Here are three sung invocations of the Holy Spirit, seeking his power, liberation, comfort, light, and renewal.
>> “Holy Spirit, Come with Power”: This hymn was written by Anne Neufeld Rupp in 1970, who set it to a Sacred Harp tune from 1844 attributed to B. F. White. It’s performed here by the Bel Canto Singers from Hesston College in Kansas, featuring Gretchen Priest-May on fiddle and Tim May on acoustic guitar.
I was introduced to this hymn through the Voices Together Mennonite hymnal, where it appears in both English and Spanish as no. 57.
>> “Mweya Mutsvene” (Holy Spirit, Take Your Place) by Joshua Mtima and The Unveiled:The Unveiled is a collective of Christian musicians from Harare, Zimbabwe, founded by Joshua Mtima in 2020. Here they sing one of their songs in Shona. An English translation is provided onscreen. [HT: Global Christian Worship]
>> “Ven Espíritu Divino (Secuencia de Pentecostés)” (Come, Spirit Divine) by Pablo Coloma, performed by Chiara Bellucci: The Spanish lyrics of this contemporary Christian song from the Latin American Catholic tradition are in the YouTube video description. They ask the Holy Spirit, “sweet guest of our souls,” to come bringing healing, regeneration, growth, joy, and charisms.
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SUBSTACK POST: “Veni Creator Spiritus: A Lush Middle English Hymn” by Grace Hamman, Medievalish: Dr. Grace Hamman shares Friar William Herebert’s (ca. 1270–ca. 1333) Middle English translation of the classic Latin Pentecost hymn attributed to Rabanus Maurus (ca. 780–856), “Veni Creator Spiritus” [previously]. Herebert uses words like vor-speker (for-speaker; i.e., intercessor), lodes-mon (lodesman; i.e., journeyman or navigator), and shuppere (shaper) as titles for the Holy Spirit.
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ORGAN WORK: “Improvisation on Veni Creator Spiritus” by Alfred V. Fedak: “Your congregation will hear the rushing of the Holy Spirit in this improvisatory prelude (taken from Fedak’s and Carl P. Daw’s oratorio The Glories of God’s Grace),” writes Selah Publishing. “Fedak effectively uses sweeping whole-tone scale passages and arpeggios to indicate the Spirit’s presence, while the pedal plays phrases of the hymn tune,” a medieval plainchant. The publisher has posted the following performance of the piece (audio only), by the composer himself, along with a selection of Pentecost art from the thirteenth to eighteenth centuries. [HT: Global Christian Worship]
There are many other works on organ (fantasias, partitas, fugues) based on the “Veni Creator Spiritus” tune; view a select list on Wikipedia.
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POEM:“Book of Hours”by Kimberly Johnson: “A pentecost of bloom: all the furred tongues / awag in the iris patch, windrush through the fireflower.” So opens the poem “Book of Hours” by Kimberly Johnson [previously], from her collection Uncommon Prayer (Persea, 2014). A book of hours is a genre of medieval prayer-book used by laypeople, which arranges prayers, scripture, and other devotional texts for reading at prescribed times of the day. Johnson’s “Book of Hours” draws on the fields of codicology (the study of manuscripts as physical objects) and botany to consider how God’s Spirit moves through and enlivens the material world, be it the irises, fire lilies, alyssum, and paperwhite narcissus in her garden, or the ink and natural pigments on calfskin—green verdigris, red cochineal, yellow curcumin—in the rare manuscripts library where she examines a book of hours whose embellished Latin text she can’t quite make out but whose beauty enraptures her nonetheless. These are but two untranslatable experiences of sensual, embodied communion with God that Johnson narrates in the collection, the paint flakes on her lips and the pollen on her wrist a chrism and a prayer.
Virginie Cognet, Danse, 2023. Gouache on satin-finish watercolor paper, 70 × 50 cm.
Last night did Christ the Sun rise from the dark, The mystic harvest of the fields of God, And now the little wandering tribes of bees Are brawling in the scarlet flowers abroad. The winds are soft with birdsong; all night long Darkling the nightingale her descant told, And now inside church doors the happy folk The Alleluia chant a hundredfold. O Father of thy folk, be thine by right The Easter joy, the threshold of the light.
This English translation of Sedulius Scottus’s “Carmen paschale” originally appeared in Mediaeval Latin Lyricsby Helen Waddell (Henry Holt, 1929) and is in the public domain.
Sedulius Scottus (fl. 840–860) was an early medieval Irish monk, poet, teacher, and biblical commentator. (He is not to be confused with the fifth-century poet Caelius Sedulius, who also wrote a [much longer] Carmen paschale, consisting of five books.) Driven out of his monastery by Viking invaders, Sedulius settled in the city of Liège under the protection of Bishop Hartgar. While living in exile on the Continent, he established himself as a leading literary figure of the Carolingian Renaissance. One of his most important works is De Rectoribus Christianis (On Christian Rulers), an instructional treatise on governing and a noteworthy contribution to Christian ethics. Sedulius was at least trilingual, proficient in Irish, Greek, and Latin. Eighty-three of his poems survive, composed in a variety of classical meters and ranging from mock heroic epics and philosophical puzzles to hymns of praise and drinking songs.
Helen Waddell (1889–1965) was a medieval literature scholar, historical novelist, playwright, and translator (from medieval French and Latin to English) who was awarded the Benson Medal of the Royal Society of Literature. She was born in Tokyo to an Irish Presbyterian missionary family, spending the first eleven years of her life in Japan. She was later educated in Belfast, Oxford, and Paris and became part of a circle of friends in London that included W. B. Yeats, Virginia Woolf, and Siegfried Sassoon. In addition to writing, she worked as a literary adviser and reader for the esteemed publisher Constable. She is the subject of an award-winning biography by Dame Felicitas Corrigan, published in 1986.
VIDEO: “The Lord is Risen! Proclaimed by people from 29 countries”: This video was put out in 2020 by ICF Rotterdam, an intercultural church in the Netherlands whose congregation consists of members from over forty nations! They asked a handful of them to recite the Paschal greeting in their native tongue, so represented here are Indonesian, Chinese, Zulu, Igbo, Urdu, Nepali, Kurdish, Romanian, and more. [HT: Global Christian Worship]
Wycliffe Bibliafordítók (Wycliffe Bible Translators) in Hungary produced a similar video last year:
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SERMON: “Let Beauty Awake” by N. T. Wright: One of the things I love about the Anglican cleric N. T. Wright’s preaching and teaching is the importance he places on beauty. (I actually met Wright once—and it was at an arts conference.) In this sermon, which he preached at Durham Cathedral on Easter Sunday 2009, he takes as his text what I’ve heard him say is his favorite chapter in the Bible, John 20, and discusses how in Jesus’s rising, the glory of God was let loose in all the world.
“Easter carries with it a strange and powerful beauty,” he says. “I hope that, by exploring the biblical roots of why this is so, I may have surprised some of you at least into asking, afresh, What can we do to celebrate, more consciously and deliberately, the reawakening of beauty which comes with the light of Easter Day? How can we take this forward, as an explicit project, so that a world so full of ugliness and functionality, and in consequence so full of unbelief or false belief, can once again be wooed into belief and love?”
He opens the sermon by quoting a stanza from a poem by Robert Louis Stevenson, and near the close, he reprises it in his own words, which were developed into a song by Steve Bell:
Let Beauty awake in the morn from the cool of the grave, Beauty awake from death; Let Beauty awake, For Jesus’ sake, In the hour when the angels their silence break And the garden is bright with His Breath.
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RECIPE: “Tsoureki: The Symbolic Greek Easter Bread”: On her blog The Liturgical Home (and on Instagram), Ashley Tumlin Wallace shares a recipe for tsoureki, a brioche-like sweet bread made by many Greek Christians on Easter. It is soft and fluffy, flavored with citrus, and decorated with red-dyed eggs!
SPOKEN WORD + SONG: “Because He Lives” by Sharon Irving: Singer-songwriter, worship leader, and spoken word artist Sharon Irving [previously] recorded this video for City First Church Spring Creek’s virtual worship service for Easter 2020. It begins with an original spoken word piece, and then is followed by her singing the Gaither classic “Because He Lives.”
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SONG: “Sbab Dia Hidup” (Because He Lives) by Prison Akustik: The song “Because He Lives,” written in 1971 by Bill and Gloria Gaither, has made its way all around the world and has been translated into many languages. Here is the group Prison Akustik [previously] singing it in Indonesian.
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SUBSTACK POST: “Myrrhbearers & Magi” by Beth Felker Jones: In her Church Blogmatics post from last week, theologian Beth Felker Jones [previously] shares three new digital collages she made: one of the three myrrh-bearing women who discovered Jesus’s empty tomb, one of the three magi who brought gifts to the newborn Christ, and one that combines both groups of devoted witnesses. She provides descriptions of each and two original prayers, including the one below.
