>> “The Music of the Psalms in Church History” by W. David O. Taylor, Christ Church, Austin, Texas, October 1, 2022: “For two thousand years, Christians have found the Psalter to be an invaluable resource for worship and prayer. And, like the original psalmists, Christians have felt compelled and inspired to set the text of the psalms to music, of all sorts: from a cappella to choral, from folk to rock, from reggae to gospel, and more. In collaboration with local musicians, David Taylor, Associate Professor of Theology and Culture at Fuller Theological Seminary and author of Open and Unafraid: The Psalms as a Guide to Life, will explore how Christians in different periods of church history have sung the psalms within corporate worship,” spanning the apostolic, medieval, Renaissance, Reformation, modern, and contemporary eras.
Left: Icon of the Holy Prophet-King David. Right: Celtic Cross with Bible Page, encaustic by Phaedra Jean Taylor.
A choir will perform several chants (Hebrew, Byzantine, Gregorian) and a motet, and then attendees will be led in a handful of Psalm-based songs, from a hymn of German origin to an African American spiritual to CCM classics. Along the way Taylor will provide historical context and trace a narrative.
Sponsored by the Brehm Center at Fuller Theological Seminary, the event is free, but registration is required and filling up; reserve your spot here. It will be recorded and eventually posted on the Fuller Studio YouTube channel (whether there will be a livestream is still TBD).
>> Baylor Symposium on Faith and Culture: Art Seeking Understanding, Baylor University, Waco, Texas, October 26–28, 2022: Every fall the Institute for Faith and Learning at Baylor University organizes a symposium around a given topic, and this year’s topic is the arts. Registration is still open! The standard cost is $250, or $125 for students. “The notion of art seeking understanding (ars quaerens intellectum) invites association with the notion of faith seeking understanding (fides quaerens intellectum). Just as faith is a gift of grace that grows toward deeper knowledge, so it seems that art is a gift whose practice leads to a deeper order of understanding. This seems true not only for the person who experiences art, but also the artist—whether musician, painter, sculptor, or poet. The 2022 Baylor Symposium on Faith and Culture invites contributions from across the disciplines (including scholars, artists, and other practitioners) as we explore together how art seeks understanding and thus contributes to human flourishing.”
Their line-up of presenters includes several from within Baylor’s own distinguished ranks, such as composer and liturgist Carlos Colón, theologian Natalie Carnes, art historian Heidi J. Hornik, and literature scholar David Lyle Jeffrey, in addition to famous outside guests like theologian-pianist Jeremy Begbie, contemporary nihonga painter Makoto Fujimura, and Early Christian art historian Robin M. Jensen. See a full list by clicking on the boldface link above.
Just a fraction of the books authored by the eminent speakers at the upcoming Baylor symposium
The website does not provide a list of presentation titles, but among the topic suggestions on its call for proposals page are how art contributes to moral and spiritual perception, sensitivity, and/or character formation; the power of imagination; the relation of poetic art to the communication of moral truth; art therapy in pastoral counseling; how musical settings of biblical texts add value to those texts; and how to reconcile the making of religious art with the commandment in Exodus 20:4.
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SONG: “The Lord Is My Light” by Lillian Bouknight | Performed by the Notre Dame Folk Choir, dir. Emorja Roberson: “Very little is known about Lillian Bouknight (d. 1990), except that she was an African American from North Carolina, and a soloist and composer in the Pentecostal Holiness movement in the Aliquippam, PA, Community, also serving as a prayer warrior and on the Mother’s Board.” This setting of Psalm 27 that she composed appears in the African American Heritage Hymnal #160.
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VIDEO: “Theology through the Arts” by Jeremy Begbie: A pioneer of the field of theology and the arts, UK-born and US-based scholar Jeremy Begbie is the headliner for the Baylor symposium mentioned above. I met him briefly at a Duke conference a few years ago, and he’s such a delightful person, not to mention a phenomenal teacher who often dispenses wisdom from a piano bench. If you’re not familiar with his work, this fourteen-minute video is a great introduction to it. He’s all about demonstrating how instrumental music (his specialization is Western classical) can help unlock the truths of the Christian gospel. Here he talks about the given, the improvised, and the ministry of the Holy Spirit.
Geoffrion is also a professional photographer, and she shares many of her beautiful art photographs from Chartres on her blog, providing specific prompts for prayer and meditation based on the images. For example, in a post on the stained glass panel of Saint Martin bringing a man back to life, she writes, “Think of what is dead and needs resurrection in you, in those you love, in those who live within twenty-five miles of you, and in whatever country you call home. Then, take a very deep exhale and plead with God, ‘Bring resurrection!’” Or, reflecting on the sixteenth-century Nativity sculpture group attributed to Jehan Soulas, she invites us to “imitate one or more of the sets of eyes in the image . . . as you pray, ‘May I see with Your eyes, God. Teach me to see anew.’”
Saint Martin bringing a man back to life (with two onlookers), 1217–20, stained glass window panel in the south ambulatory at Chartres Cathedral, France. Photo: Jill Geoffrion.Jehan Soulas, Nativity, 1529, from the choir screen in Chartres Cathedral, France. Photo: Jill Geoffrion.
Geoffrion’s blog is a wonderful free resource for those looking to engage prayerfully with the art treasures of Chartres Cathedral. New content is typically posted in batches a few times a year, and the archive goes back to 2015. Sometimes Geoffrion digitally isolates certain details of the stained glass to aid in a more concentrated focus.
As I said when I featured the Tree of Jesse window several years ago, Chartres is high on my list of places to visit, for aesthetic, historical, and spiritual reasons. I hope to make it there sometime in the next five years.
The song “Compassionate and Wise,” which appears on an album of the same name recorded by Father Cyprian Consiglio in 2006, represents a cross-pollination of Hinduism, Buddhism, and Christianity.
