contains fourteen full-page miniatures and four Gospel headpieces. A later hand clumsily retouched in black ink some facial details that had become abraded over the years—so no, those marks most noticeable on folios 56v and 178v are not intended as mockery.
Of the fourteen full-page miniatures, four are portraits of the Evangelists (i.e., Gospel-writers): Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. These are the most refined and celebrated paintings in the manuscript.
fol. 1v: Portrait of Matthew the Evangelistfol. 65v: Mark the Evangelist Receiving the Gospel from Peterfol. 105v: Portrait of Luke the Evangelistfol. 174v: Portrait of John the Evangelist
Each Evangelist is shown under a cusped arch—Matthew copying his Gospel in Arabic, Luke seated in front of a pulled-back curtain with a lotus design pattern, and John uniquely reclining, a pose adapted from secular models.
But the most interesting of the four Evangelist portraits is Mark’s, because there’s another figure with him. The owning institution labels the page “Marc l’évangéliste; Pierre lui donnant l’Evangile” (Mark the Evangelist; Peter giving him the Gospel). I had to look into this!
Traditionally, a man named John Mark is credited as the author of the Gospel that begins, “The beginning of the good news of Jesus Christ.” (It came to be called the Gospel of Mark by the end of the second century.) John Mark was a disciple of Peter, whom he is believed to have used as his primary source in composing his Gospel. The two were close companions, and Peter even refers to him as a son (1 Pet. 5:13). John Mark’s mother, Mary, hosted a house church that Peter was connected with (Acts 12:12). John Mark was also a cousin of Barnabas of Cyprus (Col. 4:10) and accompanied Paul in some of his apostolic travels (Acts 12:25; 13:1–5; 15:36–39).
Papias of Hierapolis, Irenaeus, Justin Martyr, Clement of Alexandria, Eusebius, Tertullian, and Origen—church fathers of the first two centuries of Christianity—all mention in their writings that Mark wrote his Gospels based on Peter’s eyewitness testimony and teachings. [2]
So folio 65v of Copte-Arabe 1 shows Peter passing on his intimate knowledge of Christ to Mark. As a sign of respect, Mark’s hands are covered with a cloth, ready to receive Peter’s notes.
Examining artistic precedents of this pair of men, Hunt writes:
Middle Byzantine iconographic sources can . . . be suggested for the Copte-Arabe 1 portrait of Mark with Peter (fol. 65v), which relates to the broad category of Evangelist portraiture with a second, usually inspiring figure. Mark appears seated, with Peter, who stands before him bearing the Gospel. More frequent are portraits of Peter dictating to Mark, the earliest known being that in the mutilated Greek New Testament in Baltimore (Walters Art Gallery W. 524) in which both are seated. Greek manuscripts with such portraits would have been accessible through the Syrian and Armenian communities. Two such twelfth century Gospels today in Jerusalem are the Greek Taphou 56 and the Armenian Theodore Gospels (Armenian Patr. 1796), showing the standing Peter dictating to the seated Mark. It has often been pointed out that secondary figures, either inspiring or presenting, are particularly common in Coptic and other oriental Christian art. [3]
Now let’s take a look at the narrative images. I went through them all and attempted to identify each scene as best I could (I can’t read the Arabic inscriptions), which I label in the caption along with the scripture passage it illustrates. These descriptive titles are preceded by the folio number. Note that in manuscript studies, “fol.” or “f.” stands for “folio” (page), “v” stands for “verso” (a left-hand page), and “r” stands for “recto” (a right-hand page).
The first narrative scene in the manuscript, a header to the Gospel of Matthew, is a Nativity, with Mary reclining in the hollow of a cave and the Christ child lying swaddled beside her, adored by an ox and ass. An angel with folded hands peers reverently over a rocky outcrop, while shepherds approach from the left and magi from the right. Joseph is seated near his wife, eyeing the coming visitors.
fol. 2r: The Nativity (Matt. 1:25; 2:9–11; cf. Luke 2:1–7)
Later there follow six pages illuminating various stories from the Gospel of Matthew—the largest image sequence in the manuscript. As in the Gospels of Luke and John (there are none for Mark), these scenes are arranged on a grid system of six small squares to a page.