Digital collage (with AI-generated elements) by Beth Felker Jones, 2025
Holy Father, who accompanied your daughters on their way to the tomb, and in the power of your Spirit, turned their sorrow into joy, bring us too into the joy of those who found the tomb empty, and incorporate us, with them, into your resurrection life. With our sisters at the tomb that day, help us to say, “I have seen the Lord!” Amen.
Greta Leśko (Polish, 1979–), Rabbuni!, 2021. Tempera on board, 29 × 30 cm. [purchase giclée print]
“At the place where Jesus was crucified, there was a garden, and in the garden a new tomb, in which no one had been laid.” —John 19:41
From garden to garden, God’s body moved. Born to breath beneath Eden’s tree, He named Himself Adam, Herself Eve, a twice-crowned exiled King and Queen. Gethsemane came a dark surprise— (Who knew where the garden gate might lead?)— the wind in the olives, the moon’s slow rise, the tell-tale blood on bony knees. That gray Friday we carried Christ home to one last garden, while evening birds sang a song of pity His stopped ears heard until He rose and hove away the stone. Our good dead God, while the dawn birds keened, bloomed anew in the garden’s sudden green.
Angela Alaimo O’Donnell is a writer, poet, and professor at Fordham University in New York City, where she teaches English and creative writing and serves as associate director of the Curran Center for American Catholic Studies. She is the author of eleven books of poems and four books of prose, three of which are about Flannery O’Connor, and her essays—about the poetic craft, the nexus between faith and art, and literature in the context of the Catholic intellectual tradition—appear in numerous publications, including the magazines America and Commonweal.
HOLY WEEK TRADITION: Antigua, Guatemala, is renowned for its annual Good Friday observance, which involves the laying out of alfombras (carpets) of multicolored sawdust through the city’s cobblestone streets, hundreds of feet long. On Maundy Thursday, the city closes so that families and businesses can spend the day constructing the carpets, applying the sawdust to planned designs using stencils and strainers and adding pine needles, flowers, fruits, and other natural materials as well.
People watch while locals make an alfombra (carpet) of dyed sawdust for Antigua’s Good Friday processions, the most famous in Latin America. Photo: Lucy Brown, 2016.
At 4 a.m. on Good Friday, the processions begin, with people carrying floats that bear statues of Christ carrying his cross, followed by marching bands playing solemn music. (This is a remembrance of Jesus’s walk to Calvary.) As their feet pass over the alfombras, the dust scatters. Locals and visitors gather along the streets dressed in black for mourning, and at 11 p.m. a figure of Jesus is laid to rest in the church.
Here are two resources for exploring this tradition further:
>> VIDEO: “Alfombras de Semana Santa en Guatemala,” dir.Federica Dominguez: This short film (in Spanish, with English subtitles) interviews Rolando Ortiz, an alfombrero who is also a shoemaker. He explains that the carpets hark back to Jesus’s triumphal entry into Jerusalem, when the crowds strewed his path with palm branches (giving him the red carpet treatment, so to speak). Even though the alfombras last only a brief time, locals spare no expense in bringing them to fruition each year—“for Jesus,” Ortiz says. “It is an act of gratitude above all.” An offering of beauty and praise.
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NEW ALBUM: As Foretold, Part 3 by Poor Bishop Hooper: Released today, this is the final album in a trilogy based on the prophetic fulfillment passages in the Gospel of Matthew. It centers on Jesus’s passion and concludes with a resurrection epilogue. As with all their music, the duo graciously offers it for free download from their website.
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SONGS performed by Emorja Roberson: Emorja Roberson [previously] is a singer, gospel choir conductor, and assistant professor of music and African American studies at Oxford College of Emory University in Georgia. I enjoy following his YouTube channel. Here are two songs that are especially fitting for Holy Week.
>> “I Know It Was the Blood”: Roberson sings three verses of this beloved African American spiritual: the title verse, “They whipped him all night long,” and “He never said a mumblin’ word.” The song is more typically sung in a major key, and its full lyrics span Christ’s passion, resurrection, ascension, and second coming. But Roberson slows down the tempo and sings in a minor key, homing in on the sorrow of Good Friday.
>> “He Decided to Die” by Margaret Pleasant Douroux: Roberson, on keys, sings a gospel classic with friends Marcus Morton and Cameron Scott, a song that emphasizes Christ’s resoluteness on the cross, his endurance for love.
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VISUAL COMMENTARIES: “After the Order of Melchizedek” by Victoria Emily Jones: My latest contribution to the Visual Commentary on Scripture, a project based out of King’s College London, was published earlier this month. Tasked with choosing and commenting on three artworks that dialogue with Hebrews 7–8, I landed on a “You Are a Priest Forever” icon from Russia (very strange!), an Antwerp Mannerist triptych that centers the Last Supper, and (my favorite) a wall painting of Christ the Grapevine from a Romanian church. I was interested to explore the idea of how Jesus, in giving his body and blood, is both the offerer and the offered, both priest and sacrifice.
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POEM: “The Death of Christ” by Emperor Kangxi: Emperor Kangxi (1654–1722) ruled in China for sixty-one years during the Qing Dynasty. In 1692 he issued the Edict of Toleration, which barred attacks on churches and legalized the practice of Christianity among Chinese people. Curious about and respectful of other faiths, he penned this short poem on the Crucifixion using the classical qi-yen-she form.
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EXHIBITION: Tara Sellios: Ask Now the Beasts, Fitchburg Art Museum, January 18, 2025–January 18, 2026:Tara Sellios is a multidisciplinary artist from South Boston working mainly in large-format photography. Delighting in detail and complex symbolism, she often uses insects, dried fauna, bone, and other organic matter to create elaborate still lifes that she then photographs under dramatic lighting. She is inspired by art historical representations of the end of the world, especially the bizarre paintings of Hieronymus Bosch and Albrecht Dürer’s Apocalypse woodcuts, and by seventeenth-century Dutch vanitas paintings.
The photographs in her current solo show, Ask Now the Beasts at Fitchburg Art Museum in Massachusetts, are “contemporary allegories of suffering and transcendence.” The exhibition’s title comes from Job 12:7.
Two of the works on display are a pair of crosses: Umbra (Latin for “darkness” or “shadow”) and Dilucesco (“to begin to grow light, to dawn”), which together suggest a movement from death to resurrection. Constructed with a throng of black beetles and other black insects, the Umbra cross evokes the detail from the Synoptic Gospels’ Crucifixion accounts that at noon, “darkness came over the whole land until three in the afternoon, while the sun’s light failed” (Luke 23:44–45; cf. Matt. 27:45; Mark 15:33). Dilucesco, on the other hand, shows the cross seemingly exploding into light, as white moths and other winged insects break out of their cruciform shape. View these two photographic artworks, plus a few process photos and sketches the artist sent me, below. See, too, www.tarasellios.com.
Tara Sellios (American, 1987–), Umbra, 2024, from the series Ask Now the Beasts. Inkjet print from 8 × 10 negative, 55 × 35 in. Courtesy of the artist.Tara Sellios (American, 1987–), Dilucesco, 2024, from the series Ask Now the Beasts. Inkjet print from 8 × 10 negative, 55 × 35 in. Courtesy of the artist.
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Pelican in Her Piety, 1880–81. Mosaic, Palatine Chapel, Aachen, Germany.
The pelican was one of the most popular animal symbols for Christ in the Middle Ages, appearing widely in art and literature. The association was first made in the Physiologus, a Late Antique Greek compilation of moralized animal lore written (probably around the year 200) in Alexandria and intended for Christian edification. Its anonymous author says the mother pelican is such “an exceeding lover of its young” that, to revive them from death, she pierces her breast with her beak and spills her blood over them.
The church sometimes refers to this allegorical bird as the vulning pelican (from the Latin vulnerō, “to wound”), or the Pelican in Her Piety.
The Christological parallel is obvious: Jesus submitted to being pierced with nails and spear on the cross, his heart’s blood spilt, in order to give life to his children. But the Physiologus cites a more obscure biblical passage: “ὡμοιώθην πελεκᾶνι ἐρημικῷ” (Ps. 101:7a LXX). In the Latin Vulgate, that’s “Similis factus sum pelicano solitudinis,” and in English, “I am like a pelican of the wilderness” (Ps. 102:6a KJV). The Physiologus author puts these words of the psalmist, which express a sense of isolation, into the mouth of Christ, lonely in his messianic ministry and in his passion.
Detail from the 13th-century Redemption Window at Chartres Cathedral in France, showing a pelican (a figure of Christ) feeding her young with her own blood as King David looks on, holding a scroll with the inscription “Similis factus sum pellicamo,” from Psalm 102:6. Photo: Adrian Barlow. There are similar glass panels at Rouen and Le Mans.
Not all parts of the pelican legend recounted in the Physiologus map easily onto Christ’s love for his church. The chicks are dead because they kept striking their parents in the face, and their parents, striking back, killed them. The parents feel bad, and it’s after three days of mourning that mama bird breaks herself open to bring back her little ones.