An earlier version, simply called “Dedication of Merit,” was first sung at a Buddhist-Christian conference at a Benedictine convent in Indiana the week after the September 11 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center in New York City. The Rev. Dr. Heng Sure, an American Chan Buddhist monk, was asked to offer a dedication of merit (similar to what Christians would call an intercessory prayer, though it’s phrased more like a benediction). For this he and a colleague translated a passage from the Mettā Sutta, the Buddha’s discourse on developing and sustaining loving-kindness. Their translation reads:
May every living being, Our minds as one and radiant with light, Share the fruits of peace With hearts of goodness, luminous and bright.
If people hear and see How hands and hearts can find in giving, unity, May their minds awake, To Great Compassion, wisdom, and to joy.
May kindness find reward; May all who sorrow leave their grief and pain; May this boundless light Break the darkness of their endless night.
Because our hearts are one, This world of pain turns into paradise. May all become compassionate and wise, May all become compassionate and wise.
In reciting the dedication, Sure spontaneously matched it with a melody by Canadian singer-songwriter Loreena McKennitt, which she had written in 1994 for the song “Dark Night of the Soul,” a setting of verse by the sixteenth-century Spanish Catholic mystic Saint John of the Cross. Conference attendees, their hearts full of grief over the falling of the Twin Towers, joined in singing, lifting up their collective longing for light to break through the darkness.
A few years later at a different Buddhist-Christian gathering, Sure met Father Cyprian Consiglio, a Camaldolese Benedictine monk, author, and musician from California. He shared the song with him, struck by its similarity to some of the prayers Consiglio had offered that week.
With the blessing of Sure and McKennitt, Consiglio and his regular collaborator John Pennington, a percussionist, recorded a new arrangement of the song in 2006 under the title “Compassionate and Wise.” Here they are performing it with friends on June 28, 2018, at the “Arise, My Love” concert in Santa Cruz to raise money for New Camaldoli Hermitage in Big Sur, California, where Consiglio has been the prior since 2013:
(The song starts at 2:43, following Consiglio’s spoken introduction.)
Their version has slight lyrical alterations and opens with two Sanskrit chants that Consiglio learned from the monks and nuns at Saccidananda Ashram (nicknamed Shantivanam, “Forest of Peace”), a Camaldolese Benedictine monastery in Tannirpalli, South India. The first chant, which is from the Rig Veda but also appears in the Yajur Veda, is known as the Mahamrityunjaya Mantra (Great Mantra for Conquering Death). The second is a svasti pāṭhaḥ, an invocation for the welfare of all.
The following Sanskrit and its English translation were provided to me by Consiglio:
We worship the true God who is the Supreme Being Who is fragrant and nourishes all beings May he liberate us from death for the sake of immortality Like a cucumber is severed from its bondage to the creeper
May all be happy May all be free from disease May all realize what is good May none be in misery May the nonvirtuous be virtuous May the virtuous attain tranquility May the tranquil be freed from the bonds of death May the freed make others free Peace, peace, peace
And here is the sung English that follows:
May every living being, Our minds as one and radiant with light, Share the fruits of peace, Our hearts of goodness luminous and bright.
If people hear and see, Our hands and hearts can find, in giving, unity. May their minds awake To Great Compassion, wisdom, and to joy.
May goodness find reward; May all who sorrow leave their grief and pain; May this boundless light Dispel the darkness of their endless night.
Because our hearts are one, This world of pain turns into paradise. May all become compassionate and wise, May all become compassionate and wise.
This song is full of interfaith exchanges. A melody written to set the text of a Carmelite Christian friar was adapted to fit a Buddhist dedication of merit and is introduced by a Benedictine Christian monk with a passage from the Hindu scriptures! For more information on the song’s history, see urbandharma.org.
Explaining the significance of a dedication of merit (and metta practice) to his Christian readers, Consiglio writes on the hermitage blog, “We can dedicate whatever closeness to God we have to the good of someone else.” I myself wouldn’t use the phrase “dedication of merit” or its derivatives to describe what I’m doing when I intercede to God for others, but I see what Consiglio means, and I think it’s this: “The prayer of the righteous is powerful and effective” (James 5:16). Through Christ, God hears our prayers, and it is our duty in prayer to think more widely than just our own needs or the needs of those in our immediate circles—though that can be a good starting point. As the apostle Paul says, “I urge that supplications, prayers, intercessions, and thanksgivings be made for everyone” (1 Tim. 2:1, emphasis mine).
What if our prayers extended to enfold all living beings? I was always taught to avoid genericisms in prayer, and while there is value in direct naming, there is also a beauty to those kinds of broad prayers often heard on the lips of children—for “the whole world,” for “peace everywhere.”
Perhaps you are uncomfortable by the lack of doctrinal specificity in “Compassionate and Wise,” or by what you might call “syncretism” (the mixing of belief systems). But as Consiglio says, there is nothing in the song that contradicts Christianity. The song arose out of an interreligious context, so it’s meant to invite the participation of people of various faith backgrounds.
“Because our hearts are one” refers to a unity of intention or desire. The singers may not be united in theological particulars, nor even around the deity they’re addressing, but they are one in their wish for universal well-being, for liberation from the bonds of death and a walking together in friendship across boundaries of difference.
Merab Abramishvili (Georgian, 1957–2006), Dancer, 2006. Tempera on plywood, 76 × 52 cm.
I cannot dance, O Lord,
Unless You lead me.
If You wish me to leap joyfully,
Let me see You dance and sing—
Then I will leap into Love—
And from Love into Knowledge,
And from Knowledge into the Harvest,
That sweetest Fruit beyond human sense.
There I will stay with You, whirling.