fol. 4v: The Magi before Herod (Matt. 2:7–8); The Flight to Egypt (Matt. 2:13–15); The Massacre of the Innocents (Matt. 2:16–18); John the Baptist Baptizes Converts (Matt. 3:1–12); Jesus Heals a Man with Leprosy (Matt. 8:1–4); A Centurion of Capernaum Seeks Healing for His Servant (Matt. 8:5–13)fol. 5r: The Healing of Peter’s Mother-in-Law (Matt. 8:14–15); Jesus Restores Two Demon-Possessed Men (Matt. 8:28–24); The Healing of the Paralytic (Matt. 9:1–8); The Calling of Matthew (Matt. 9:9–13); The Healing of the Woman with the Issue of Blood (Matt. 9:20–22); The Raising of Jairus’s Daughter (Matt. 9:18–19, 23–26)fol. 18v: Messengers from John the Baptist (Matt. 11:2–5); The Beheading of John the Baptist (Matt. 14:1–12); The Feeding of the Multitudes (Matt. 14:13–21); The Transfiguration (Matt. 17:1–13); Jesus Heals a Demon-Possessed Boy (Matt. 17:14–20); The Mother of James and John Requests a Favor (Matt. 20:20–28)fol. 19r: Jesus’s Disciples Fetch a Donkey (Matt. 21:1–6); Christ’s Entry into Jerusalem (Matt. 21:7–11); The Parable of the Wise and Foolish Virgins (Matt. 25:1–13); The Anointing at Bethany (Matt. 26:6–13); Jesus Washes His Disciples’ Feet (John 13:1–17); The Last Supper (Matt. 26:20–29)
From having seen other similar compositions, I know that the man holding the scroll and gesturing toward the donkey on folio 19r/1 is the prophet Zechariah, and that his scroll contains a portion of Zechariah 9:9: “Rejoice greatly, O daughter Zion! Shout aloud, O daughter Jerusalem! See, your king comes to you; triumphant and victorious is he, humble and riding on a donkey, on a colt, the foal of a donkey.”
fol. 56v: The Agony in the Garden (Matt. 26:36–46); The Kiss of Judas (Matt. 26:47–49); The Arrest of Christ (Matt. 26:50–56); Christ before Caiaphas (Matt. 26:57–66); The Denial and Repentance of Peter (Matt. 26:69–75); Christ before Pilate (Matt. 27:11–23)fol. 57r: Judas Returns the Blood Money and Hangs Himself (Matt. 27:1–10); Pilate Washes His Hands (Matt. 27:24–26); Christ Carries His Cross (Matt. 27:31); The Crucifixion (Matt. 27:33–56); The Deposition (Matt. 27:57–59); The Entombment (Matt. 27:59–61)
Strikingly, all the figures in this manuscript are given halos around their heads, not just holy figures—for example, King Herod, antagonistic Pharisees, Judas, the Roman soldiers who arrest and taunt Jesus, and the foolish virgins. I’m not sure the reason for this; it’s possible it marks the imago Dei in each and every human, even those who oppose Christ. I welcome the input of scholars better versed in Coptic art than I.
The headpiece to the Gospel of Mark portrays the Baptism of Christ. Fully nude, he is submerged in the Jordan River. John the Baptist stands on the bank and touches Christ’s head, while the hand of God the Father emerges from the heavens, pronouncing blessing over the Son, and the Holy Spirit as dove hovers above. Again, the manus velatae (veiled hands) motif appears, this time with the angels, signaling their reverence. On the left an ax cuts into the base of a tree, a reference to John the Baptist’s stark warning to the Sadducees and Pharisees who observe the baptisms: “Even now the ax is lying at the root of the trees; therefore every tree that does not bear good fruit will be cut down and thrown into the fire” (Matt. 3:10).
fol. 66r: The Baptism of Christ (Mark 1:9–11)
The next illumination is folio 106r, which opens the Gospel of Luke. It shows three scenes from Luke 1: the angel Gabriel announcing to the priest Zechariah that his wife, Elizabeth, will bear a son named John; Gabriel announcing to the virgin Mary that she will bear a son named Jesus; and Mary and Elizabeth rejoicing together in the unexpected news of their pregnancies and the divine deliverance they signal.
fol. 106r: The Annunciation to Zechariah (Luke 1:5–23); The Annunciation to Mary (Luke 1:26–38); The Visitation (Luke 1:39–56)
In the first full-page miniature from Luke (below), the third scene confuses me a bit. I’m fairly sure it’s supposed to be the twelve-year-old Jesus sitting among the doctors of the law in the temple at Jerusalem, as narrated in Luke 2:41–51; this episode is typically included in image cycles on the Life of Christ. But here he’s shown as a full-grown adult. The arch above the group is similar to the one shown in the previous frame where the infant Christ is presented in the temple forty days after his birth, suggesting that this is the temple, not a synagogue.
fol. 109v: The Birth of John the Baptist (Luke 1:57–58); The Presentation in the Temple (Luke 2:22–38); Christ Disputing with the Doctors in the Temple (Luke 2:46–47); Jesus Teaching in the Synagogue at Nazareth (Luke 4:16–20); The Religious Leaders Attempt to Push Jesus Off a Cliff (Luke 4:28–30); Jesus Raises the Son of the Widow of Nain (Luke 7:11–17)
Regardless, the next episode, portrayed on folio 109v/4, is one of my favorites in Luke’s Gospel: Jesus interpreting the Isaiah scroll at his hometown synagogue, announcing himself as the long-awaited Messiah and thereby launching his ministry.
When he came to Nazareth, where he had been brought up, he went to the synagogue on the Sabbath day, as was his custom. He stood up to read, and the scroll of the prophet Isaiah was given to him. He unrolled the scroll and found the place where it was written:
The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to set free those who are oppressed, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.
And he rolled up the scroll, gave it back to the attendant, and sat down. The eyes of all in the synagogue were fixed on him. Then he began to say to them, “Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.” (Luke 4:16–20; cf. Isa. 61)
When asked to expound, Jesus emphasizes how God’s plan of salvation is for all people, recounting two stories from the Hebrew scriptures in which God showed favor to Gentiles—namely, the widow of Zarephath and the Syrian general Naaman. Well, this really raises the ire of his Jewish audience, who believed the Messiah should act exclusively on their behalf. The artist of Copte-Arabe 1 shows on folio 109v/5 the culmination of this contentious encounter between the up-and-coming Jewish teacher making his way through Galilee and the old guard: an attempted murder!
When they heard this, all in the synagogue were filled with rage. They got up, drove him out of the town, and led him to the brow of the hill on which their town was built, so that they might hurl him off the cliff. But he passed through the midst of them and went on his way. (Luke 4:28–30)
On the following page, in the fifth frame, the Rich Man and Lazarus is one of Jesus’s three parables depicted in the manuscript. (The other two are of the Ten Virgins and the Good Samaritan.) The artist depicts not the impoverished, sore-laden Lazarus begging outside the wealthy Dives’s door in this life, but the afterlife. Lazarus, now whole, sits comfortably in Abraham’s bosom, while Dives, who lacked mercy on earth, is denied it in hell; he languishes in flames.
fol. 110r: Jesus Is Anointed by a Sinful Woman (Luke 7:36–50); The Parable of the Good Samaritan (Luke 10:25–37); The Healing of the Woman with a Bent Back (Luke 13:10–17); The Healing of the Man with Edema(?) (Luke 14:1–6); The Rich Man and Lazarus (Luke 16:19–31); The Healing of the Ten Lepers (Luke 17:11–19)
I’m not sure what the center right scene depicts, but given its placement in the sequence, its setting in a lavish interior, and Jesus’s clear presence at the left (as indicated by the cross in his halo; which I’d say precludes the figures being characters in a parable), my best guess is it represents the healing of the man with edema (dropsy), which takes place in the house of a prominent Pharisee.
Further into the manuscript, our anonymous artist commences the fourth and final Gospel, John, with a depiction of the descent of the Holy Spirit on the apostles at Pentecost—an event described not in John’s Gospel but in the book of Acts.
fol. 175r: The Descent of the Holy Spirit (Acts 2:1–13)fol. 178v: The Wedding at Cana (John 2:1–12); Jesus Teaches Nicodemus (John 3:1–21); The Woman at the Well (John 4:1–26); The Healing at the Pool of Bethesda (John 5:1–15); The Woman Caught in Adultery (John 8:1–11); The Healing of the Man Born Blind (John 9:1–12)fol. 179r: The Raising of Lazarus (John 11:1–44); The Holy Women at the Tomb (Mark 16:1–8); The Road to Emmaus (Luke 24:13–27; cf. Mark 16:12); The Incredulity of Thomas (John 20:24–29); The Miraculous Catch of Fish (John 21:1–14); The Ascension (Luke 24:50–53)
Folio 179r also contains scenes whose scriptural referents are from other Gospels: four women arriving at Christ’s empty tomb on Easter morning (John mentions only Mary Magdalene, Matthew mentions two women, Mark mentions three, and Luke speaks generally of “the women”); the risen Christ meeting two pilgrims on the road to Emmaus; and Christ’s ascent into heaven. I suppose it’s because this final full-page miniature is Resurrection-themed, so the artist harmonizes the four Gospels, pulling relevant highlights from each.
NEW ALBUM: By Babylon’s River by the Pharaoh Sisters: A folk band from the foothills of North Carolina, the Pharaoh Sisters [previously] are Austin Pfeiffer, Jared Meyer, Kevin Beck, and John Daniel Ray. On September 13 they released their second album, By Babylon’s River, unveiling a new genre they call “saloon Christian.” The title track is a western waltz adaptation of Psalm 137. Also included on the album are a version of Psalm 81 (“Sing, Oh Sing”); bluegrass arrangements of the gospel standards “Leave It There” and “Hold to God’s Unchanging Hand”; retunes of the hymns “All Things Bright and Beautiful” by Cecil Frances Alexander and “’Tis Finished” by Charles Wesley; a cheeky take on the story of Samson, and more.
I was introduced to Hurt over a decade ago through his recording of the African American spiritual “I Shall Not Be Moved,” based on Psalm 1. The songs he sang were a mix of sacred and secular.
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ARTISTS’ PROFILE: “Sunny Taylor / Jack Baumgartner,”Artful, season 3, episode 6: The BYUtv docuseries Artful, which is available to watch freely online, profiles a variety of artists of faith—many of them Latter-day Saints, but some (non-LDS) Christian or Jewish.
The first half of episode 6, season 3, highlights the work of Sunny Taylor, who lives in Wilton, Maine, and engages with painting’s geometric tradition. She values process over product and wants viewers to observe the surface and textures of her paintings, built up through meticulous layering techniques that involve scraping and grinding. She sees beauty in imperfection, and sorrow and joy as bound up together. Follow her on Instagram @sunnytaylorart.
Sunny Taylor (American, 1979–) Connections, 2024. Acrylic on panel, 24 × 12 in. [for sale] [artist’s statement]
Beginning at the 13:38 time stamp, the second half is on multidisciplinary artist Jack Baumgartner of Kansas. Baumgartner, who has a Presbyterian background, is a printmaker, painter, farmer, woodworker, puppeteer, and musician. He raises sheep, goats, and chickens, builds furniture, plays the banjo, and cohosts the podcast The Color of Dust with two poet friends, “exploring the seen and unseen in the soil of art and agriculture.” He is also a husband and a father of five. I first learned about Baumgartner through an Image journal profile; and Plough published an article about him in 2018. I really enjoyed this twelve-minute video segment that shows him at work and at play in and around his home—especially his puppet theater performance of The Two Deaths of John Beartrist Laceroot! Follow him on Instagram @baumwerkj.
Jack Baumgartner (American, 1976–), Go On, Adam, Breathe, 2023. Linocut, 14 × 18 in. [for sale]
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PODCAST EPISODE: “Grief and Poetry, with guest Kim Langley,”Faith and Imagination, October 4, 2021: Kim Langley is a certified spiritual director and retreat leader from Ohio; she is also the founder of WordSPA (acronym for “Spirituality Poetry Appreciation”) and author of Send My Roots Rain: A Companion on the Grief Journey (Paraclete, 2019), a compilation of sixty poems interwoven with narrative and commentary, in preparation for which she interviewed some three dozen chaplains, pastors, grief counselors, hospice workers, funeral directors, and bereaved people. She wrote the book after the death of her parents. “I found such comfort in the poems,” she writes, “written by a host of people just like us, picking up their pain, juggling it awkwardly in their arms at first—or maybe for a long time—then gradually finding the resilience to carry it, to know when and how to put it down, when to pick it up, and how to develop strong muscles for the long haul. They helped me carry my pain, and I think they will help you to survive, and maybe even thrive a little.” In this podcast episode, she and the host read and discuss four poems from the book: “Let Evening Come” and “Otherwise” by Jane Kenyon, “Those Winter Sundays” by Robert Hayden, and “Stillbirth” by Laure-Anne Bosselaar.
Launched in 2020, Faith and Imagination [previously] is the podcast of the BYU Humanities Center, hosted by founding director Matthew Wickman. It features interviews with a range of writers, scholars, clergy, and others. View the full archive at https://humanitiescenter.byu.edu/podcast/. And in addition to the Langley episode, let me turn your attention to an excellent recent release with an author I’ve mentioned before: “On Deepening Our Religious Experience: An Invitation to Poetry for the Church, with Abram Van Engen.” You may have heard Van Engen discuss his new book elsewhere, but this interview brings some great insights to the fore.
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CREATIVE COLLABORATION: Ordinary Saints, a project by artist Bruce Herman, poet Malcolm Guite, and composer J.A.C. Redford: When Bruce Herman’s parents died unexpectedly in 2009, three months apart, painting their portraits was a key way in which he moved through his grief. Poet Malcolm Guite saw Herman’s portrait of his father exhibited at a Christians in the Visual Arts conference in 2011 and, struck by its sheer sense of presence, wrote a sonnet about it. This act of ekphrasis then developed into a three-way collaboration when their mutual friend J.A.C. Redford, a composer, responded by setting Guite’s poem to music.
Bruce Herman (American, 1953–), Portrait of the Artist’s Father: William C. Herman, 2010. Oil and alkyd on wood, 30 5/8 × 51 in. Collection of the artist.
The basis of Ordinary Saints is a series of portraits Herman painted of family and friends throughout the 2010s, which spawned a series of poems by Guite, which in turn spawned a suite of instrumental music and a song cycle by Redford. The first public presentation of the multidisciplinary project was at a Laity Lodge retreat in the Texas Hill Country on October 26–28, 2018, and it has since traveled to Nashville and Oxford.
The project attempts “to render . . . a glimpse of the glory of our mortal faces when turned toward God . . . faces that point toward the one Face we all must seek,” Herman says. Or, as Guite puts it: “to explore what it means to be truly face to face with one another, how we might discern the image of God in our fellow human beings, and how that discernment might ready us for the time when, as we are promised, we will no longer see ‘through a glass darkly’ but really see God and one another face to face in the all-revealing, and all-healing light of Heaven.”
Here is the title poem, followed by Redford’s title composition for voice, piano, cello, and clarinet:
Ordinary Saints
by Malcolm Guite
The ordinary saints, the ones we know, Our too-familiar family and friends, When shall we see them? Who can truly show Whilst still rough-hewn, the God who shapes our ends? Who will unveil the presence, glimpse the gold That is and always was our common ground, Stretch out a finger, feel, along the fold To find the flaw, to touch and search that wound From which the light we never noticed fell Into our lives? Remember how we turned To look at them, and they looked back? That full- Eyed love unselved us, and we turned around, Unready for the wrench and reach of grace. But one day we will see them face to face.
>> “Ordinary Sugar” by Amanda Gunn: Pádraig Ó Tuama reads and comments on this food poem in the July 10, 2023, episode of Poetry Unbound. “How can russet potatoes be made to taste of sugar and caramel? By dedication, love, and craft. Amanda Gunn places her poetry in conversation with the farming and culinary skills of her forebears: women who cultivated land, survival, strength, and family bonds.”
>> “Given”by Anna A. Friedrich: This poem by Anna A. Friedrich is a beautiful tribute to her grandmother, Juanita Powell Alphin, who died this June. Friedrich imagines all the gifts her memama ever gave—jump ropes, stuffed animals, homemade fudge, thrift-store doodads, five-dollar bills, a kitten, a plane ticket, etc.—tumbling out onto the golden streets of heaven, a testimony to her generous, loving spirit.
John Linnell (British, 1792–1882), Wheat, ca. 1860. Oil on canvas, 94.2 × 140.6 cm. National Gallery of Victoria, Australia.
Summer ends now; now, barbarous in beauty, the stooks arise Around; up above, what wind-walks! what lovely behaviour Of silk-sack clouds! has wilder, wilful-wavier Meal-drift moulded ever and melted across skies?
I walk, I lift up, I lift up heart, eyes, Down all that glory in the heavens to glean our Saviour; And, eyes, heart, what looks, what lips yet gave you a Rapturous love’s greeting of realer, of rounder replies?
And the azurous hung hills are his world-wielding shoulder Majestic—as a stallion stalwart, very-violet-sweet!— These things, these things were here and but the beholder Wanting; which two when they once meet, The heart rears wings bold and bolder And hurls for him, O half hurls earth for him off under his feet.
The beauty of Christ suffuses the landscape in “Hurrahing in Harvest” by Gerard Manley Hopkins, written September 1, 1877, while he was studying theology at St Bueno’s College in the Vale of Clwyd, Wales. A hurrah is a jubilant shout, an exclamation of joy, and in this poem the object of that joy is the kingdom of God manifest in a late summer day during the wheat harvest. Hopkins wrote to his friend and fellow poet Robert Bridges—the man who championed his work and is responsible for its being known at all—that “the Hurrahing Sonnet was the outcome of half an hour of extreme enthusiasm as I walked home alone one day from fishing in the Elwy.”
Stooks are bound sheaves of wheat, and Hopkins describes them as savage-looking (“barbarous in beauty”), perhaps suggesting their resemblance to an unkempt head of hair. In their wonderfully wild way, when propped up, they point to the clouds, which glide along moving aerial sidewalks—the wind (“wind-walks”). Through metaphor, Hopkins refers to the clouds as “silk-sack[s]” (they’re bulky yet smooth, substantial yet wispy) and not snowdrift but “meal-drift” (mounds of coarsely ground white grain). The clouds are willful and wavy; they mold together and melt into sky.
Hopkins lifts up his eyes and heart—language reflecting the Sursum corda of the liturgy—to behold the day’s glory. “Down” in line 6 can be read as an adverb or verb: Hopkins looks down across the valley, or he “downs” the scene, takes it all in. And seeing the freshly reaped fields, he “glean[s]” Christ. He likens the rapture he feels to receiving a kiss of greeting from a lover, real and round. Addressing his eyes and heart, he says that no adoring human gaze nor tender human lips have ever imparted such pleasure as Christ imparts through nature.
In the final stanza Hopkins perceives the hills as the majestic shoulders of Christ supporting the sky. He compares Christ to a stallion (wild, strong) and a violet (delicate, humble).
The image of a stallion returns in the second-to-last line, where he says his own heart “rears” (raises upright) wings, which enable him to launch himself upward, his legs pushing off the ground. It’s a leaping of the spirit, an ascent of the soul—an intimate meeting of self and Savior in the goodness of the cloudy-blue afternoon. The Divine is always here, he says, “and but the beholder / Wanting”; that is, lacking awareness.
Throughout the poem there’s a strong sense of propulsion, carried in part by all the alliteration: “barbarous in beauty,” “wind-walks,” “silk-sack,” “wilder, wilful-wavier,” “meal-drift moulded . . . melted . . . ,” “glory . . . glean,” “realer, rounder replies,” “hung hills,” “world-wielding,” “stallion stalwart,” “heart . . . hurls.”
Hopkins’s eyes have been oriented to perceive the spiritual in the material, and the result is ecstasy.
Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844–1889) was a preeminent English poet and a Jesuit priest, whose most famous works include “The Wreck of the Deutschland,” “Pied Beauty,” “God’s Grandeur,” and “The Windhover.” In 1866 he converted from Anglicanism to Roman Catholicism, a decision that estranged him from his family; then he entered the Jesuit novitiate in 1868 and was ordained to the priesthood in 1877. He spent the last five years of his life as a classics professor at University College Dublin, struggling with depression, during which time he wrote the “terrible sonnets,” so-called because of their expression of deep anguish and desolation. Very few of his poems were published during his lifetime, and widespread recognition didn’t come until nearly three decades after his death, in 1918, when his friend Robert Bridges edited the first collection of his poems. Hopkins was the most innovative poet of the Victorian era, his “sprung rhythm” creating new acoustic possibilities and anticipating the modernist movement.
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