In his commentary on Psalm 102, Augustine writes, “Let us not pass over what is said, or even read, of this bird, that is, the pelican.” Standing over her dead chicks, “the mother wounds herself deeply, and pours forth her blood over her young, bathed in which they recover life. This may be true, it may be false: yet if it be true, see how it agrees with him, who gave us life by his blood. It agrees with him in that the mother’s flesh recalls to life her young with her blood; it agrees well. For he calls himself a hen brooding over her young. If, then, it be so truly, this bird does closely resemble the flesh of Christ, by whose blood we have been called to life.”
Augustine then goes on to explain how the mother’s killing her young relates to God metaphorically killing our old self so that he can then raise us up to new life in Christ; he likens conversion to death and rebirth. Medieval theologians loved to stretch allegories to the extreme!
A more streamlined version of the pelican legend that got passed down omits the filicide, focusing simply on the bird’s animating sacrifice—on how her shed blood raises the dead to life. And after the Feast of Corpus Christi was established in 1311, a variant emerged that said the pelican feeds her young with her blood when no other food would satisfy, a picture that resonated with the increased attention on the Eucharist in the Latin West.
The Physiologus, which contains the earliest known appearance of the pelican legend, was translated from Greek into Latin sometime between the fourth and early sixth centuries, and from there into Ethiopic, Armenian, Syriac, and a multitude of European and Middle Eastern vernaculars. By the end of the twelfth century its legends were absorbed into the bestiary, a genre of popular nature-book in keeping with the encyclopedic taste of the High Middle Ages.
In Art
The vulning pelican has appeared in all kinds of visual media from late antiquity through the medieval and premodern eras and on into the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, including illuminated prayerbooks, missals, bestiaries (as in the tiled gallery below; hover to view captions, or click to enter carousel); panel paintings, frescoes; mosaics; stained glass windows; tapestries; lecterns, roof bosses, bench ends, misericords, corbels; and a range of liturgical objects and vestments.
From a miscellany containing an illustrated copy of Hugh of Fouilloy’s De avibus, Italy, late 13th or early 14th century. Biblioteca Statale di Cremona, MS 199, fol. 11v. https://bestiary.ca/beasts/beastgallery244.htm
From an illuminated copy of Der Naturen Bloeme (The Flower of Nature) by Jacob van Maerlant, Flanders, ca. 1350. The Hague, Koninklijke Bibliotheek, KA 16, fol. 96vb. https://manuscripts.kb.nl/show/images/KA+16/page/26
Pelican in Her Piety, 1331–32. Stained glass, Lady Chapel, St Michael and All Angels, Felton, Northumberland, England. Photo: Ann Chapman.Pelicanin Her Piety, 15th century. Stained glass, All Saints Church, Oaksey, England. Photo: Rex Harris.Pelican in Her Piety, All Saints Church, Bishop Burton, East Riding of Yorkshire, EnglandPelican in Her Piety, 1476. Fresco, Bollerup Church, Sweden. Photo: Stig Alenas.Painted choir vault, 15th century, Mariakerk (St. Mary’s Church), ‘t Zandt, Groningen, Netherlands. Photo: Ana Sudani.Oak wood roof boss, ca. 1470–80, St Mary the Virgin, Shrewsbury, Shropshire, England. Photo: Ana Sudani.Bench end by Henry Ringham, 19th century, St Margaret, Ipswich, Suffolk, England. Photo: Simon Knott.Carved oak misericord from Sheffield Cathedral, England, 1920Sculpture with Pelicans, Switzerland, 16th century. Painted linden and willow wood, 29.5 × 27 × 26 cm. Landesmuseum (Swiss National Museum), Zurich, LM-3972.Triptych with the Virgin and Child (detail), Cologne or Lower Rhine, ca. 1425–30. Tempera and gold leaf on oak wood. LVR-LandesMuseum Bonn, Germany. [view full triptych]Plate with the Pelican in Her Piety, Dinant or Malines, Netherlands, 15th century. Brass, diameter 19 7/8 in. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. It’s unknown whether this plate was used domestically or liturgically (i.e., for the Eucharist).Tapestry with a Pelican Feeding Her Young (detail), Germany (Lüne Abbey), ca. 1500. Linen and wool, 65 × 233 cm. Kloster Lüne Museum für sakrale Textilkunst, Lüneburg, Germany, Inv. LUEKO Ha 010.05. Source: Book of Beasts: The Bestiary in the Medieval World, cat. 41bCushion cover (detail), England, ca. 1640–70. Wool and silk embroidery on linen, 55.9 × 107.5 cm. Victoria and Albert Museum, London. The primary scenes are the Hospitality of Abraham and the Sacrifice of Isaac. [view full cushion]Pelican in Her Piety, Russia, early 19th centuryPelican in Her Piety, 1907–9. Relief carving from the exterior of Holy Trinity Church, St Andrews, Scotland. Photo: Joy Marie Clarkson.Pelican of Mercy, 1956. Stone relief carving, exterior of Blessed Sacrament Catholic Church, Sioux City, Iowa.
The bird doesn’t always look like an actual pelican, though. It could be that some of the artists had never seen one, although the Dalmatian pelican, which has the long bill and the expandable throat pouch that we most associate with the genus, had been widespread across Europe since ancient times. More likely, the imaginative rendering of the pelican in Christian art derives from the account of the bird in book 12 (“De animalibus”) of the widely influential compendium Etymologies by the Spanish archbishop Isidore of Seville, written around 623, which repeats the popular legend and adds that the pelican lives in Egypt. An exotic bird therefore required exotic treatment.
Neither does the behavior the Physiologus ascribes to pelicans have any basis in natural fact. It’s possible the legend arose from the observation that the pelican sometimes bends its beak into its chest, which may look like it’s piercing it, and that some pelicans have a reddish tinge on their breast plumage and/or a red tip on their beak. However, zoological accuracy was not the point; the point was to convey theological truth.
In The Bestiary of Christ, Louis Charbonneau-Lassay says the pelican first started appearing as a Christian symbol on clay oil lamps in ancient Carthage (present-day Tunisia), citing “L. Delattre, Carthage,Symboles eucharistiques, p. 91”—the French archaeologist Alfred Louis Delattre (1850–1932). But I’ve not been able to track down the cited text or find any such examples. If you can point me to photographs, please do!
In the “Ējmiacin [Etchmiadzin] Codex” entry in The Eerdmans Encyclopedia of Early Christian Art and Archaeology, Paul Corbey Finney identifies the border illustrations in that Armenian Gospel book’s Baptism of Christ miniature from ca. 600 as depicting a pink-bodied pelican spreading its blue wings and pecking its breast while standing in a bejeweled chalice. The figure is repeated ten times.
Pelican detail from The Baptism of Christ in the Codex Etchmiadzin, an Armenian Gospel book. Yerevan, Mesrop Mashtots Institute of Ancient Manuscripts (Matenadaran), Cod. 2374, fol. 229v. The image is dated to ca. 600, but it was added to a 10th-century manuscript.
Finney mentions that a vulning pelican also appears in the Rabbula Gospels from sixth-century Syria. I think he’s referring to the bird at the top of the canon tables on folio 5a, which also shows the prophets Joel and Hosea and the Wedding at Cana. The iconography is far less obvious here.
One illuminated manuscript page I love that makes use of the pelican symbol comes from the late Flemish Boussu Hours, a prayerbook made for Isabelle de Lalaing, probably after the death of her husband Pierre de Hennin, lord of Boussu.
Master of Antoine Rolin (Flemish, active 1490–1520), Le pélican, symbole du Christ (Pelican, symbol of Christ), from the Boussu Hours, Cambrai, France, ca. 1490–95. Paris, Bibliothèque de l’Arsenal, Ms 1185 réserve, fol. 187r.
Appearing opposite a full-page miniature of Christ in Gethsemane, folio 187r opens the Hours of the Passion prayer cycle:
V: Domine labia mea aperies. R: Et os meum annunciabit laudem tuam. V: Deus in adiutorium meum intende. R: Domine ad adiuvandum me festina. Gloria Patri, et Filio: et Spiritui sancto. Sicut erat in principio, et nunc, et semper: et in saecula saeculorum.
English translation:
V: O Lord, open my lips, R: And my mouth shall declare thy praise. V: Incline unto my aid, O God. R: O Lord, make haste to help me. Glory be to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Ghost, as it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be: world without end.
The historiated initial “D” shows Christ before Pilate, and in the margin a pelican exudes her lifeblood into the mouths of her two chicks, a scene set against a gold background likewise dripping with blood—as well as sweat and tears. It’s “almost as if the gold margin were an expanded microcosm of the bird’s broken breast,” writes Katharine Davidson Bekker in her essay “Those Who Weep: Tears, Eyes, and Blood in the Boussu Hours.” Bekker further notes that “the pansy flower in the margin, the name of which references the French penser (‘to think’), . . . encourages the reader to think deeply about the images on the page.”
Another remarkable appearance of the pelican in medieval manuscript illumination is in the Holkham Bible Picture Book from fourteenth-century England—remarkable because it appears not in a passion cycle, as was typical, but in a creation cycle!
The Tree of Knowledge, from the Holkham Bible Picture Book, southeastern England, ca. 1327–35. British Library, Add MS 47682, fol. 3v.
In the garden of Eden, God the Creator, portrayed here as Christ, instructs Adam and Eve that they may freely eat of any tree except the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, which he points to with one hand and with the other wags his finger in a forbidding manner. Various birds perch atop the adjacent trees, but at the apex of this fateful one at the center is the vulning pelican, foreshadowing the sacrifice of Christ that will be required for humanity to reenter Paradise after the fall.
Compare this image to the diagrammatic one on folio 125v of the De Lisle Psalter, which was inspired by Bonaventure’s meditational treatise the Lignum vitae. It shows a pelican nesting atop the tree of life on which Christ is crucified, wounding herself to feed her offspring with her blood:
Tree of Life, from the De Lisle Psalter, England, 1310–39. London, British Library, Arundel MS 83, fol. 125v.
The Latin inscription above it in red reads, Pellicanus dicor, pro pullis scindo mihi cor (“I am called a pelican, because I tear open my heart for my chicks”). The twelve branches contain texts relating to Christ’s humanity, passion, and glorification, while the surrounding panels contain Old Testament witnesses.
The Crucifixion is the narrative context in which the vulning pelican most often appears in art, reinforcing the notion of Christ’s self-emptying sacrifice. It was especially popular in proto- and early Renaissance panel paintings from Italy—which the gallery below reflects, in addition to featuring a few other examples from France, Greece, and Armenia.
Fra Angelico, Christ on the Cross, the Virgin, Saint John the Evangelist, and Cardinal Torquemada (detail), ca. 1453–54. Harvard Art Museums / Fogg Museum, Cambridge, Massachusetts. Photo: Victoria Emily Jones [view full painting]
In the Simone di Filippo Benvenuti example above (third row, left), notice the little winged dragon fleeing the pelicans’ nest as the mother pelican undoes the harm he has inflicted. A similar detail can be found in the Crucifixion fresco from the altar wall of the Oratory of St. John the Baptist in Urbino, which shows a snake slithering away from the perishing chicks, who are brought back to life by their intervening mother:
Lorenzo Salimbeni (Italian, 1374–ca. 1418) and Jacopo Salimbeni (Italian, ca. 1370/80–after 1426), Crucifixion (detail), ca. 1416. Fresco, Oratorio di San Giovanni Battista (Oratory of St. John the Baptist), Urbino, Italy.
The snake motif references a version of the pelican legend found in De natura rerum (On the Nature of Things) by the Flemish Dominican friar Thomas of Cantimpré (ca. 1200–1272) and the slightly later De animalibus (On Animals) by the German Dominican friar Albertus Magnus (ca. 1200–1280). According to these two works, when the mother pelican leaves her nest to find food for her fledglings, she returns to find them dead from the bite of an ambushing snake. She then tears her own flesh to revive them with her blood, which is full of healing properties.
One of the most unique visual treatments of the vulning pelican that I found is a painting by the Dutch Renaissance artist Hieronymus Bosch. Rendered in grisaille (gray monochrome), his pelican appears in the center of a ring depicting scenes from the passion of Christ. It’s painted on the reverse of a panel that shows John the Evangelist in exile on Patmos, penning the book of Revelation.
Hieronymus Bosch (Netherlandish, ca. 1450–1516), Scenes from the Passion of Christ (reverse of John on Patmos), ca. 1500. Oil on panel in grisaille, 62.8 × 43.2 cm. Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Gemäldegalerie.
Staged around mountain crags, the passion cycle begins on the right with Jesus praying in Gethsemane and continues clockwise with the Arrest of Christ, Christ before Pilate, the Flagellation, the Crowning with Thorns, the Carrying of the Cross, the Crucifixion, and the Entombment.
Outside this ring of scenes is a darkness populated by shadowy demons:
But the inner disc, the focal point of the composition, contains the promise of redemption. Emerging from the still waters of a vast postdiluvian landscape is a hillock with a hollow that houses a burning fire. On the summit, a large mother bird spreads her protective wings over her brood, inclining her head toward her chest—an iconography we recognize as the vulning pelican, symbolic of the deep, saving love God embodied on the cross.
As we view this painting, we progress from the outer darkness with its infernal powers, to the growing light actualized by the events of Maundy Thursday and Good Friday, and finally to the brilliant center with its red flame—which, other than two dim, flickering torches in Gethsemane, contains the sole bit of color in the whole painting. Images of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, which would gain prominence in the seventeenth century, feature a flame, representing Christ’s ardent love burning bright. And that’s what we have here.
Red is also the color of blood. I’m reminded of Robert Southwell’s poem “Christ’s Bloody Sweat,” which combines imagery of the pelican and the self-immolating but ultimately indestructible phoenix, marveling at “how bleedeth burning love.” (I’ll explore a few more poems about the pelican in the next section.)
As John writes in the wonderful prologue to his Gospel, “The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overtake it” (John 1:5).
In Bosch’s painting, the Christbrand bursts, like the pelican’s split side. The flame of redemption is lit, like a lighthouse, calling us home into the love of God.
Another especially compelling art object that draws on the pelican legend is a silver-plated tabernacle monstrance from Portuguese Goa in southwestern India.
Tabernacle monstrance made in Goa, India, 17th century. Silver on wood, glass, 142 × 72 cm, globe 66 cm. Museum of Christian Art, Convent of Santa Monica, Old Goa, India.
In the Roman Catholic Church, a tabernacle is a container in which the consecrated hosts (small unleavened wafers of bread) of the Eucharist are stored as part of the “reserved sacrament” rite, and a monstrance is a vessel that displays the consecrated host on the altar and in procession. This object combines both into one—the spherical base serving as the tabernacle, with access gained through an opening at the back, and the bird’s breast bearing a transparent aperture surrounded by a golden sunburst halo, through which the host can be viewed. The body of Christ, broken for you.
In researching this essay, I found that the pelican is a subject that recurs (so charmingly!) in the folk art of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Pennsylvania Germans:
A Pelican in Its Piety, Bucks County or Montgomery County, Pennsylvania, ca. 1800. Watercolor and ink on laid paper, 8.9 × 8.3 cm. Promised gift of Joan and Victor Johnson to the Philadelphia Museum of Art.David Kulp (American, 1777–1834), Pelican in Its Piety, Bucks County, Pennsylvania, ca. 1810. Watercolor and ink on wove paper, 18.6 × 12.2 cm. Free Library of Philadelphia.Pelican, Pennsylvania, ca. 1850. Watercolor and ink on wove paper, 31.6 × 25.4 cm. Free Library of Philadelphia.A Pelican in Its Piety, Pennsylvania, ca. 1825. Watercolor and ink on wove paper, 24.1 × 19.1 cm. Promised gift of Joan and Victor Johnson to the Philadelphia Museum of Art.
From the Victorian era, I’m especially fond of the stained glass pelican design by the Pre-Raphaelite artist Edward Burne-Jones, fabricated by Morris & Co. to serve as part of the East Window of St Martin’s Church, Brampton, in Cumbria. Burne-Jones drew his design in 1880, and after the window was completed the following year, he returned to the drawing out of personal fondness, embellishing it with colored chalks, and gold for the blood drops, thus developing it into a more substantial work.
Edward Burne-Jones (British, 1833–1898) and Morris & Co., Pelican on Nest (detail), 1880. East Window, St Martin, Brampton, Cumbria, England. Photo: Dave Webster. [view full window]Edward Burne-Jones (British, 1833–1898), Pelican in Her Piety, 1880–81. Pencil, colored chalk, and gold on paper, 172.7 × 57.3 cm. William Morris Gallery, London.
Contemporary artists have also turned to the subject of the vulning pelican, especially the Ukrainian Catholic women iconographers of Lviv:
Natalya Rusetska (Ukrainian, 1984–), Pelican, 2017. Egg tempera on gessoed wood, 19 × 15 cm.Natalya Rusetska (Ukrainian, 1984–), Jesus the Grapevine and the Last Supper, 2021. Egg tempera on gessoed wood, 30 × 24 cm.Kateryna Kuziv (Ukrainian, 1993–), Pelican, 2021. Egg tempera on gessoed wood, 30 × 30 cm.Kateryna Kuziv (Ukrainian, 1993–), Crucifixion, 2022. Egg tempera on gessoed wood, 65 × 49 cm.Ulyana Tomkevych (Ukrainian, 1981–), Pelican, 2021. Egg tempera on gessoed wood, diameter 30 cm.Olya Kravchenko (Ukrainian, 1985–), Sacrifice and Victory, 2022. Tempera and silver leaf on gessoed wood, 40 × 40 cm.
Addendum, 4/8/25: Shortly after publishing this, a reader reminded me of Josh Tiessen’s painting All Creatures Lament from his Vanitas and Viriditas series, which shows an American white pelican protecting her chicks in the face of another oil spill and the accumulation of fishing-related plastic waste. Tiessen, an artist of faith, directs the symbolism of the pelican toward a call for wildlife conservation. (I previously featured Tiessen’s work here.)
Josh Tiessen (Canadian, 1995–), All Creatures Lament, 2023. Oil on braced Baltic birch, diameter 26 inches.
In Poetry and Song
Probably the most universally famous poetic treatment of the pelican as an emblem of Christ is the eucharistic hymn “Adoro te devote” (Hidden God, Devoutly I Adore Thee). Written around 1260 by Thomas Aquinas, it is one of the most beautiful medieval poems in Latin. Aquinas did not originally write it for the liturgy, but it was added to the Roman Missal in 1570 and since then has been used in the Catholic Mass. The penultimate stanza reads:
Pie pelicane, Jesu Domine, Me immundum munda tuo sanguine, Cujus una stilla salvum facere Totum mundum quit ab omni scelere.
Like what tender tales tell of the Pelican, Bathe me, Jesus Lord, in what thy bosom ran— Blood that but one drop of has the pow’r to win All the world forgiveness of its world of sin.
Trans. Gerard Manley Hopkins
Here’s a great video of the hymn put out by the Fundación Canto Católico, set to a Benedictine plainsong melody from the thirteenth century, as has become standard. Our pelican passage appears at the 4:10 mark. The subtitles are in Spanish, but you can turn on CC for English.
(If, like me, you’re wondering what in the world the video’s images are from, an explanatory note in the YouTube comments section explains: they are from the Cuasimodo festival in Chile, celebrated the second Sunday of Easter. The festival has nothing to do with Victor Hugo’s famous hunchback but rather is about bringing Communion to the sick and elderly who were unable to leave their residences to participate in the sacrament during Holy Week. [The Spanish Cuasimodo comes from the Latin Quasimodo, from the incipit of the day’s introit based on 1 Peter 2:2: “Quasi modo géniti infántes . . . ,” or “As newborn babes . . .”] Traditionally for this task, priests were escorted by horsemen, who showed them the route and protected them from assaults.)
The vulning pelican also appears in the liturgy of the Eastern Orthodox Church, whose members sing at Matins on Good Friday evening, “Like a pelican wounding her breast, Thou, O Word, hast made Thy mortal children to live, for Thou hast shed upon them life-giving streams.”
Dante Alighieri, the great medieval Italian writer, calls Christ “nostro Pelicano” (our Pelican) in canto 25 of his Paradiso, the third book in his Divine Comedy trilogy of extended narrative poems.
The Christ-pelican appears, too, in English poetry from the late Middle Ages onward. One Middle English poem found in a prayerbook from ca. 1460 reads:
The pellicane his bloode dothe blede Therwith his birdis for to fede. It figureth that God with his bloode Us fede hanging on the rode, Whane he us brought oute of hell In joy and blis with him to dwel, And be oure fader and oure fode, And we his childerne meke and good.
[Bodleian Library MS Douce 1, fol. 57r]
The pelican his blood doth bleed, Therewith his birdies for to feed. It figures God, who, with his blood, Fed us hanging on the rood, By which he brought us out of hell, In joy and bliss with him to dwell, To be our father and our food, And we his children meek and good.
Our Pelican, by bleeding thus, Fulfill’d the law, and cured us.
Look here, and mark (her sickly birds to feed) How freely this kind Pelican doth bleed. See how (when other salves could not be found) To cure their sorrows, she herself doth wound; And when this holy emblem thou shalt see, Lift up thy soul to him, who died for thee.
For this our hieroglyphic would express That Pelican which, in the wilderness Of this vast world, was left (as all alone) Our miserable nature to bemoan; And in whose eyes the tears of pity stood, When he beheld his own unthankful brood His favors and his mercies then condemn, When with his wings he would have brooded them, And sought their endless peace to have confirm’d, Though to procure his ruin, they were arm’d.
To be their food, himself he freely gave; His heart was pierc’d, that he their souls might save, Because they disobey’d the sacred will, He did the law of righteousness fulfill; And to that end (though guiltless he had been) Was offered for our universal sin.
Let me, oh God! forever fix mine eyes Upon the merit of that sacrifice: Let me retain a due commemoration Of those dear mercies, and that bloody passion, Which here is meant; and by true faith, still feed Upon the drops this Pelican did bleed; Yea, let me firm unto thy law abide, And ever love that flock for which he died.
I already mentioned, in relation to Bosch’s pelican painting above, “Christ’s Bloody Sweat” by the English Catholic martyr Robert Southwell.
More recently, the Anglican priest Matt Simpkins, who performs music under the name Rev Simpkins, wrote a song titled “Pelican,” which he released on his album Big Sea (2020). Gritty and impassioned, here’s a live performance at Colchester Arts Centre:
Pelican feeds the hungry and needy I kneel before her My throat like an open grave
Food cannot fill me Water dilutes me Nothing contents me Pelican, pity me
She tears her breast, her children to refresh By her I am blessed, led to life from living death
Though death entreats me Her life flows sweetly Given so freely Given in flesh and blood
She tears her breast, her children to refresh By her I am blessed, led to life from living death
Pelican feeds me Loves me completely Though I’m unworthy She gives so graciously
She tears her breast, her children to refresh By her I am blessed, led to life from living death
She crowns the whole earth, the heavens and seas The Pelican tears her breast for me
She’s queen of what was and what is to be The Pelican tears her breast for me
She gives of herself in infinity The Pelican tears her breast for me
She’s compassion and love, she’s strength and glory The Pelican tears her breast for me
I love it when contemporary artists engage with historical Christological symbols, whether from the animal world or elsewhere, tapping into a creative wisdom the saints of ages past have bequeathed to us but that is too often dismissed in favor of literalism or wordy, intellectual articulations of doctrine.
I wholeheartedly support the endeavor of academic theology, but it must be remembered that for centuries, the church has developed her theology not just through discursive prose but also through liturgy, verse, and visual art. While many modern Christians may discount medieval allegories of Christ as naive, backward, too fanciful, or too obscure, I want to suggest that there’s value in learning (at least some of) them and even incorporating them into new material, to explore how they might come alive in new contexts.
By studying the pelican of ancient lore, for example, as it has been adapted in Christian art and literature, I’ve grown in my appreciation for the mother-love of God, who, to restore me to life and to nourish me—his child, his dependent—allowed his sacred flesh to be torn, so that I might know the power in the blood.
This essay took many hours to research and write and came to fruition only after several years spent collecting enough Pelican images to reach a critical mass. If you have the inclination and means to support more essays like this, I’d really appreciate a donation!
>> The Divine Dark, vol. 1: This three-song EP was released December 15, 2024, on Re-Echo Records, a new label for music created by artists from Resurrection Philadelphia church. “The Divine Dark is an ongoing series of original arrangements and compositions for devotion, contemplation, and edification. The series takes its name from a phrase that emerged in the fifth century among Christian mystics to describe the ineffable unknowableness of God . . . in all his kindness, grace, and mystery.”
The first volume features new arrangements by Joshua Stamper [previously] of two seventeenth-century German hymns (both translated into English by Catherine Winkworth, and sung here by Sarah Long), plus one new hymn that Stamper wrote with his wife, Kory Stamper, whose refrain is taken from Psalm 127:4. The songs quietly explore the mysteries of salvation, the Eucharist, and God’s sovereignty as well as some of the paradoxes of God’s character, such as his being both storm and shelter (wild and thundering, but also safe and enfolding).
Volume 2 of The Divine Dark is likely to release later this year.
>> It Is Good to Be Here with You by Nick Chambers: Out today, the first full-length album by singer-songwriter Nick Chambers. These songs of spiritual seeking touch on sobriety, divine nearness, ambiguity and wonder, the pursuit of understanding or insight, the longing to be held and loved, and more. Chambers deftly weaves voices from scripture—the blind beggar Bartimaeus, who cried out to Christ for mercy; the sons of Korah, who thirsted for God like a deer thirsts for water; the apostle Paul, who experienced a frustrating tension between desire and action—with his own poetic voice, finding companionship with those ancient seekers who were transformed by their encounters God. There’s reference to the wrestling patriarch Jacob, the blazing bush-vision of Moses, Elijah in a wilderness cave, the mount of Transfiguration, the eighth day of creation. Besides biblical texts, the songs bear influences from writers Rainer Maria Rilke, Madeleine L’Engle, Gregory of Nyssa, and Esther de Waal.
The album features some co-writing contributions by Jon Guerra (“Hold Me”), Paul Zach (“A Sweeter Word,” “Always Already”), and Tyson Matthews (“It Is Good to Be Here with You”).
My favorite tracks: “To an Unknown God,” “Hear,” “Thanks Be to God.”
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NEW ART COMMISSION: Memorial to Enslaved Persons by Harmonia Rosales, King’s Chapel, Boston:Harmonia Rosales, an Afro-Cuban artist born and raised in Chicago and living in Los Angeles, is at work on a three-part commission for the historic King’s Chapel at 58 Tremont Street in Boston, a church originally built in wood in 1686 and then rebuilt in stone in the 1750s. One of the oldest churches in the United States, it (and its adjacent burying ground) is one of the stops along the Freedom Trail, and it still has an active congregation.
Conceptual image of the mural by Harmonia Rosales that’s being installed this year on the ceiling of King’s Chapel in Boston, Massachusetts
Despite being in the North, King’s Chapel has links to the slave trade. Historical documents reveal that at least 219 persons, most of them of African descent but at least two of them Native American, were enslaved by ministers and members of the church throughout its history, and that even after slavery was abolished in Massachusetts in 1783, donations to the church continued to flow in from people whose wealth depended on Southern slave labor, such as textile magnates. You can read more details in Slavery and King’s Chapel, the thirty-two-page report published by King’s Chapel’s Ad Hoc Committee on Slavery in 2018.
Until at least the mid-nineteenth century, people of color, both enslaved and free, who attended King’s Chapel were relegated to the balcony seats. We know the names of 182 enslaved attendees from the church’s baptismal, marriage, and burial registers. “As a community of faith,” the church writes on its website, “we are working to recover, honor, and remember these long-overlooked members of our community. We hope to make their lives and their presence in early Boston visible in new and powerful ways as we tell a more complete version of our history for our congregation, our city, and the 4 million people who walk the Freedom Trail each year.”
In addition to setting up a “living fund” to “provide monetary support for programs and engagement centered around reparative justice and reconciliation in the community,” the church has hired artist Harmonia Rosales, in partnership with the MASS Design Group, to create a physical commemoration of this history, which has three components: a figurative sculpture in the church’s courtyard, a collection of bronze birds perched throughout the church’s exterior and grounds, and a trompe l’oeil ceiling mural in the sanctuary. The memorial will be unveiled later this year. Here are two videos about it:
>> “How a Freedom Trail landmark is reckoning with its ties to slavery,” GBH News, July 19, 2023: This news segment features interview clips of Cassandra Dumay and Jessie Sage O’Leary, Boston University journalism students who are inquiring further into King’s Chapel’s links to the colonial slave trade; Rev. Joy Fallon, senior minister at King’s Chapel; Marissa Cheifetz, director of the King’s Chapel History Program; and memorial committee member David Waters.
>> “VCS Creative Conversations: Ben Quash with Harmonia Rosales,”Visual Commentary on Scripture,February 27, 2025: Theologian and VCS director Ben Quash sits down with artist Harmonia Rosales inside King’s Chapel to discuss her latest commission for that space, plus her paintings Birth of Oshun, The Creation of God, Strangler Fig, and more. Raised in the Santería religious tradition, in her art Rosales draws Yoruba deities (the orishas) into play with Christian ones and centers Black women. Speaking of the VCS’s commitment to showcasing biblical engagement from diverse vantage points, Quash tells Rosales, “We’ve always said that these conversations should not just be about the Bible’s importance to Christians or Jews, but the Bible’s importance to those of other traditions, as something to bounce off, to use, sometimes to object to. And you are a wonderful example of how to do that in a way that’s constantly creative and generous.”
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ARTICLE: “At the Cloisters, Sor Juana’s Words Ring Out in Song” by Elisabeth Vincentelli, The New York Times:Primero Sueño (First Dream) is a new opera by Magos Herrera and Paola Prestini that adapts to music the seventeenth-century mystical poem of the same title by the Mexican Catholic nun Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, one of the greatest literary works of the Hispanic Baroque. Commissioned by the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Department of Live Arts (MetLiveArts) and VisionIntoArt, it was conceived as a processional opera that meanders throughout the Met Cloisters, audience in tow—an appropriate choice, as the poem is about the soul’s journey. It premiered January 23, with Herrera playing Sor Juana, the nun in black, “sing[ing] in an earthy mezzo that complements the heavenly harmonies of the six nuns in white, performed by the German vocal ensemble Sjaella.” Accompaniment was provided by harps, hand percussion, theorbo, and Spanish guitar. Here’s a trailer (not filmed on location):
Magos Herrera, center, as Sor Juana in a rehearsal of the opera Primero Sueño at the Met Cloisters. Photo: Earl Wilson / The New York Times.
The Cloisters—a building designed to evoke a medieval European monastery and housing a sizeable portion of the Met’s medieval art collection—is one of my favorite spaces in all of New York. What a delight that Herrara, Prestini, and team utilized its halls and rooms as staging ground for this dramatic, musical reimagining of a historic sacred poem by a pioneering female Christian writer.
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INTERFAITH ART EXHIBITION: Cloud of Witnesses: Images of Faith and Divinity Today, St John’s Waterloo, London, March 4–April 27, 2025: A juried exhibition featuring the work of twenty-six artists from the UK, funded and supported by Art + Christianity; The God Who Speaks; St John’s Church, Waterloo; the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of England and Wales; Culham St Gabriel Trust; and Bible Society. Click here to view the exhibition catalog.
The image used for the cover of the exhibition catalog is Life 1, a linocut by Svetlana Atlavina consisting of fifty golden concentric circles that she said represent the vibrations of the heart—the sounds constantly being emitted from our cardiac valves, which mean we’re alive.
Svetlana Atlavina, Life 1, 2024. Handmade linocut with gold ink on 300g white Somerset paper, 70 x 50 cm.
The work that I find most compelling is the eight-piece series of COME AND REST photographs by Kirsty Kerr.
Kirsty Kerr, COME AND REST: Bethnal Green Library, 2018. Photograph of a public intervention, from a series, 30.5 × 44 cm. Documentation by Will Alcock.
COME AND REST documents a series of public interventions informed by the demolition and rebuilding of Bethnal Green Mission Church. Taking letters from a scripture text that had hung on the old building (Jesus’ words: ‘Come to me and I will give you rest’), Kirsty spelt the phrase in Bethnal Green locations, recording the process with local filmmaker Will Alcock. The words were a gentle yet radical proclamation: of welcome, refuge, and quiet protest against loneliness and exhaustion often synonymous with city life. The act of spelling them out became a performed prayer, symbolic of the church’s continued presence and God’s enduring invitation.
Against the backdrop of this racially and religiously diverse neighbourhood, the words were both witnessed to and overlooked by passers-by of all faiths and none.
Kerr displayed Christ’s invitation in fields and basketball courts, on street corners and scaffolding and bandstand steps, outside subway stops and housing estates and libraries. View the full series here, using the right scroll arrow. I also enjoyed exploring the artist’s other projects on her website.
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EVENT: Taste of Heaven Intercultural Worship Festival, Coventry Cathedral, May 24, 2025: Organized by Intercultural Churches UK. “The Taste of Heaven Festival will be an exciting opportunity to celebrate the rich cultural diversity and creativity of the UK church through live performances, workshops, food and worship. The festival will take place in the iconic venue of Coventry Cathedral and its beautiful surrounding ruins. The day will trace our history of increasing diversity, by highlighting different cultural worship expressions from Celtic to Choral, South Asian and Caribbean, to more recent immigrant communities including Middle Eastern, African, and Hong Kong. It will culminate in a celebration of Intercultural Worship, demonstrating how churches can draw from different cultural streams in their corporate worship.” Tickets range from £10 to £25. Register here. [HT: Global Christian Worship]
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SPOTIFY PLAYLIST: April 2025 (Art & Theology): The song selections on my short monthly playlists are somewhat random—a smorgasbord of what I’ve been listening to, a mix of brand-new releases and older faves—but for thematic playlists keyed to where we are in the liturgical calendar during April, see my Lent Playlist, Holy Week Playlist (I’m especially proud of this one!), and Eastertide Playlist.
Pamela Mordecai (born 1942) is a Jamaican poet, novelist, short story writer, and scholar of Caribbean literature and culture, living in Toronto. Born and raised in Kingston, she earned a PhD in English from the University of the West Indies and has taught language arts at secondary and postsecondary levels. She often writes in Jamaican Creole, such as for de Man (1995)—a verse play about the crucifixion of Jesus—and the two follow-up collections of narrative poems about Jesus’s parents: de book of Mary (2015) and de book of Joseph (2022).
Vincent van Gogh (Dutch, 1853–1890), Pietà (after Delacroix), 1889. Oil on canvas, 73 × 60.5 cm. Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam.
“Poor fighter, poor sufferer,” my brother’s words for me. Self-pity— I have to beat it down. But how, exactly? Never know when the next attack will come. How to suppress religion? Down the cloisters of the sick it beckoned— I abused my God . . . that lithograph of Delacroix’s, irredeemable sheets I flung in the paint and oil, his Pietà in ruins. Reconstruct it from memory. Good technical exercise. Start with the hands, there were four hands, four arms in the foreground— mother and son, and the torsions of their bodies almost impossible, draw them out— painfully . . . no measurements— into a great mutual gesture of despair.
Delacroix and I, we both discovered painting when we no longer had breath or teeth. Work into his work, strain for health, the brain clearing, fingers firmer, brush in the fingers going like a bow, big bravura work—pure joy! I copy— no, perform his masterwork of pain.
Genius of iridescent agony, Delacroix, help me restore your lithograph with color. I mortify before your model— how to imitate my Christ? The bronze of my forelock shadows his, the greatest artist: stronger than all the others, spurning marble, clay and paint, he worked in living flesh.
Living and yet immortal, Lord, revive me— let me inhale the blue of Mary’s cape billowing hurricanes of hope, clothe me in your cerements gold with morning— mother and son, from all your sorrow all renewal springs, the earth you touch turns emerald as your hand that burgeons green.
Robert Fagles (1933–2008) (PhD, Yale) was an award-winning American translator, poet, and academic. He is best known for his many translations of ancient Greek and Roman classics, especially the epic poems of Homer. He taught English and comparative literature at Princeton University from 1960 until his retirement in 2002, chairing the department from 1975 onward.
Vincent van Gogh (1853–1890) was raised in the Dutch Reformed Church, the son of a small-town minister—and even worked himself as a lay preacher in the Borinage mining region of southwestern Belgium for two years in his mid-twenties. While there, he gave away all his possessions and lived in poverty like those he served, eating a spare diet, wearing rough garments, and sleeping on the floor. Ironically, his sponsoring evangelical committee deemed such behavior unbecoming of a minister of the gospel, and, due also to his lack of eloquence and theological refinement, they withdrew their support.
This rejection soured Vincent on institutional Christianity. But it didn’t squash his faith. After moving back in with his parents in Nuenen, the Netherlands, he wrote to his brother and close confidante, Theo:
Life [. . .] always turns towards one an infinitely meaningless, discouraging, dispiriting blank side on which there is nothing, any more than on a blank canvas.
But however meaningless and vain, however dead life appears, the man of faith, of energy, of warmth, and who knows something, doesn’t let himself be fobbed off like that. He steps in and does something, and hangs on to that, in short, breaks, ‘violates’ – they say.
Let them talk, those cold theologians. [Letter 464]
Although Vincent left the church and developed conflicted feelings about the Bible, he maintained a reverence for Christ to the end of his days. His time in the Borinage was not for nothing, as it’s there that he discovered, through sketching his parishioners and the surrounding landscapes, his calling to be an artist.
This new vocation was one he ascribed metaphorically to Christ. In a letter to his friend and fellow artist Émile Bernard dated June 26, 1888, Vincent wrote that Jesus’s masterworks are human beings made fully and eternally alive:
Christ – alone – among all the philosophers, magicians, &c. declared eternal life – the endlessness of time, the non-existence of death – to be the principal certainty. The necessity and the raison d’être of serenity and devotion. Lived serenely as an artist greater than all artists–disdaining marble and clay and paint – working in LIVING FLESH. I.e. – this extraordinary artist, hardly conceivable with the obtuse instrument of our nervous and stupefied modern brains, made neither statues nor paintings nor even books . . . he states it loud and clear . . . he made . . . LIVING men, immortals. [Letter 632]
In the same letter, he contended that “the figure of Christ has been painted – as I feel it – only by Delacroix and by Rembrandt…….. And then Millet has painted…. Christ’s doctrine.”
These are the three artists Vincent admired most. He mentions them many times throughout his ample correspondence with family and friends, and he made paintings after all three.
The only painting Vincent ever made of Christ was his Pietà, which he painted in two versions in September 1889, both after the French artist Eugène Delacroix (1798–1863). These are among the many works Vincent painted at a psychiatric hospital in Saint-Rémy-de-Provence in southern France, to which he had voluntarily committed himself after suffering an acute mental breakdown that resulted in his infamous severing of his left ear on December 23, 1888. Theo had rushed to Arles, where Vincent was living in “the Yellow House” at the time, and on December 28 reported on Vincent’s condition in a letter to his wife, Jo van Gogh-Bonger:
I found Vincent in the hospital in Arles. The people around him realized from his agitation that for the past few days he had been showing symptoms of that most dreadful illness, of madness, and an attack of fièvre chaude, when he injured himself with a razor, was the reason he was taken to hospital. Will he remain insane? The doctors think it possible, but daren’t yet say for certain. It should be apparent in a few days’ time when he is rested; then we will see whether he is lucid again. He seemed to be all right for a few minutes when I was with him, but lapsed shortly afterwards into his brooding about philosophy and theology. It was terribly sad being there, because from time to time all his grief would well up inside and he would try to weep, but couldn’t. Poor fighter and poor, poor sufferer. Nothing can be done to relieve his anguish now, but it is deep and hard for him to bear. [Letter 728]
Vincent returned to the Yellow House in January 1889 but over the next few months experienced recurring bouts of mania and depression and was in and out of the hospital. Some of the people of Arles grew increasingly frightened by his erratic behavior, and they essentially ran him out of town. That’s when he made his way twenty miles northeast to the town of Saint-Rémy to check in to Saint-Paul-de-Mausole, a former monastery that then, as now, served as a hospital for the mentally ill.
Vincent had two rooms there, one of which he used as a studio, setting up the various print copies he owned of acclaimed paintings. One was a lithograph by Célestin François Nanteuil-Leboeuf after Delacroix’s Pietà, from the portfolio Les artistes anciens et modernes. (Theo had bought and sent him this litho at his request.) Vincent lamented to his brother that he accidentally damaged it with spilled paint—but that impelled him to paint his own copy of Delacroix. On September 10, 1889, he wrote:
Work is going very well, I’m finding things that I’ve sought in vain for years, and feeling that I always think of those words of Delacroix that you know, that he found painting when he had neither breath nor teeth left. Ah well, I myself with the mental illness I have, I think of so many other artists suffering mentally, and I tell myself that this doesn’t prevent one from practising the role of painter as if nothing had gone wrong.
[. . .] In the very suffering, religious thoughts sometimes console me a great deal. Thus this time during my illness a misfortune happened to me – that lithograph of Delacroix, the Pietà, with other sheets had fallen into some oil and paint and got spoiled.
I was sad about it – then in the meantime I occupied myself painting it, and you’ll see it one day, on a no. 5 or 6 canvas I’ve made a copy of it which I think has feeling. [. . .] My fingers [are] so sure that I drew that Delacroix Pietà without taking a single measurement, though there are those four outstretched hands and arms – gestures and bodily postures that aren’t exactly easy or simple. [Letter 801]
LEFT: Eugène Delacroix, Pietà, ca. 1850, oil on canvas, 35.6 × 27 cm, National Museum of Art, Architecture and Design, Oslo. CENTER: Célestin François Nanteuil-Leboeuf, Pietà (after Delacroix), 1853, lithograph, Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam. RIGHT: Vincent van Gogh, Pietà (after Delacroix), 1889, oil on canvas, 42 × 34 cm, Vatican Museums.
The painted copy he refers to here is the smaller of the two, which he gifted to his sister Willemien and is now in the collection of the Vatican Museums in Vatican City. In another letter, from September 19, he tells Wil “this little copy of course has no value from any point of view,” but “you’ll be able to see in it that Delacroix doesn’t draw the features of a Mater Dolorosa [sorrowing Mother of God] in the manner of Roman statues – and that the pallid aspect, the lost, vague gaze of a person tired of being in anguish and in tears and keeping vigil is present in it.”
The other Pietàthat Vincent painted—which is similar to the first but larger and brighter—he kept for himself, hanging it in his bedroom at Saint-Rémy. He describes the painting to Wil:
The Delacroix is a Pietà, i.e. a dead Christ with the Mater Dolorosa. The exhausted corpse lies bent forward on its left side at the entrance to a cave, its hands outstretched, and the woman stands behind. It’s an evening after the storm, and this desolate, blue-clad figure stands out – its flowing clothes blown about by the wind – against a sky in which violet clouds fringed with gold are floating. In a great gesture of despair she too is stretching out her empty arms, and one can see her hands, a working woman’s good, solid hands. With its flowing clothes this figure is almost as wide in extent as it’s tall. And as the dead man’s face is in shadow, the woman’s pale head stands out brightly against a cloud – an opposition which makes these two heads appear to be a dark flower with a pale flower, arranged expressly to bring them out better. [Letter 804]
Vincent van Gogh (Dutch, 1853–1890), Pietà (after Delacroix), 1889. Oil on canvas, 73 × 60.5 cm. Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam.
Although Vincent may have at one time seen Delacroix’s Pietàpainting in person, at Saint-Rémy he had only a grayscale image, the lithograph by Nanteuil-Leboeuf, to reference. For his version, he invented his own color scheme—bold blues and yellows.
On September 20, Vincent described to Theo his process of “copying,” or interpreting, the masters:
What I’m seeking in it, and why it seems good to me to copy them, I’m going to try to tell you. We painters are always asked to compose ourselves and to be nothing but composers.
Very well – but in music it isn’t so – and if such a person plays some Beethoven he’ll add his personal interpretation to it – in music, and then above all for singing – a composer’s interpretation is something, and it isn’t a hard and fast rule that only the composer plays his own compositions.
Good – since I’m above all ill at present, I’m trying to do something to console myself, for my own pleasure.
I place the black-and-white by Delacroix or Millet or after them in front of me as a subject. And then I improvise colour on it but, being me, not completely of course, but seeking memories of their paintings – but the memory, the vague consonance of colours that are in the same sentiment, if not right – that’s my own interpretation.
Heaps of people don’t copy. Heaps of others do copy – for me, I set myself to it by chance, and I find that it teaches and above all sometimes consoles.
So then my brush goes between my fingers as if it were a bow on the violin and absolutely for my pleasure. [Letter 805]
Some art historians believe the Christ figure in the painting is a self-portrait—Vincent identifying himself with the suffering Christ, or recognizing Christ’s presence with him in his suffering, and expressing his longing to be cradled in loving arms and for resurrection from the grave of psychosis. In Vincent van Gogh: The Complete Paintings, Ingo F. Walther and Rainer Metzger write,
Nothing could convey more clearly his need to record his own crisis in the features of another than these two copies [of Delacroix’s Pietà]. The face of the crucified Christ in the lap of a grieving Mary quite unambiguously has van Gogh’s own features. In other words, a ginger-haired Christ with a close-trimmed beard was now the perfect symbol of suffering, the (rather crude) encoding of van Gogh’s own Passion. The painter was to attempt this daring stroke once more, in his interpretation of Rembrandt’s The Raising of Lazarus. Here, van Gogh gave his own features to a Biblical figure who, like Christ, passed through Death into new Life. It was as if, in his work as a copyist, van Gogh was pursuing the kind of oblique allegory he disapproved of in Bernard and Gauguin [see Letter 823]. Five weeks of mental darkness demanded artistic expression – and even that incorrigible realist Vincent van Gogh could not be satisfied with landscape immediacy alone. (542)
On May 16, 1890, Vincent left the hospital at Saint-Rémy, bringing his Pietà painting with him. He moved to Auvers-sur-Oise, a suburb of Paris, placing himself under the care of the homeopathic doctor Paul Gachet, who became a friend. Dr. Gachet admired the painting very much and requested his own copy. (As far as we know, Vincent never got around to making one.)
Vincent was incredibly prolific in Auvers, but his mental health continued to decline, and he died a little over two months after relocating there, on July 29, 1890, from a gunshot wound to the lower chest that was likely self-inflicted.
In his poem “Pietà” from an ekphrastic collection based entirely on Vincent’s paintings, Robert Fagles draws on Vincent’s biography and letters in addition to the titular painting to voice the spiritual and emotional yearnings of Vincent’s final year. The last stanza is a prayer that the poetic speaker Vincent addresses to God—for hope, renewal, light:
Living and yet immortal, Lord, revive me— let me inhale the blue of Mary’s cape billowing hurricanes of hope, clothe me in your cerements gold with morning— mother and son, from all your sorrow all renewal springs, the earth you touch turns emerald as your hand that burgeons green.
In Vincent’s Pietà, the dead Christ’s limp hand rests on a grassy boulder or knoll, which Fagles reads as signifying life awakening from death. You can even see the green reflected in Christ’s face and chest, not to mention the golden sun (“after the storm,” as the historical Vincent wrote) glinting on his right arm, abdomen, and shroud, a faint promise of resurrection.
ART PROJECT: Fractured by David Popa: “Fractured is a project located on various ice floes in southern Finland. By use of only earth, charcoal and the source water, a series of portraits were created on fractured ice floes that remained for only a brief time. The pieces were documented via aerial drone video, photography and photogrammetry and hold a tactile form as limited-edition prints as well as in digital form through 1/1 NFTs. The project evolved as a response to the ongoing conflict in Ukraine, which has only further highlighted the fractured state of the world in which we live. During the project, the ice fractured completely unexpectedly at unpredictable times, leaving the artist at odds as to whether continuing the work was even worthwhile. From the ground, one would never be able to decipher any silver linings within the chaos; however, from above, the fragments hold a harmony and beauty that is imperceptible from any other perspective. The work offers a means to point the viewer not to despair and chaos, but rather questions where we must look to mend the broken fragments of our lived reality and perhaps how the fragments can be used to create an entirely new mosaic from the scattered vestiges.”
David Popa (American, 1997–), from the Fractured series, 2023. Iron oxide black earth pigment and charcoal on floating ice.
Explore more of the artist’s work at www.davidpopaart.com. For a printed interview with Popa (featuring many of his amazing photos of his amazing land art), see www.yatzer.com/david-popa.
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POEMS: Seven Reimagined Psalms from the Darkling Psalter by Andy Patton:The Darkling Psalter is a project by Andy Patton (MA, Trinity Evangelical Divinity School) to write new creative renditions of the Bible’s 150 psalms. The Rabbit Room recently featured seven of these: Psalms 5, 10, 12, 14, 25, 27, 30.
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PODCAST INTERVIEW: “Van Gogh Has a Broken Heart, with Russ Ramsey,”Makers & Mystics: I appreciated this recent conversation in which pastor, writer, and arts enthusiast Russ Ramsey discusses his latest book, exploring the struggles and sorrows of a handful of historical artists and how they are reflected in their art.
Vincent van Gogh (Dutch, 1853–1890), Self-Portrait with Bandaged Ear, 1889. Oil on canvas, 60 × 49 cm. Courtauld Gallery, London.
EXHIBITION REVIEW: “Selva Aparicio’s Memorials to Loss and Renewal” by Lori Waxman, Hyperallergic: Mounted last year by the DePaul Art Museum in Chicago, the first solo show of the Barcelona-born artist Selva Aparicio featured works that “offer a merciful focal point for grief.” Aparicio, Waxman writes, “treats unwanted things with extreme sensitivity, personally gathering and storing them over many years, eventually renewing them with remarkable vision.” She reproduced the twice-destroyed rose window of the Basilica de Santa Maria del Pi using lettuce leaves discarded by her neighborhood market; she filled the interior of an upright piano with wasp nests; she constructed over two dozen pairs of decorative ears out of moss, shells, seed pods, animal hair, and other materials for her late cat, Momo, whose ears were removed due to illness; using strands of hair from herself, her mother, and her niece, she sewed a mourning veil, the kind traditionally worn by widows, out of 1,365 cicada wings.
Exhibition view: Selva Aparicio: In Memory Of, DePaul Art Museum, Chicago, 2024. Left: Velo de luto (Mourning Veil) (2020), formed from 1,365 Magicicada wings; right: Solace (2023–24), crochet cotton blanket woven through with honey locust thorns.
I didn’t get to see this exhibition in person, but I’m compelled by what I saw and read of it online—how it deals so tenderly with suffering, death, remembrance, and hope.
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SONGS:
>> “Parce mihi Domine” (Spare Me, O Lord): A musical setting of the Latin translation of Job 7:16b–21, this motet by the Spanish Renaissance composer Cristòbal de Morales “captures the sense of desolation and abandonment that is expressed by Job, a dark condition akin to the forsakenness that our Lord experienced on the cross,” writes church music director Ken Myers. In 1994 the Hilliard Ensemble recorded the piece in collaboration with the Norwegian saxophonist Jan Garbarek for their album Officium, a jazz-classical fusion that became one of ECM’s most successful releases, selling over 1.5 million copies.
The video below features a different set of musicians paying tribute to this “unexpected . . . alliance of austere vocal music and wandering saxophone” (Elodie Olson-Coons). Filmed December 18, 2015, at the Chiesa di Sant’Anna (Church of St. Anne) in Cagliari, Italy, the performance is by the vocal ensemble Cantar Lontano (under the direction of Marco Mencoboni) and saxophonist Gavino Murgia. [HT: Global Christian Worship]
After losing his health, wealth, and children, the Old Testament character Job laments openly before God. “I will not restrain my mouth,” he says. “I will speak in the anguish of my spirit; I will complain in the bitterness of my soul” (Job 7:11). He views God as his tormentor and begs God to leave him alone (“spare me”). Adopting Job’s voice, the four singers of the Morales piece sing the following biblical passage:
Parce mihi Domine, nihil enim sunt dies mei. Quid est homo, quia magnificas eum? Aut quid apponis erga eum cor tuum? Visitas cum diluculo, et subito probas illum. Usquequo non parcis michi, nec dimittas me, ut glutiam salivam meam? Peccavi. Quid faciam tibi, o custos hominum? Quare posuisti me contrarium tibi, et factus sum michimet ipsi gravis? Cur non tollis peccatum meum, et quare non aufers iniquitatem meam? Ecce nunc in pulvere dormio; et si mane me quesieris, non subsistam.
English translation (NRSVUE):
Let me alone, for my days are a breath. What are humans, that you make so much of them, that you set your mind on them, visit them every morning, test them every moment? Will you not look away from me for a while, let me alone until I swallow my spittle? If I sin, what do I do to you, you watcher of humanity? Why have you made me your target? