Afifa Aleiby (Iraqi, 1953–), Enchantment, 2001. Oil on canvas, 100 × 80 cm.
“You are drunk, but not with wine.” —Isaiah 51:21
O God of too much giving, whence is this inebriation that possesses me, that the staid road now wanders all amiss and that the wind walks much too giddily, clutching a bush for balance, or a tree? How then can dignity and pride endure with such inordinate mirth upon the land, when steps and speech are somewhat insecure and the light heart is wholly out of hand?
If there be indecorum in my songs, fasten the blame where rightly it belongs: on Him who offered me too many cups of His most potent goodness—not on me, a peasant who, because a king was host, drank out of courtesy.
This poem was originally published in the Catholic World 173 (April 1951), and then in The House at Rest (privately printed, 1984), and is compiled in The Selected Poetry of Jessica Powers, ed. Regina Siegfried and Robert Morneau (ICS Publications, 1989).
Jessica Powers (1905–1988) was an American poet and cloistered nun from Wisconsin. She took vows at the Carmel of the Mother of God in Milwaukee (later relocated to Pewaukee) in 1942, taking the monastic name Sister Miriam of the Holy Spirit, OCD. She had an active writing career for over sixty years, publishing under her birth name. She was influenced by the works of other Carmelite writers, such as Teresa of Ávila, John of the Cross, and Thérèse of Lisieux.
When I look back at my own path to a contemplative phenomenology, I am surprised to note that the places I learned to befriend mystery were rarely “religious” in the usual, institutional sense. Religious institutions seem as committed as Descartes was to certainty, clarity, and binary conceptions of knowledge. Instead, I have learned to love the inscrutable in spaces devoted to the imagination. I see now that the art gallery has been a “desert” of sorts into which I have retreated to find a stillness that makes me available for surprise. The cinema has been a cloister for contemplation. The novel has been a sanctuary into which I would retreat, only to discover the utter mystery of human beings on kaleidoscopic display. The wager of my book is that the modes of attention and contemplation that characterize “the aesthetic mindset” [Susan Magsamen and Ivy Ross, Your Brain on Art, xiii] are analogous to the spiritual itinerary of contemplation that we find in ancient desert dwellers, medieval mystics, and twentieth-century sages like Thomas Merton, Howard Thurman, and Henri Nouwen. In our culture of distraction and self-absorption, as well as skepticism and doubt, one of the best paths for cultivating openness to mystic contemplation is to engage regularly with contemporary art in all its conceptual upending and difficult beauty.
Contemporary art invites an itinerary that tracks with monastic contemplation: we withdraw from the grind of the everyday to retreat to a space of reflection. Whether we are reading a poem or facing a painting, we have to still the chatter and noise to be present for the encounter. But one of the reasons I am specifically arguing for the contemplative significance of contemporary art is that the vanguard of the avant-garde is a terrain in which our expectations are upended. Unlike confrontations with “classics” (which, of course, have their depth and profundity), engagement with art and literature from our own generation means encountering art for which we don’t yet have established habits. And so I find myself drawn to the avant-garde and the experimental. By subjecting myself to such art, I forgo control and comfort. I can’t rely on existing habits of perception. Such art disrupts my predilections and demands that I make myself available for the aesthetic encounter in a new way. Sometimes this is maddening, even alienating. Sometimes it leaves me cold. But this, too, is an aspect of the mystical experience. To engage the experimental and avant-garde requires “a beginner’s mind.” “Isn’t a beginner’s mind,” Henri Nouwen asks [in The Genesee Diary], “a mind without the thought, ‘I have attained something,’ a mind opened for grace?”
Art holds together contradictions that discursive rationality disallows. The best artworks make room for the messiness of the world around us, the swirling complexity of the soul within, and even, sometimes, the infinite mystery of the divine. Where a syllogism has to resolve to a conclusion, a poem remains open. While a treatise has to make an argument, a sculpture can evoke fourteen feelings and seven ideas all at once, and all of them can be true. A movie like Terence Malick’s Thin Red Line doesn’t take sides; instead, it immerses us in a world that is a heart-rending conflation of good and evil, darkness and light, beauty and horror, and we recognize all of it.
Next to the antiseptic precision of binary logic, art is messy and maddening. Michael Kimmage, in a provocative essay “The Bad and the Beautiful,” describes this as “art’s salutary impurity.” This, he says, is a central endeavor of what we call modern art: it “defies expectations by rejecting the expected structures, pushing sense and language and image in bizarre, unpredictable directions, breaking up straight lines, flirting with ugliness, defying representation, leaving much unsaid, smudging borders, bubbling over into excess.” He takes James Joyce’s Ulysses as a prime example: “the mongrelness of the distinction,” he argues, “is not impurity for impurity’s sake. Joyce was striving to make discoveries about life by defying and discomposing the conventions of language, to take the lid off the consciousness of his characters, to peer into their souls.” It is the disruptive difficulty of the prose in Ulysses that is the means of epiphany, somehow displaying the abyssal mystery of human consciousness in a way that an fMRI never could. And I, curled up on my sofa in what looks like “private” absorption, am, in fact, in solidarity with the beautiful monstrosity called humanity that lies beyond the reach of “philosophy of mind.” By cultivating an “aesthetic mindset” and a contemplative posture, we learn new habits of attention and wonder that underwrite a life of compassion and peace. Contemplation of contemporary art could engender just the sort of rupture and disruption that can make us aware of our ek-static being, our longing for communion, and break us open to the possibility of grace—the arrival and incursion of something unanticipated.
pp. 50–53
In many ways, art has been an occasion for me to practice friendship with epistemic failure. Artworks have helped me learn how to feel at home in the dark. Held by a painting that baffles me, rapt by a poem that eludes me, dazzled by a film that defies my comprehension, I practice dwelling in epistemic darkness. I can find a certain thrill in perplexity. I start to find joy in unknowing. Moments of analytic failure in front of artworks become occasions for a new kind of patience. It’s not that I resolve to stay until the artwork reveals an answer; it’s rather that the aesthetic experience lures me into a strange kind of waiting that doesn’t expect resolution. I am still expectant, even hopeful. But I am learning that what is given will not be a disclosure that can be fed back into my syllogisms; instead, a different kind of truth dawns, on a register of awareness that exceeds binary logic. . . .
Part of the joy I experience with contemporary art is the peculiar elation that comes from being in a “beginner’s” space. It is the joy of perpetually learning something new; the joy of being an eternal novice. To live a life in the company of contemporary art is to be thrown into unfamiliar territory where all of my acquired imaginative prowess seems useless and irrelevant. Like I’m just learning how to see. I encounter such works and, as [John] Carvalho puts it [in Thinking with Images], I don’t know what to think. My inclination is to move on—turn the page, change the song, move to the next sculpture, looking for something familiar, comfortable. But when I look away from what arrives as opaque, I evade possibility. For to run away from the darkness of an aesthetic encounter—the inscrutability, even offense, of the work—is always to run backward, to comfort and familiarity. The challenge of the artwork arrives, then, as something of a threat to self-assurance and command. But what it invites is a breakdown that could be a breakthrough. To dwell with such artworks is to make one’s home in the dark. To wait with them—quietly gazing at the opaque painting, continuing to read the vexing story, staying in one’s seat despite the alienating film—is already an act that unsettle autarky. To trust that something might be happening that you don’t recognize, can’t control, and don’t understand. Who knows?”
Sonia Gechtoff (American, 1926–2018), Celestial Red, 1994. Acrylic on canvas, 77 3/4 × 78 in. (197.5 × 198.1 cm). Photo: Victoria Emily Jones, at 55 Walker (art gallery), Tribeca neighborhood, New York, August 2022.
In the beginning (in the beginning of time to say the least) there were the compasses. Whirling in void, their feet traced out beginnings and endings, beginning and end in a single line. Wisdom danced also in circles, for these were her kingdom. The sun spun, worlds whirled, the seasons came round, and all things went their rounds; but in the beginning, beginning and end were in one.
And in the beginning was love. Love made a sphere, and all things grew within it. The sphere then encompassed beginnings and endings, beginning and end. Love had a compass whose whirling dance traced out a sphere of love in the void; in the center thereof rose a fountain.
The Circus of the Sun is an effusive, metaphysical cycle of thirty-one poems by Robert Lax that presents the circus tent as a microcosm of the universe. The cycle unfolds over five sections—morning, afternoon, evening, the midway, and night—following the daily routine of a traveling circus troupe, from set-up to rehearsal to performance to tear-down.
The poem above is the second in the cycle (it’s preceded by an introductory tercet) and the first in the “morning” section. It describes the origins of the cosmos in the dance of the Trinity, drawing on Genesis 1 and the prologue to the Gospel of John, as well as the title “Alpha and Omega” that’s applied to both God the Father and God the Son in the book of Revelation. God is not so named, but there’s a measuring, loving Being behind the flurry of creativity that’s being narrated. There’s a sense of orchestration and design, with the beginning and the end traced out at once, held together in the mind of God, with all things in between.
The Creation, from the Tiberius Psalter, New Minster, Winchester, 1050. British Library, Cotton MS Tiberius C VI, fol. 7v.
Many medieval depictions of the creation of the world show God holding a drafting compass, the tool of an architect, to mark out and circumscribe. Lax imagines the divine compass in balletic terms, its anchor leg fixed while its marking leg points and makes sweeping arcs, bringing about a fiery sun and spinning planets with wide orbits and seasonal cycles and so on.
Circles are symbols of eternity, wholeness, perfection. God is perfection, and God makes a perfect world.
And in the center of that world, this mystic poem suggests, is a fountain, representing the abundant life God is and gives. It’s cool and fresh and overflows. Jesus tells of this primordial fount to a Samaritan woman one day at Jacob’s well, describing it as a thirst-quenching “spring of water gushing up to eternal life” (John 4:14).
The theological orientation of The Circus of the Sun is established in part by its epigraph, Proverbs 8:23–27a (Douay–Rheims translation), where Wisdom personified speaks:
I was set up from eternity, And of old Before the earth was made:
The depths were not as yet, And I was already conceived; Neither had the fountains of waters As yet sprung out;
The mountains with their huge bulk Had not as yet been established; Before the hills I was brought forth:
He had not yet made the earth, Nor the rivers, Nor the poles of the world:
When he prepared the heavens, I was there.
Wisdom dances, Lax writes, in the beginning, producing fecundity.
The connection of creation to the circus in the Circus’s second poem is not clear, but it becomes more so as the cycle progresses, as the circular shapes and movements are echoed in rings, balls, and somersaults.
The Circus of the Sun was inspired largely by Lax’s experience traveling with the Cristianis, a long-standing circus-performing family of equestrians and acrobats from Italy. On a writing assignment for The New Yorker, he toured with the Cristiani troupe through western Canada in summer 1949, occasionally performing as a clown in their show.
Lax was fascinated by the Cristianis, especially by how they approached the state of “pure act” (actus purus)—a term that Thomas Aquinas, whose writings Lax engaged deeply, used to describe God, in the sense that God is pure existence and actuality with no unfulfilled potential. Michael N. McGregor, Lax’s biographer, elaborates in the 2015 article “Poetic Man of God”:
The acrobats’ performance, Lax thought, was as close as anything he’d seen to a fully present existence, an ability to be entirely in the moment that was both practiced and spontaneous. This ability, this nearness to the essence of God, came not only from physical ability and mental acuity but also a spiritual awareness, a fullness of love. The family was Catholic and close, trusting completely in the skill and the intention—the whole person—of each other.
The Circus of the Sun—Lax’s first full-length poetic work—didn’t come out until ten years after his illuminating immersion in circus life. It was published in 1959 by Journeyman Press, a small operation founded by the illustrator Emil Antonucci, using money from a Guggenheim grant, expressly to disseminate Lax’s poetry, beginning a lifelong collaboration between the two. Antonucci provided a few line drawings for the volume.
The cycle has appeared in three compilation volumes since then, including, along with Lax’s other circus poems, Circus Days and Nights (Overlook Press, 2000), which composer Philip Glass adapted into an opera in 2021.
The Circus of the Sun marks the end of the early, lyrical phase of Lax’s career. His later poems are much more experimental and minimalistic, alienating some readers (including me!).
But this work, which I think is his best, is brilliant in its grand exploration of, as Lax interprets in one of the poems, “creation and glory, / of rising, / and fall: / and again of the rising / where we are all risen.” For Lax, the circus is a place of glory, grace, daring, mindfulness, joy, play, and wonder that points back to creation, forward to the eschaton, and right here to what the life of faith looks like, nomadic and whimsical and death-defying.
In his introduction to Circus Days and Nights, Paul Spaeth writes,
Circus of the Sun is a blending of devotional poetry, in the Catholic tradition, with the eye of a journalist and the delight of a child. I use the term “journalist” in the sense of being a reporter but also in the sense of one who keeps a journal or diary. Lax, the reporter seeing things with childlike grace, at times relates his vision like an Old Testament prophet, at times like St. Francis composing a new “Canticle of the Sun,” and at times like a kid wandering through the circus grounds eating popcorn.
Hear Lax read the entire poem cycle in this 1983 recording from Patmos Island. (I’ve cued up the creation poem, but feel free to rewind to the beginning.)
Robert Lax (1915–2000) was an American avant-garde poet who is especially respected among practitioners and admirers of concrete poetry. Born to Jewish immigrant parents in Olean, New York, he attended Columbia University in the late 1930s, studying literature under Mark Van Doren. There he became lifelong friends with classmate Thomas Merton (Merton mentions him in his autobiography, The Seven Storey Mountain), with whom he worked on the college humor magazine Jester and who influenced his conversion to Catholicism in 1943. At various times in his career, Lax worked as a university lecturer, book reviewer, film critic, Hollywood scriptwriter, editor at The New Yorker and the progressive Catholic magazine Jubilee, and even as a circus clown. In 1964 he moved to Greece, where he remained, with the exception of a few brief visits to the US and annual trips to the European mainland, for the rest of his life, writing.
DANCE: “Seraphim” (2026), choreographed by Lindsey Hanson: This is one of the most unique dances for film that I’ve seen. It’s absolutely mesmerizing! Filmed in Dimnent Memorial Chapel in Holland, Michigan, with a bird’s eye view camera, “Seraphim” features eight female dancers who utilize the space’s pews and at times appear to be swimming in water or floating in zero gravity. They curl and climb and slide and propel. I love the illusion of them ascending and descending a ladder using the bench ends—a reference to the ladder in Jacob’s vision, linking heaven and earth. (Reminds me of the angels on the limestone facade of Bath Abbey in the UK!) In part because of the work’s title, I imagine the dancers as the invisible spiritual presences that move about the church, quietly ministering.
“Seraphim” is the second of four new works created this year as part of the Sanctuary Project, funded by the Creative Arts Collective for Christian Life and Faith. The third work, “Gethsemane,” will be performed for a live audience, who will watch from the stage, on September 5 at the W83 Ministry Center Sanctuary at Redeemer Presbyterian Church in New York City; free reservations are open! Debuting in 2021, SANCTUARY is a site-specific dance made for Redeemer, to activate the architecture of the church’s worship space, and choreographer and director Lindsey Hanson has expanded the concept into a continuing body of work.
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POEM: “Lord of Light and Dark”by Haley Hodges Schmid, Reformed Journal:Haley Hodges Schmid is a sonically driven poet, and that shows in this gorgeous poem published last month, a prayer with internal rhyme, consonance, a verbified noun, and other language play. It’s about “holy darkening,” says Schmid, whose debut poetry collection, Eros Rex, was released earlier this year by Orison Books. She seeks to recover positive imagery of darkness, and so expand our metaphorical associations. I’m reminded of other poets who have similarly explored the biblical paradox of the light and darkness of God, including John Milton (“Dark with excessive bright thy skirts appear,” he writes in Paradise Lost) and Meister Eckhart via Jon M. Sweeney and Mark S. Burrows: “You are the One who is in-yet-beyond / the many, Light burning in darkness // and Darkness shining beyond light” (from Meister Eckhart’s Book of the Heart). There are a handful of contemporary hymns and worship songs that do the same.
“Lord of Light and Dark” was born out of a week-long residency on poetry and prayer that Schmid participated in in Asheville, North Carolina, led by Marie Howe, who had the group write collects, a short, structured prayer form used in Anglican worship.
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ARTICLES:
>> “A feast day for the whole church,” an interview with Kimberly Belcher, by Steve Thorngate, Christian Century: “This spring, the Consultation on Common Texts published an update to the Revised Common Lectionary: It added the Feast of Creation in Christ on September 1, offering biblical texts and other materials for use starting with the current church year. It’s a milestone in a decades-long ecumenical process.” Steve Thorngate talks with liturgical theologian Kimberly Belcher, who participated in the Assisi meetings in 2024–25, about this feast day that has only recently developed in the West but that has been celebrated in the East for more than five hundred years as the Feast of the Indiction. Belcher describes what’s behind the full name, how a feast day is distinct from a world day of prayer, the challenges and gifts of ecumenism, creation as revelation, and more.
Illustration by Mary Haasdyk Vooys for The Christian Century‘s September 2026 cover story on the Feast of Creation in Christ, a new addition to the official liturgical calendars of many Western churches
I love the illustration Mary Haasdyk Vooys made for this article, which is used on the magazine’s cover. It shows Christ as Creator, holding a drafting compass and surrounded by diverse animals.
>> “Hillary Waters Fayle Creates ‘Portraits of Place’ from Seeds, Foliage, and Petals” by Kate Mothes, Colossal:Portraits of Place is an ongoing series of botanical artworks by Hillary Waters Fayle that pay tribute to the land and our relationship with it. The artist collects botanical material from a designated place, dries and preserves it, arranges it into an intricate, mandala-like pattern, and then uses that to create a cyanotype. Many of these she does on commission for people who want to commemorate a piece of land that is special to them.
Penland Pop by Hillary Waters Fayle
I urge you to explore the artist’s website, which contains many more photos plus other extraordinary projects, including embroidered leaves and lacelike leafcuts: https://www.hillarywfayle.com/.
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WORSHIP RESOURCES: Creation Collection from Reformed Worship: ReformedWorship.org has compiled numerous resources on the theme of creation—worship services, songs, prayers, litanies, a Psalms-based reader’s theater, sermon series, stories, and more.
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SONG:“Die Himmel erzählen die Ehre Gottes” (The Heavens Declare the Glory of God) by Heinrich Schütz: This motet from 1648 is a setting of Psalm 19:1–6. It’s performed here by VOCES8 in the Christuskirche in Recklinghausen, Germany.
POEM:“Last Words (Death Row, Texas)”by Eileen Talone: This poem from Image journal’s Winter 2020 issue made me cry. “Formally, it is a villanelle composed of found language from the transcripts of executions in Texas,” writes James K. A. Smith. “It is a poem of last words that the poet has braided together as an elegy, a song of both lament and yearning.”
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PODCAST EPISODE:“Pádraig Ó Tuama: Poetry, and Making Peace, Bearing Witness and Being Human – Poetry Against the Dark,”No Small Endeavor with Lee C. Camp, November 3, 2025: “‘Legitimate target has sixteen letters—and one long abominable space between two dehumanizing words.’ In this episode, poet and peacebuilder Pádraig Ó Tuama offers a sobering yet luminous reflection on language, theology, and the long road of reconciliation. From exorcisms and conversion therapy to moments of silence, soup, and starlight, his stories remind us that even in a burning world, there is still room for awe, for courage, and for a better kind of human flourishing.”
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EXHIBITION (+ BOOK + VIDEO TOUR): Esther and the Dream of One Loving Human Family, American Visionary Art Museum, Baltimore, February 23, 2019–December 2030: I recently saw this affecting exhibition at AVAM (the same museum that’s currently showing Mary Proctor), spending a whole afternoon taking in the visual and textual testimony of Esther Nisenthal Krinitz (1927–2001) regarding her survival of the Holocaust. Krinitz was twelve when the Nazis occupied the Polish hamlet of Mniszek, where she lived on a farm with her family. She was able to flee three years later, in 1942, with one of her younger sisters, but she never saw her parents, brother, or other sister again. She emigrated to the United States in 1949, working as a seamstress in Brooklyn and then in Frederick, Maryland, where she spent the remainder of her life.
In 1977, at age fifty, Krinitz embroidered an approximately four-by-four-foot panel of her childhood home, her carrying pails of water up the footpath. She wanted to share her memories with her two daughters, Bernice Steinhardt and Helene McQuade. This became the first piece in a series of thirty-six, covering her bucolic childhood—tending geese, swimming in the river, walking through wheat fields on stilts, watching her mom make Passover matzos—and then its sudden disruption by German forces during the war. Her embroidered pictures show such cruelties as a soldier ripping off her father’s prayer shawl and cutting off her grandfather’s beard, and her whole family being pulled out of their beds at dawn and taunted with guns. They show children forced to dig trenches, a family friend’s betrayal, Krinitz hiding out in the woods, death marches, shootings, cabbages growing on human ashes at Maidanek concentration camp, and Nazi corpses hanging from trees after the liberation. Krinitz didn’t finish embroidering her whole life story, but the final image she completed shows her arriving, after living for several years in a refugee camp in Germany, in New York Harbor with her husband and newborn.
To view all the images, visit the Art and Remembrance website, which includes image files as well as a video tour narrated by Steinhardt. I also heartily recommend the beautifully produced bookMemories of Survival, which reproduces the full series and provides an introduction, transcriptions of Krinitz’s hand-stitched descriptions, and commentary by Steinhardt.
Krinitz’s art is the primary component and anchor point of the current exhibition in Baltimore—but the exhibition also includes a dozen or so works by other artists that lament atrocities and advocate for an end to violence. “The show pays tribute to humanity’s unjust persecution of innocents and the dream of a world at peace.”
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TED TALK: “How Art Transforms Brokenness into Beauty” by Lily Yeh, April 19, 2024: Chinese American artist Lily Yeh travels the world, building community through the arts and bringing beauty to public spaces often seen as “broken.” In this TED Talk, she describes three of her collaborative projects: establishing an art park in North Philadelphia, which involved the making of murals, sculptures, and mosaics with neighborhood children and adults (a project that evolved into the nonprofit The Village of Arts and Humanities); working with survivors of the Rwandan genocide to create a memorial in Rugerero atop a mass grave (“Where there’s beauty, we see hope,” one survivor told her); and “turning dilapidation into color and abundance” at a middle school for migrant children in rural China.
Yeh is the subject of the 2014 documentary The Barefoot Artist: Healing Communities Through Art, streaming for free on Kanopy and available for rental through other platforms.
Lily Yeh (Chinese American, 1941–), Village Life in Rwanda Before the 1994 Genocide, 2015. Acrylic on brown paper. Courtesy of the artist.
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SONGS:
>> “The Law of God Is Love” by Kester Limner:Kester Limner wrote this song in June 2020 for a virtual contemplative worship service at St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church in Seattle, influenced by the simple, slow, repetitive style of Taizé chant. She shares it under a Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license, which enables reusers to distribute, remix, adapt, and build on the material in any medium or format, even commercially, as long as attribution is given to the creator.
Love, love, the law of God is love And to break every chain of oppression So we work, and we pray, O God, Your kingdom come May we see the dawn of Your justice
>> “Prayers for Freedom” by MaMuse: “Wholeheartedly fed by the folk and gospel traditions, MaMuse (Sarah Nutting and Karisha Longaker) create uplifting music to inspire the world into thriving.” “This video,” they write, “was inspired by our love and reverence for water, for friendship cherished and laughter forever praised.” I’ve previously featured the duo here and here.
Annette Fortt (American, 1944–), Jonah, 2014. Collagraph print, 16 × 19 in. Edition of 10. [for sale]
Seaweed wrapped and wrangled, nested in fronds and tangled in stipes, Jonah curled his salt- soaked spine, fetal in the bloated bonds, the belly that stretched and stank—assaulting, contracting, compressing until each rib en-caged him like fingers, like the hard hand that grabs the racing child with bruising grip to pull him back from edges or up and out of pits, those plunging depths from which we call. Cradled thus, he waited a wry span of days and nights during which his only lullaby was digestion’s gurgle and his only pillow, a spongy kelp blade. Ensconced, his vigil swelled as ocean swayed.
This poem, inspired by the collagraph Jonah by Annette Fortt, was originally published in Inkwell, a publication of Christianity Today, on January 20, 2026. Used by permission of the poet.
Rev. Dr. Bethany Besteman is the pastor of worship and discipleship at Silver Spring Christian Reformed Church in Maryland and an editor for ReformedWorship.org. She has a PhD in English language and literature from Catholic University of America. Her poetry has appeared in Ekstasis, Presence, Reformed Journal, and Cable Street.
Deborah Mesa-Pelly (Cuban American, 1968–), Rosy, 1999. Chromogenic print mounted on aluminum, 30 × 40 in. National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, DC. [view artist’s website]
At that time the disciples came to Jesus and asked, “Who is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven?” He called a child, whom he put among them, and said, “Truly I tell you, unless you change and become like children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven. Whoever becomes humble like this child is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven.”
—Matthew 18:1–4 (cf. Mark 9:33–37; 10:13–16; Luke 9:46–48)
The Architect of Love has built the door into heaven so low that no one but a small child can pass through it, unless, to get down to a child’s little height, they go in on their knees.
I saw the above photograph on display several years ago at the National Museum of Women in the Arts and was captivated. The artist, Deborah Mesa-Pelly, regularly features female subjects in her work, often on the verge of marvelous adventure. In Rosy, a girl breaks through a papered wall, entering another world on hands and knees.
The image of this child-size portal leading from a dark, dusty room into a bright and verdant landscape reminds me of Jesus’s teaching that we must receive the kingdom of heaven like little children. What is it about little ones that makes God more accessible to them? What quality or qualities of children ought we to emulate?
Matthew specifically names their humility, by which he may mean their lack of pretension or worldly ambition, their dependance and trust, and/or their openness and teachability (different from naivete). Children tend to be curious, exploratory, full of wonder, energetic, honest, and unselfconscious. These are all traits I want to embody in my life of faith as I press through walls to discover more and more of the “life more abundant” that Jesus offers.
Juneteenth (June 19) is a holiday that celebrates the end of race-based chattel slavery in the United States. It rejoices in the expansion of freedom, but it also reckons with the shadow of freedoms still denied. It is thus both backward- and forward-looking. (For more on the holiday, see the article that historian Jemar Tisby published this morning: “Juneteenth Is the Counter-Narrative to America 250.”) Below are a few artistic pieces that speak to the themes of Juneteenth.
ARTWORKS: From my two most recent visits to New York City.
>> The Floating World: Lotus (125th) by Sanford Biggers:Lotus (125th) is part of the 2013 Floating World series by the multidisciplinary artist Sanford Biggers, employing paper collage, stencils, screenprint, and spray paint to construct layered compositions that blend Japanese aesthetics with African American history. “Floating world” translates the Japanese term ukiyo-e, referring to Edo-era woodblock prints, and “125th” likely refers to the main street in Harlem. The work features a mandala-like lotus flower whose petals are eighteenth-century diagrams showing enslaved humans tightly packed into the cargo hold of a ship. What looks pleasing from a distance is, on closer inspection, horrifying.
Sanford Biggers (American, 1970–), The Floating World: Lotus (125th), 2013. Screenprint and collage, image: 27 15/16 × 26 3/8 in. (71 × 67 cm), sheet (irregular): 27 15/16 × 26 3/8 in. (71 × 67 cm). Edition 1/30. The Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs: Print Collection, New York Public Library. Photo: Victoria Emily Jones. [object record]
Biggers lived in Japan for three years in the 1990s, where he became greatly influenced by Zen Buddhism. In Buddhism, the lotus is associated with awakening, purity, transcendence. The slave-ship-lotus is a motif the artist has used in other works—see, e.g., here and here—and I’m not exactly sure what to make of it. Is it about how the pain, trauma, and destruction wrought by slavery can be transmuted into enlightenment, progress? Or is the disjunction between beautiful flower and ugly abuse meant to be ironic, perhaps a statement about how we tend to palliate the vile parts of American history?
>> Contending with Contingency I by Kenturah Davis:Kenturah Davis is a multidisciplinary artist working between Los Angeles and Accra. Oscillating between facets of portraiture and design, her work explores the fundamental role language has in shaping how we understand ourselves and the world. Contending with Contingency I is the first work in a series engaging the Thirteenth Amendment to the US Constitution, which abolished slavery, with one exception: Those convicted of a crime can be subjected to forced labor. The amendment was a milestone, but the punishment clause creates a contingency under which slavery can remain legal. (Ava DuVernay’s illuminating documentary 13th, on Netflix, examines how this loophole has and continues to be exploited to disproportionately incarcerate Black people.)
Kenturah Davis (American, 1984–), Contending with Contingency I, 2021. Carbon pencil, pencil, and blind debossing on nine sheets of paper, 132 × 81 in. (335.3 × 205.7 cm). Museum of Modern Art, New York. Photo: Victoria Emily Jones. [object record]
The eight pieces in Davis’s Contending with Contingency series depict a Black woman dancing over transcripts of the 1864–65 congressional debates regarding the language and provisions of the Thirteenth Amendment, and whether to pass it. Here’s an excerpt, for example, of the opinion given by Senator Lazarus Powell from Kentucky:
I do not believe it was ever designed by the founders of our Government that the Constitution of the United States should be so amended as to destroy property. I do not believe it is the province of the Federal Government to say what is or what is not property. . . . You seem to care for nothing but the negro. . . . You seem to be inspired by no other wish than to elevate the negro to equality and give him liberty. . . . I believe this government was made by white men and for white men; and if it is ever preserved it must be preserved by white men.
“The structures that shape our experience in the world extend from the ways we use language,” Davis says. “The implications of this language are activated through our bodies.” The legislators’ oppositional words, and the legacy they reflect and perpetuate, impede the free movement of the dancing figure—but she appears to be pushing past the obstacles, resisting dissent, claiming her right to liberty. I read the work, especially in light of the whole series, as ultimately emancipatory.
>> “Joy” by Raye, Mike Sabath, Tom Richards, Amma, and Absolutely: This song appears on the second studio album of the British pop sensation Raye (the stage name of Rachel Agatha Keen), This Music May Contain Hope, released in March. It’s based on Psalm 30:5: “Weeping may linger for the night, but joy comes with the morning.” Here’s Raye singing it on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert with her sisters Amma and Absolutely. (A worship song on late-night TV!) See also the recent cover bythe Good Shepherd Collective.
>> “Someday We’ll All Be Free” by Donny Hathaway and Edward Howard, performed by the Good Shepherd Collective: In 1973, the American soul singer Donny Hathaway wrote the melody to this classic, and his friend Edward Howard wrote the lyrics. Howard said he intended it as an encouragement to Hathaway, who was struggling with paranoid schizophrenia; but it has since become an anthem of Black American civil rights. It’s sung here by Charles Jones for a Good Shepherd New York digital worship service.
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COMPILATION:“Early Photographs of Juneteenth Celebrations,”Public Domain Review: Many of the photographs that survive from turn-of-the-century Juneteenth celebrations in Texas depict elegantly dressed groups in horse-drawn carriages elaborately decorated with flowers down to the wheels.
Martha Yates Jones (left) and Pinkie Yates (right), daughters of Rev. Jack Yates, park their decorated carriage in front of Antioch Baptist Church in Houston’s Fourth Ward on June 19, 1908. Photo courtesy of the Houston Public Library Digital Archives.
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POEM:“Gospel”by Rita Dove: This poem is from Rita Dove’s Pulitzer Prize–winning collection Thomas and Beulah (Carnegie Mellon University Press, 1986), based on the lives of her maternal grandparents, who moved from Tennessee and Georgia to Akron, Ohio, during the Great Migration. Opening with the instantly recognizable phrase “Swing low” from the African American spiritual “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot,” it describes her grandparents’ Black church congregation as “a humming ship of voices / big with all / the wrongs done / done them,” but that “ride[s] joy.” Hymns, gospel songs, and spirituals have had a formative influence on Dove, a member of the African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Zion Church, as they did too for her predecessors, lifting them out of the miseries inflicted on them by Jim Crow America and into heaven, a place of wholeness, affirmation, and triumph, where racism and lynch mobs can’t touch.
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CHORAL-ORCHESTRAL WORK:Requiem for Colour: A Journey through Lament and Joy by Jeffrey L. Ames: Composed by Dr. Jeffery Ames, Requiem for Colour (2022) is a thirteen-movement work for SATB choir, soprano, tenor, orator, rapper, orchestra, and African percussion that adapts the form of the Requiem Mass, traditionally offered for the repose of the souls of the deceased, to tell a story of Black enslavement and liberation. Gentry Publications, who publishes the score, provides this description:
Requiem for Colour by Jeffery L. Ames is a powerful choral and orchestral work that honors the lives and legacies of enslaved Blacks from 1619 to 1865 and contemporary Black martyrs who sacrificed for equality and freedom. This masterwork skillfully blends idiomatic Black musical genres with Western European composition styles, creating a unique and profound musical journey. The requiem traces the Black experience from West Africa, through the Middle Passage, slavery, and sharecropping in the South, to the Civil Rights Movement and today’s ongoing fight against racism and injustice. The libretto incorporates narratives from enslaved people, sharecroppers, and contemporary activists, offering an aesthetic experience that both commemorates and challenges. This deeply moving work is a testament to the resilience and complexity of Black American history.
In this February 5, 2025, performance at the Fisher Center for the Performing Arts at Belmont University in Nashville, Ames conducts the Belmont University Oratorio Chorus and Orchestra, comprising over 450 students. The performance features soprano NaGuanda Nobles, tenor Rodrick Dixon, and orators Jasmine Simmons and Elliott Robinson, plus a lyrical rap by the composer’s daughter, Lydia Ames. The concert and its recording—which aired June 18, 2025, on WNPT, Nashville’s PBS station—were made possible by a grant from the Creative Arts Collective.
My roundups aren’t typically thematic, but in this one I’ve pulled together content around the Psalms—plus a link to my new monthly playlist, from which I call out particular psalms.
SPOTIFY PLAYLIST: June 2026 (Art & Theology): Most months of the year, I release a playlist of thirty songs, mostly by Christian artists—an assortment of psalms, hymns, and other spiritually inclined music. The psalm settings I feature this month are Psalm 10:1 for choir by the South Korean composer Jung Jae-il (known for his work on Parasite and Squid Game); “Psalm 55” by Poor Bishop Hooper (they’ve set all 150 songs from the Psalter!); Psalm 97:11 in Hebrew (“Light dawns for the righteous and joy for the upright in heart”) by the Jewish women’s a cappella ensemble Vocolot; Psalm 103:1, a new cover of Andraé Crouch’s “Bless His Holy Name” by Paul Zach, Jessica Fox, and IAMSON; Psalm 117, in English and Spanish and with Latin rhythms, by The Soil and The Seed Project (see below); a song by the indie singer-songwriter Sam Wilson that uses Psalm 119:103 as a refrain; and “Psalm 139” by the New Jersey–based DJ duo (and married couple) KNGDM REVIVAL.
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NEW ALBUM:Psalmsby The Soil and The Seed Project: Released last month, this double album contains thirty-four new songs and one re-release. The first disc consists of word-for-word settings of psalms using the NIV or NRSV translations—hence why the album is classified as part of their “Bible Memory Collection”—whereas the second disc comprises songs inspired by the Psalms—loose paraphrases and, more commonly, songs that talk to God in a psalmic vein, encompassing the same broad emotional range as the biblical Psalter. There are songs of praise and gratitude, of weariness and lament, as well as petitionary songs seeking rescue or direction, presence or protection, stillness or fruitfulness.
Here’s the bilingual Psalm 117 setting “Praise the LORD, All You Nations”—the shortest psalm and the shortest chapter in the entire Bible—by Seth Thomas Crissman and Jorge Eliecer Triana, sung by Nicolas Melas and Lauren Yoder. I’ve followed it with “Lord, I Get Grumpy” by Clara Weaver, which she sings with Nichole Barrows while, it sounds like, doing dishes! “Lord, I need your patience” is something I pray a lot; now I can sing it.
Led by my friend Seth Thomas Crissman (MDiv, Eastern Mennonite Seminary), The Soil and The Seed Project is more than just a songwriting collective; they create all kinds of “creative resources that help us together turn towards Jesus in the ordinary moments of life.” Their latest Psalms package includes, in addition to the album, coloring pages and a Little Liturgies booklet with responsive readings, reflection questions, and suggested activities, all written with children in mind. You can download all these resources for FREE from their website!
>> “Considering Lament: Psalms of Protest, Pain and Hope,” Presbyterian Church in Ireland: This video presents Considering Lament: Psalms of Protest, Pain and Hope, a suite of eight lament psalms composed in 2026 by David and Karen Campbell based on the experiences of victims and first responders to the Troubles, a violent ethno-nationalist-religious conflict in Northern Ireland that lasted from the late 1960s to 1998 but whose wounds are still felt. The suite grew out of a project conceived by the Peace and Reconciliation Panel of the Presbyterian Church in Ireland’s Council for Public Affairs, which involved Rev. Dr. Karen Campbell and her husband David convening Psalm study groups in eight locations across Northern Ireland over the course of two years. The stories, thoughts, and feelings shared in response to the eight given lament psalms—Psalms 5, 7, 39, 59, 64, 82, 109, and 140—and in relation to the sectarian traumas the participants have endured informed the Campbells’ musical adaptations of these psalms. Click on the link above for the song list.
The lament psalms, Campbell says, “provided vessels to channel all kinds of emotions – from disappointment, anger, betrayal and sorrow – without losing hope,” an avenue “to present our hurts before the One who knows what it means to experience pain . . . and grief.” The Considering Lament suite was recorded by local artists in a studio in South Armagh and is available for free streaming, and you can download an accompanying booklet that includes sheet music. It premiered March 26 at an evening of live worship (see video) that interwove the eight songs with painful stories told firsthand, with a liturgy to connect them and to guide worshippers in prayer and reflection around the theme of suffering and loss.
To learn more about the Considering Lament project, read this wonderful interview with Karen Campbell, conducted by Joan Huyser-Honig for the Calvin Institute of Christian Worship.
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HISTORICAL PSALTERS: Barberini Oriental 2 and Ethiopien d’Abbadie 105: As you know, I’m very interested in Christian material culture, and if a cultural object has an appealing aesthetic, all the better! Here are two psalters (a volume containing the biblical book of Psalms) I photographed at the Africa and Byzantium exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2023. The first, dated to somewhere between the twelfth and fourteenth centuries, is a pentaglot (five-language) psalter from Dayr al-Suryan, a multicultural and multilinguistic monastic community in Egypt. From left to right in parallel columns are Ge‘ez, Syriac, Coptic, Arabic, Armenian, and Syriac again. This format would have facilitated comparative study of the Bible as well as common readings in the liturgy.
Pentaglot Psalter, Egypt, 12th–14th century (restored and rebound 1636). Ink on parchment, 14 1/2 × 11 × 2 3/4 in. (36.8 × 28 × 7 cm). Vatican City, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Barb. Or. 2, fols. 2v–3r. Photo: Victoria Emily Jones. [object record]
Another psalter, from fifteenth-century Ethiopia, was open to a full-page illustration of King David, the author of many of the psalms, playing an Ethiopian box lyre called a begena, traditionally played by elite and royal men. He is shaded by an attendant with a ceremonial umbrella. In most countries at the time, it was common practice for artists to contextualize the Old and New Testament saints of the ancient Near East to their own culture. (Think, for example, of the contemporaneous Italian and Dutch Renaissance paintings.) This anonymous artist has signified “imperial ruler” by giving David the familiar trappings of an Ethiopian emperor. The manuscript would have been used by a priest or monk in the Ethiopian Orthodox Church in both his personal devotions and liturgical services.
David the Musician, from a psalter from Tigray, Ethiopia, 15th century. Ink and tempera on parchment, 11 7/8 × 8 1/4 in. (30 × 21 cm). Ethiopien d’Abbadie 105, fols. 13v–14r. Collection of the Académie des Sciences, Institut de France, on deposit at the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Paris. Photo: Victoria Emily Jones. [object record]
OLD HUNDRED is a famous hymn tune from the Genevan Psalter, so named because it came to be associated with William Kethe’s metrical paraphrase of Psalm 100, “All People That on Earth Do Dwell.” In her early poem “OLD HUNDRED,” written in the latter half of the 1960s, the African American poet Lucille Clifton (1936–2010) also engages with the Hundredth Psalm, interleaving its first line with the opening lyric of the spiritual “Nobody Knows the Trouble I’ve Seen” and blues-like phrases to create a multitextured expression of praise and lament.
Like the Psalter itself, life encompasses both gladness and sorrow. While many of the psalms call us to rejoice and give thanks, others express deep pain and questioning. The vocalist and composer Ruth Naomi Floyd says the greatest blues line ever written is Psalm 22:1, which Jesus “sings” from the cross: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”
Clifton had seen trouble; so had Jesus. (“Nobody knows but Jesus . . .”) And Jesus is a friend who stands with us in hardship, weathering it alongside. When God’s promises seem far off and we can’t muster a hallelujah, looking to Jesus can give us the strength, both to be honest about our trouble and to put it in God’s hands and so lay hold of joy. “OLD HUNDRED” wrestles through that.
Does this poem feel disjunctive or integrated? What do you make of Clifton’s use of all-caps? After reading the poem, read Psalm 100 and the lyrics to “Nobody Knows” and compare them. Consider how they both fit into the church’s repertoire of songs.
“OLD HUNDRED” can be found in Clifton’s Collected Poems, a volume I highly recommend.
Käthe Kollwitz (German, 1867–1945), Mary and Elizabeth, 1929. Woodcut, sheet 14 × 13 1/2 in. (35.6 × 34.3 cm). Buffalo AKG Art Museum, Buffalo, New York.
In the morning it takes the mind a while To find the world again, lost after dream Has taken the heart to the underworld To play with the shades of lives not chosen.
She awakens a stranger in her own life, Her breath loud in the room full of listening. Taken without touch, her flesh feels the grief Of belonging to what cannot be seen.
Soon she can no longer bear to be alone. At dusk she takes the road into the hills. An anxious moon doubles her among the stone. A door opens, the older one’s eyes fill.
Two women locked in a story of birth. Each mirrors the secret the other heard.
John O’Donohue (1956–2008) was an Irish poet, philosopher, and best-selling author of Anam Cara (1996), Conamara Blues (2001), and To Bless the Space Between Us (2008), among other books. Ordained to the Catholic priesthood in 1982, he retired from priestly ministry in 2000 to devote himself to full-time writing and social activism. He was deeply influenced by Hegel, Meister Eckhart, and Celtic spirituality, and much of his work has to do with beauty, friendship, and how the material and the spiritual intertwine in human experience.