Mechthild de Magdeburg (ca. 1207–ca. 1297) was a medieval Christian mystic from a wealthy German family. In 1230 she entered a local house of the Beguines, independent communities of laywomen devoted to leading a life of good works, poverty, chastity, and spiritual practice; and around 1272 she joined the Cistercian convent at Helfta, where she lived until her death. Her seven-volume book Das fließende Licht der Gottheit (The Flowing Light of the Godhead), written in Middle Low German over the course of three decades, is a compendium of visions, prayers, and dialogues that centers on her experience of God as lover. Her feast day is November 19.
Jane Hirshfield (b. 1953) is an American poet, essayist, and translator whose nine collections of poetry have won multiple awards. Her work encompasses a large range of influences, drawing from the sciences as well as the world’s literary, intellectual, artistic, and spiritual traditions. She lives in California.
Addendum, 9/5/22: Composer Thomas Keesecker has just alerted me to a choral setting he wrote of this passage, “Unless You Lead Me, Love.” Lovely!
SPOTIFY PLAYLIST: September 2022 by Victoria Emily Jones: This month’s thirty-song lineup includes a tango, a Pentecostal praise song, a playful setting of the Heidelberg Catechism Q&A number one, an Americana lament for hard times, a Negro spiritual on sax, Christina Rossetti, guitar evangelist Mother McCollum with a unique Jesus metaphor (!), a 9/11-inspired interfaith prayer that I will write about in a separate post, and songs in Turkish (“Kutsal, Kutsal, Kutsal Allah” = Holy, Holy, Holy Lord God) and Sepedi (“Modimo re boka wena” = God, we praise you).
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LECTURE (AUDIO): “God’s Thumbprint” by Frederick Buechner: Ordained minister and Pulitzer Prize– and National Book Award–nominated author Frederick Buechner died August 15 at age ninety-six. He was a wonderful writer (of both fiction and spiritual nonfiction) and preacher, and I hear him quoted all the time. He once summed up the theme of all his work as “Listen to your life.”
In 1992 Buechner spoke for the biennial Festival of Faith and Writing at Calvin University in Grand Rapids, Michigan, about how “art and religion are twin expressions of the human spirit.” Discussing poetry, painting, and music, he shows how the arts help us to pay attention. Listen to the talk, “God’s Thumbprint,” on FFW’s Rewrite Radio podcast. It is an expansion of the “Art” entry Buechner wrote in his book Whistling in the Dark: An ABC Theologized (1988); read the full excerpt here.
Rembrandt van Rijn (Dutch, 1606–1669), Old Woman Praying, 1629–30. Oil on gilded copper, 15.5 × 12.2 cm. Residenzgalerie Salzburg, Austria. This is one of the many careworn, lived-in elderly faces Rembrandt painted.
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LECTURE (VIDEO): “Difficult Beauty: Contemporary Art as Spiritual Discipline” by James K. A. Smith: In its content selection and development, the arts quarterly Image, says editor in chief James K. A. Smith, resists both nostalgia (old is better) and progressivism (new is better), charting a third way that he calls “archaic avant-garde.” The journal’s focus is on contemporary art, but contemporary art funded by tradition. Most of the writers and artists they feature see the tradition of religious art as a gift and a launchpad.
In this lunchtime Zoom talk from May 19, 2021, Smith considers why contemporary art so often feels alienating. He focuses on painting, giving a brief history of the onset of modernism in that medium, starting with the impact of photography, which pushed painters beyond the representation of objective reality. He shares compelling quotes by art critic Peter Schjeldahl and philosopher John Carvalho, about how we look and when thinking happens. Smith discusses the need for humility—to be comfortable with the not-knowing, to surrender our desire for mastery and control (i.e., demanding that paintings explain themselves).
What if the art that first alienates us is the art that might also stretch us? Or what if the literature that’s intimidating might also be the literature that has the possibility to kind of break us open in new ways, open us up to others, and even open us up to God? What if the difficulty of contemporary art is a virtue? And what if experiencing that difficulty is actually what we need? (12:42)
Daniel Domig (Canadian/Austrian, 1983–), Prayer Invites Chaos, 2019. Oil on mixed fibers, 75 × 59 in. [artist’s website]
The last twenty minutes consists of Q&A and addresses icons, art as propaganda, whether and how to engage art that comes out of a place of despair, and more.
I admit that I find much of contemporary art difficult, often unpleasantly so. A few readers have requested that I feature more abstract art, but I struggle to know how to talk about it. But I do want to learn. Image helps me do that.
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ESSAY: “Venice Undone” by Matthew J. Milliner: A core publication of Cardus, Comment magazine is committed to “the difficult work of being faithfully present in culture.” This summer they published an essay by art historian Matthew Milliner reflecting on the Anish Kapoor and Anselm Kiefer exhibitions at the 59th Venice Biennale, one of the art world’s largest and most significant recurring events.
At the 59th Venice Biennale, the Infant Christ from Paolo Veneziano’s Madonna and Child Enthroned (1320s) seems to bless one of Anish Kapoor’s “voids,” a black-painted work that appears flat when viewed head-on but whose convexity becomes apparent when viewed from the side. Photo: Matthew J. Milliner.
In part 2 of the essay, Milliner considers how the Kiefer show at the Doge’s Palace critiques Venice’s history of military conquest, replacing Titian’s The Conquest of Zara (1584) with an image of an empty tomb that evokes Jesus’s conquest over death. Apocalyptic themes have long been noted in Kiefer’s work; Milliner sees in particular traces of St. Paul and an interrogation of historic Venice’s bombastic displays of wealth and splendor, which are not lasting. And of course there’s the Jacob’s ladder motif. For a silent video tour of the exhibition, see here.
Anselm Kiefer (German, 1945–), These writings, when burned, will finally give some light, site-specific exhibition at the 59th Venice Biennale, 2022. Sala dello Scrutinio, Palazzo Ducale, Venice. Photo courtesy of the artist.
Prompted in part by their use of darkness, Kapoor and Kiefer have been read by some scholars through a lens of despair, but Milliner looks with eyes of hope and sees plenitude and light.
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SONG: “Jordan” by Jana Horn: One of Art & Theology’s subscribers sent this to me, and I’m not sure what to make of it, but I definitely find it intriguing, if a bit unsettling. A song from Jana Horn’s debut solo album, Optimism (2022), which Pitchfork calls “cryptic, bewildering, and daringly simple.” “Jordan” is full of veiled biblical allusions and touches on themes of pilgrimage, belief, destruction, incarnation, and burden bearing. I share it here in the spirit of Jamie Smith’s talk above, about not needing to nail down meaning in an artwork—even though I can’t help but ask, “Just who are the two dialogue partners?!” (God the Son and God the Father?)
Horn is a singer-songwriter from Austin, Texas, and a fiction-writing graduate student at the University of Virginia–Charlottesville.
Earlier this month I visited the American Folk Art Museum in New York City and was struck by a large ensemble of painted driftwood sculptures by “outsider” artist Annie Hooper (1897–1986). Arranged on a broad platform in the main gallery, the figures are a mixture of apostles, prophets, patriarchs and matriarchs, pilgrims, pray-ers, angels, dancers, and mourners. They are but a small fraction of the thousands such figures that filled Annie’s remote coastal North Carolina home, where they beckoned friends and strangers alike to come in, take a look around, and hear God’s good word. Annie loved to tell stories through these her “symbols,” as she called them, interweaving her own life experiences with the narrative of scripture to communicate the hope of the gospel.
Annie Hooper (American, 1897–1986), Art environment (works from the northwest bedroom and dining room), Buxton, North Carolina, 1950s–1986. Driftwood, cement, paint, and shells, dimensions variable (average figure height 17 in.). American Folk Art Museum, New York, 2018.6.1–170. Photo: Victoria Emily Jones.
Annie (Miller) Hooper was born in 1897 in Buxton, North Carolina, on Hatteras Island in the Outer Banks. She was raised in a devout Methodist household that included her twelve siblings—one of them her twin sister, Mamie—and fourteen foster children.
After taking a few courses at Blackstone College for Girls in Virginia, she married John Hooper and moved across Pamlico Sound to Stumpy Point, North Carolina, where John was a commercial fisherman. Their son, Edgar, was born a year later, when Annie was nineteen.[1]
Annie was very involved in her church community—playing the organ for services, preaching sermons when called upon, teaching Sunday school for children and adults, writing poems for the church newsletter, composing songs.
During World War II, when Edgar was deployed to the South Pacific and John left to work in the naval shipyards in Norfolk, Annie experienced her first bout of depression, which was accompanied by blackouts. Her second bout came when Edgar, after returning safely home from overseas, developed lung problems that required him to convalesce for a year in the mountains. Overcome with the fear of losing him, she suffered a nervous breakdown that led her to seek treatment in Raleigh (likely electroconvulsive therapy).
Shortly before her four months of psychiatric care, Annie and John had moved back to her hometown of Buxton and opened a motel. She returned to Buxton in need of recuperation, and she turned often to a large illustrated Bible for diversion and comfort, filling her mind with images of the Divine at work.
Annie Hooper with her Sermon on the Mount, Buxton, NC, ca. 1983. Photo: Roger Manley.
Then one day in her fifties, Annie “heard voices and angels guiding her to create figures” that “were to reveal the more pleasant, life-affirming aspects of Christian storytelling,” as she later reported to folklorist Roger Manley.[2] She went out to the beach, picked up a suggestive piece of driftwood, fashioned a face on it with English putty, and colored it with leftover house paint. It was Moses on Mount Nebo, at the end of his life, looking over the river Jordan into the promised land (Deut. 32:48–52; 34:1–5).
Moses on Mount Nebo
Pleased with the result, she crafted more biblical figures using those same simple materials. She would often add seashells for eyes and cement limbs.
This art practice seemed to have a healing effect on her.
As her number of sculptures grew, Annie arranged them into tableaux around her house, starting in the dining room and a bedroom and expanding over a thirty-five-year period into every square inch of empty space—hallways, stairs, closets, tables, piano tops, stove burners, etc. “She had a kind of Cecil B. DeMille vision of the sweep of multitudes with casts of thousands,” Manley told me, “while her house was all but uninhabitable from the sheer volume of work packed into it. She used yardsticks to reach the light switches, and could barely get to the kitchen sink. The overall effect was dazzling, if a bit claustrophobically breathtaking.”[3]
Annie made use of preexisting furniture to raise elements of certain scenes, creating a spatial dynamic. “In Annie’s house,” Manley said, “angels gazed down on the shepherds with their flocks from atop dressers and chairs, the golden calf was elevated on a stool, the ‘mount’ in the Sermon on the Mount was the dining room table, and so on.” She separated the scenes with garlands of tinsel and bouquets of plastic flowers and strung Christmas lights through them. “Changing colored light played over the groupings to impart movement and dazzle.”[4]
By the time Annie died in 1986 she had made about 2,500 figurative sculptures[5] inspired by the Old and New Testaments, on subjects like Jacob’s Ladder, the Exodus, Daniel in the Lions’ Den, Belshazzar’s Feast, the Visitation, the Flight to Egypt, the Sermon on the Mount, the Holy Women at the Tomb, Paul and Silas in Jail, and many more. Notably, there’s no Crucifixion scene; Annie said she couldn’t bear to put nails in the hands and feet of Christ.[6] And so we get empty crosses instead.
The final group she worked on, left unfinished when she died, was forty-seven grieving Hebrew mothers who had lost their sons to Pharaoh’s death edict (Exod. 1:22). This story of infant male genocide, along with its correlative in Matthew 2:16–18, is one she returned to frequently throughout her four decades of art making, as it held strong resonances for her. She likened her son’s being sent away to war to his being thrown to crocodiles.
Mournful moms are everywhere in Annie’s work, Manley said—“surrounding Lazarus, overlooking scores of dead babies, at the foot of the cross(es). She identified with all women experiencing loss. In WWII dead sailors (mostly American and British) occasionally washed up on the beaches near her house after their ships had been sunk by U-boats, and she pitied their mothers as well. It was a major thread running through the whole display.”[7]
Not all the figures correspond to characters in the Bible. Some are simply “bringing the message,” Annie said.[8] They may illustrate a hymn, such as “Will There Be Any Stars in My Crown?,” “It Is Well with My Soul,” “All Hail the Power of Jesus’ Name,” or “The Old Rugged Cross.”
Wanting to share these visual stories, Annie frequently welcomed visitors into her home, giving performative tours that involved narration and interactivity. For example, she would lean the Jesus figure over the prone Lazarus figure and bid him rise, or she would roll the stone away from Christ’s tomb while saying, “This is what God wants each of us to do—to roll away the stone of unbelief from our hearts.”[9]
Lazarus
In 1978 Annie’s husband became paralyzed from a stroke, and she stopped creating until John’s death in 1982 so that she could take care of him. She was devastated by the gradual loss of her best friend to whom she had been married for sixty-plus years and who had always supported her (some would say eccentric) calling. But even as John lay ill and as she grieved, she still welcomed people in to experience the mixed-media spectacle she had built in their living quarters, as she wanted it to continue fulfilling its main purpose of edification.
She set up hundreds of signs with messages—handwritten in marker on pieces of paper and foam meat trays—to accompany the figures so that people could take their own self-guided tours. Some of these consist of Bible quotations or hymn lyrics, but most are distillations of her own spiritual wisdom, in her own words, or else personal prayers. Examples include:
“God’s intent is that man should come to Him and enjoy Him forever.”
“Through the ages, heaven will never cease to resound with the glad hallelujahs from the grateful hearts of the redeemed.”
“The cry of the heart for God is the cry that brings down blessings from that high source.”
“There is a place where the tears of the forgiver and the forgiven mingle together (at the foot of the cross).”
“God’s work on the cross brought a world estranged by sin back to its Creator.”
“Whatever honors God, help me to take delight in.”
“Lord, bring me to the place where mine eye seeth Thee.”
(And the occasionally humorous) “Keep out of the manger, Santa Clause [sic]. That belongs to the Baby Jesus.”
Jesus (with donkey in foreground, from another scene)
Reflecting back on her life’s work, Annie said,
I feel like I’ve been dedicated and set apart for God’s work. I believe that, but I haven’t gotten to the point that I’m perfect. I’m not an angel, I’m an aged imp. I can only live in hope, fully believing that God will bless me by making me a blessing to others, and I think I have been. When people come, they come seeking something of the supernatural, and they get it when they get God’s word. Here they get not only God’s word but they get a symbol resembling the thought that they have.
My work is all the work of love, working out the biblical scenes that will last through the ages long after I’m gone. That is my motive, that is my purpose, making figures with some spiritual thought to go along. When I look back over the work I’ve done it amazes me—but still it is not something to be worshipped. It is something that will tell a story.[10]
In a different interview, at age eighty-seven, Annie described how she works in collaboration with God, in a sense, who has uniquely equipped her for the work:
I feel like I’ve had help. I feel like the Lord’s given me the desire to do, and the talent to do, and the material to work with, and the time to do. So I really feel like I’ve been a coworker, not only in making the material that I have, but also explaining it to those who come.[11]
Brimming with faith and battling emotional and mental distress, Annie created a world, channeling her pain and anxieties as well as her hopes and joys into the making of hundreds upon hundreds of sculptures inspired by sacred scripture. Some of the figures look lost or forlorn, whereas others look peaceful, even beatific; still others appear playful. She felt she could identify with many of the people represented—e.g., Job in his affliction, the Virgin Mary in her surrender.
Annie saw in these biblical stories a reflection of the human experience and assurances of how God meets us in our brokenness (in our doubts, fears, failures, sickness, grief, or what have you), bringing salvation. Lament and praise are joined together in her oeuvre.
Unfortunately, the AFAM exhibition does not preserve the narrative groupings of the figures, instead arranging them roughly by size and placing them all on the same level facing forward, rather than having them interact with one another. There are no visual dividers or spotlights to help viewers navigate the bunches. As such, and lacking much of Annie’s interpretive signage, it’s nearly impossible to precisely identify any of the characters or to discern a plot—though Manley was able to confirm a few of my hunches (labeled in my captions) and to guide me in identifying a few other figures.
I was puzzled by the presence of what I thought might be a bear.
Manley suggested that it is probably a Gadarene swine from the story of Jesus healing a demoniac (Mark 5:1–20) but that it could also be from Annie’s “Valley of the Shadow of Death” scene, which featured a large human figure lying down on a piece of green shag carpet (a green pasture) surrounded by scary black and purple creatures.
Even in her lifetime, Manley informed me, Annie’s scenes were unfixed, constantly shifting and evolving. “Many of Annie’s figures played multiple roles,” he said. “If she had to move a scene to a different part of the house to make way for more, and the new location was too small to accommodate the entire scene, she would repurpose the ‘extras’ and make them part of some other scene. Her environment was not static—every time I went (perhaps 20 times?) a majority of the scenes would have been relocated and rearranged. Only a few ‘stayed put.’”[12]
Roger Manley, whose friendship with and research on Annie I’ve relied on extensively for this article, became the caretaker of Annie’s work after her death. He first encountered it in 1970 when, on Christmas break after his first semester at Davidson College, he was hitchhiking and happened to be picked up by one of Annie’s grandsons. Thinking Manley would be amused by his grandma’s sculptures, he brought him to the house. Manley was enthralled by what he saw. He took photos and returned many times since, each time developing a keener sense of responsibility to preserve the work for posterity.
At Manley’s behest, Catherine Peck, a graduate student in the folklore program at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, spent August 1984 at Annie’s house in Buxton, labeling and photographing her work and interviewing her. When Annie died in 1986, she bequeathed all her sculptures to the Jargon Society in Highlands, North Carolina, which Manley helped arrange.
Ownership was transferred to North Carolina State University around 1988, when Manley curated the first solo exhibition of Annie’s work, A Blessing from the Source, at the university’s Visual Arts Center (now the Gregg Museum of Art & Design), showcasing six of her scenes and twenty-five photographs. The exhibition opened with an international symposium, the United States’ very first on visionary/self-taught/outsider art, which included participants from the Collection de l’Art Brut in Lausanne (Geneviéve Roulin), the Musgrave Kinley Outsider Art Collection (Monika Kinley), the Adolf Wölfli Foundation (Elka Spoerri), the Prinzhorn Collection (Inge Jádi), Rebecca Puharich (later to become Rebecca Hoffberger, founder of the American Visionary Art Museum in Baltimore), Roger Cardinal (author of Outsider Art, which named the “field”), John MacGregor (author of The Discovery of the Art of the Insane), Sam Farber (one of AFAM’s great champions, who largely funded their previous building next to MoMA), and others.
In 1995 Manley organized a much larger exhibition at NC State, A Multitude of Memory: The Life Work of Annie Hooper, that displayed the whole lot they had inherited.
In 2017 the Gregg Museum (of which Manley is the director) transferred the Annie Hooper Bequest to the Kohler Foundation for conservation treatment and stewardship. While many of the sculptures remain in the permanent collection of the Gregg and the John Michael Kohler Arts Center kept 233, the rest have been donated to nine other museums across the country—including the American Folk Art Museum, where I had the pleasure of being introduced to Annie’s work!
If you’d like to find out more about Annie Hooper, check out the freely accessible Digital Southern Folklife Collection at UNC, which houses four audio interviews and three on-site video tours with Annie, and the nineteen-page exhibition catalog from 1988, A Blessing from the Source.
All photos in this article, except the one of Annie Hooper, were taken by me (Victoria Emily Jones) at the multi-artistMultitudesexhibitionat the American Folk Art Museum in Manhattan in August 2022. The exhibition runs through September 5.
NOTES:
1. ^“The Life Summary of Edgar Ormond,”FamilySearch. Cf. Annie Hooper, interview by Catherine Peck, 1984, tape 1: Side 1, Catherine Peck Collection, 1981–1988, in the Southern Folklife Collection, Louis Round Wilson Special Collections Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, NC.
3. ^ Roger Manley, email to the author, August 23, 2022.
4. ^ Roger Manley, email to the author, August 21, 2022.
5. ^ “As for numbers of objects, there are about 2500 human and angel figures, dead babies, birds, crocodiles, sheep, lions, etc., and some 500 more ‘accessories’: bases for inserting artificial flowers, driftwood stumps that provided landscaping, gold-painted miniature furniture (all crudely made by Annie), textiles (shrouds, swaddling cloths, etc.), concrete food items (for various suppers and feasts, loaves and fishes). The original inventory included everything—bunches of plastic flowers, rotating color-wheel lights, garlands of tinsel—hence the 5000 number. The materials these were made of did not survive long-term storage, however; over time, low-grade plastics begin to turn gooey or brittle, tinsel sheds, etc., so the object count shrank.” Roger Manley, email to the author, August 21, 2022.
6. ^ Annie Hooper, interview by Catherine Peck, 1984, tape 6: Side 1.
In 1971 Gavin Bryars was working as a mixer and editor for a film documenting street life in and around the Elephant and Castle area of South London. Sifting through all the material that filmmaker Alan Power had recorded for the project, Bryars was struck by a twenty-six-second audio fragment of an elderly homeless man singing a simple song of Christian faith:
Jesus’ blood never failed me yet Never failed me yet Jesus’ blood never failed me yet That’s one thing I know For he loves me so
The clip didn’t make it into the film, but Power gave Bryars permission to keep it. Unfortunately the singer’s name and likeness were never recorded, and Bryars’s attempts to find him were unsuccessful. And despite scouring various hymnals and archives, neither Bryars nor anyone else has been able to find any other record of the song, which means it very likely could have been written by the man himself.
Inspired by the beauty and sincerity of the man’s song, Bryars ended up using the unwanted audio as the basis of a major orchestral composition. He made a loop of its thirteen bars (which the man sings perfectly in tune) and wrote a simple chordal arrangement, which he then developed into a rich ensemble piece with strings and brass, lasting about thirty minutes. The first three and half minutes feature a playback of the man’s bare vocals, the clip gradually increasing in volume until the strings enter in layers, then the brass, building to a swell that supports (but crucially, does not overwhelm) the voice for the entire duration.
“In a loose narrative sense, the frail, forsaken man is given a dignity and a sense of comradeship from the supporting musicians,” writes British journalist Oliver Keens, who also says that this “work of experimental classical music . . . as accessible as any pop song . . . is the closest we have in [England] to an underground national hymn.”
Music writer and sound artist Marc Weidenbaum says the piece “takes the melody inherent in a creaky recording of a homeless man singing a hymn in a painfully sweet and wavering rendition and renders it in a gentle, sensitive setting that suggests a heavenly chorus if not outright beatification.”
It is meditative; trancelike, even. And it has such emotional power. I cried when I first heard it.
The orchestration honors the anonymous man’s faith and the object of his faith, Jesus Christ—particularly the efficacy of Jesus’s blood, shed for the life of the world. An expression of divine love, that blood flows into every dark corner, bringing hope, forgiveness, and healing. The man on the tape clung to its promise. Even though his circumstances might suggest that the blood did fail him, he testifies otherwise: Jesus’s blood has never failed me.
“Jesus’ Blood Never Failed Me Yet” was originally released on LP on Brian Eno’s Obscure Records label in 1975 (a few minutes had to be shaved off for it to fit on vinyl) and was re-released in 2015. A shortened version was recorded in 2002 on Gavin Bryars: A Portrait, featuring Tom Waits, with the Gavin Bryars Ensemble.
Widely performed, the piece exists in many iterations, with different lengths (from four minutes to twelve hours) and instrumentation. Bryars said he reinvents it every time he conducts it, usually writing parts for the musicians he has available.
The song has also been covered by popular Christian artists such as Jars of Clay (2003) and Audrey Assad (2016). Sandra Stephens sings it with a new melody and Latin rhythm on the collaborative album Shades of Blue (1994), interspersed with a monologue by Lanny Cordola that references the song’s source in that unnamed Londoner who graced the world with it.
The video above captures a performance by Psappha, conducted by Clark Rundell, which took place October 12, 2016, at the RNCM Theatre in Manchester.
In a Luminous podcast interview with Bryars last year, host Peter Bouteneff, reflecting on how Bryars recovered the old singer’s brief improvised performance from the cutting-room floor, said something that has stayed with me: “It makes you wonder how at any given moment, there’s something passing being said or sung, that if we cared enough to isolate it and love it, it could become exactly as beautiful.”
Recognizing the sublimity of the man’s song, Bryars shone a light on it, developing it into a full-fledged concert piece that doesn’t compete with the original homespun quality, but rather elevates it, broadens it. “Jesus’ Blood” is a merging of “fine” and “folk” cultures that exhibits the unique strengths of both.
It’s a pity that the man has never received named authorship credit—although, as mentioned, due diligence was taken to identify him prior to the song’s going public, and no new leads have emerged since, now surely decades after the man has passed. We don’t know whether the song is one he heard long ago in some church or mission hall, or from a friend, or something he composed himself. Either way, his heartfelt presentation of the song is a gift, and Bryars’s stewardship of that gift and creative engagement with it has extended its reach all over the globe.
PODCAST EPISODE: “Incarnation and Imagination (with Malcolm Guite),”Imagination Redeemed: On March 28, 2015, the Anglican poet-priest Malcolm Guite from Cambridge, England, gave a talk in Colorado Springs for the Anselm Society, an ecumenical Christian organization whose mission is a renaissance of the Christian imagination. They have just released it on their podcast.
Guite discusses how the job of the arts is to link earth and heaven, heaven and earth; where a poem or other work of art stays on only one of those planes, it typically fails. He unpacks Theseus’s monologue from Act 5, scene 1 of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, focusing on these six lines: “The poet’s eye, in fine frenzy rolling, / Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven. / And as imagination bodies forth / The forms of things unknown, the poet’s pen / Turns them to shapes and gives to airy nothing / A local habitation and a name.”
Shakespeare, Guite says, is riffing on the prologue to John’s Gospel.
The Logos . . . is bodied forth perfectly and beautifully in the living, walking poem of Jesus Christ, in whom everything eternal is made particular, and who invites everybody to come towards him . . . because he is a habitation with open doors. So of course in John’s Gospel he says, ‘I am the door’! . . . Open up, walk in! (48:51)
And one more quote from Guite!
The church . . . is founded by one who is himself artistically embodied meaning—meaning made visible, meaning made beautiful, meaning made habitable and hospitable and welcoming in the touch of the body and in the physical event, which is then transfigured, because it is also a meaningful event, because earth and heaven meet. (55:34)
It’s a brilliant and inspiring talk, and it integrates other poetic verse besides Shakespeare’s.
>> “King Clave” by Planet Drum: In 1991 Mickey Hart (best known as a drummer of the Grateful Dead) and Zakir Hussain (a classical tabla virtuoso from Mumbai) formed the Grammy-winning global percussion ensemble Planet Drum, bringing together the world’s greatest rhythm masters into a one-of-a-kind improvisational supergroup. Prompted by ongoing international strife, Planet Drum reconvened over the past two years to record their third album, In the Groove, which released August 5. It features six unique compositions led by Hart, Hussain, Sikiru Adepoju of Nigeria, and Giovanni Hidalgo of Puerto Rico.
The centerpiece of the album is “King Clave” (the clave is a rhythmic pattern), created in partnership with Playing for Change and with funding from the United Nations Population Fund. The four core musicians mentioned above are joined by other percussionists and dancers from around the world. The music video uses the “Alternate Version” of the performance, released separately as a single.
Learn more about the Planet Drum project in this six-minute video:
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STILL LIFE EDITION: “The History of the Peace Symbol” by Michael Wright: Did you know that the peace symbol that spread worldwide during the 1960s was designed by a Christian from the UK? (Christian pacifism was one of the underappreciated drivers of the nuclear disarmament and antiwar movements.) Learn more about the symbol’s history and art historical and nautical influences in the August 15, 2022, edition of Michael Wright’s weekly letter on art and spirit, Still Life. Also included is the poem “Wildpeace” by Yehuda Amichai, and four weblinks of interest, such as an article on how the patristic tradition agrees with cognitive neuroscience, and a video of FKA Twigs performing in a church!
VIDEO LECTURE: “Symbolism and Sacramentality in Art: Medieval and Postmodern Representations of the Little Garden of Paradise” (Religion and Art Talks) by Tina Beattie: Dr. Tina Beattie is a professor emerita of Catholic Studies at the University of Roehampton whose research is at the intersections of art, gender, and theology. In this talk she explores the sacramental imagination of the medieval world through a Late Gothic painting from the Rhineland known as The Little Garden of Paradise. (You can zoom in in tremendous detail on the Städel Museum’s website.) It shows Mary reading in an enclosed garden in the company of saints, her little boy Jesus playing a psaltery at her feet. “Christ retunes the cosmos,” Beattie says. “The harmonies of creation were disrupted by sin. But all of creation is brought back into harmony through the Incarnation.”
Symbolism and allegory abound in medieval religious paintings, encoding profound meanings that can be discerned if we would but take the time to look and to meditate and to understand the world from which these images arose. “The visual image can say things that the theological text can’t,” Beattie asserts. “It can play with the doctrinal truth in ways that allow other meanings to emerge discreetly.”
Though many interpretations of hortus conclusus imagery focus on Mary’s virginity, and indeed that was a primary aspect motivating the creatives who developed such imagery, Beattie draws out themes of new creation and discusses the garden as the human soul.
The Little Garden of Paradise, Upper Rhine, ca. 1410–20. Mixed media on oak, 26.3 × 33.4 cm. Städel Museum, Frankfurt am Main, Germany.A small, slain dragon lies belly-up beside a man in greaves and chain mail, probably Saint George.
The other artworks she glosses are:
Resurrection XI by Edward Armitage Robinson (1963)
Han Hsu-Tung (韓旭東) (Taiwanese, 1962–), The Trend of Autumn (秋天の潮), 2013. Walnut wood, 155 × 98 × 50 cm. [artist’s website]
As we head back into our classrooms, may you go forth fully convinced of our love and your capacity. May you be the head and not the tail, leading others—and yourself—on a path of flourishing.
May your roots go down deep into God’s soil so you will bear the fruit of love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control.
May you remember your people, where you come from, and find your place of belonging.
May you become even more fully who you were always meant to be this year. We delight in you, darling.
We pray that you would sow seeds of life and hope wherever you find yourself, cultivating a harvest of shalom.
May you be prepared for every good work that lies ahead of you.
May your mind be clear and engaged, your memory sharp, your wisdom beyond your years. May you ask for what you need without fear or shame.
May you be safe, beloved child, protected from anything that seeks to steal, kill, or destroy in any measure. When you are afraid, may you feel our love wrapped around you and take heart.
When disappointments or disasters come—and they will—may you find the depths of the resilience we already see in you and rise, rise, rise again.
May you do what is right and good and kind and just, no matter what everyone else might do. Don’t submerge your true self into the dreams, plans, behaviors, or agendas of others. Bring your full beloved self to these days, knowing you are created in the image of God.
We pray that you would be a blessing to your teachers and the school staff, and we pray that they, in turn, would see and affirm you in the fullness God has created.
We pray for good friendships that will sharpen and delight you.
We pray you would have eyes to see the lonely ones. May you have many opportunities to practice being both brave and kind.
Beloved child of God, we send you out in the power and peace of Love itself, prepared and anointed, knowing you walk upon steady ground.
In the name of the Father, the Son, and Holy Spirit, one God and Mother of us all.
Amen.
This adaptable parental benediction for a child’s return to school is from the August 8, 2022, edition of Sarah Bessey’s Field Notes and is reproduced here with Bessey’s permission.
Chris Gollon (British, 1953–2017), Jesus and the Woman Taken in Adultery (Jesus Draws in the Dust) (triptych), 2015. Acrylic on canvas, each panel 48 × 36 in. (122 × 91 cm).
Jesus of Nazareth was not a powerless man. . . . Jesus knew exactly what he was doing, and he just used a different kind of power. When, in John’s Gospel [8:1–11], I read about a woman being stoned, I see Jesus using power. He bent down and scribbled in the ground, writing words that we do not know. He did that, knowing—I am guessing—that many of those who were about to throw stones couldn’t read the words even if they could have strained their necks to see them. He used his privilege to deflect attention, and in so doing he undid the story that held the slew of stoners together. This was not powerlessness. It was power and it is deep in us.
The woman was about to be stoned because of the addictions of the stoners. They were addicted to a violent kind of belonging, a kind of community that forges its borders through selective exclusion. She was about to be stoned with their bone-breaking morals that would prefer to kill a woman rather than examine their own complicity. We all need to be rescued from this kind of power—from both its appeal and its effect. An undoing of this power is seen when power is used for love. Power, used well, should be empowering, contagious, and protective. It should be self-critical, curious, and brave. It should know its own limits and be prepared to risk its own reputation. This kind of power asks questions to which it does not know the answers and listens because in listening is learning, and in learning is life.
May Parlar (Turkish, 1981–), Salt IV, 2018. From the photograph series Once I Fell in Time.
O Christ, thou art within me like a sea,
Filling me as a slowly rising tide.
No rock or stone or sandbar may abide
Safe from thy coming and undrowned in thee.
Thou dost not break me by the might of storm,
But with a calm upsurging from the deep
Thou shuttest me in thy eternal keep
Where is no ebb, for fullness is thy norm.
And never is thy flood of life withdrawn;
Thou holdest me till I am all thy own.
This gradual overcoming is foreknown.
Thou art within me like a sea at dawn.
This poem appears in Therefore Choose Life by Edith Lovejoy Pierce (Harper and Brothers, 1947).
Edith Lovejoy Pierce (1904–1983) was a Christian poet and pacifist. Born in Oxford, England, she married an American in 1929 and moved to the US the same year, settling in Evanston, Illinois. In her writing she drew inspiration from the Bible, Gandhi’s philosophy of nonviolent resistance, music, history, and mysticism, among other sources.
Art & Theology 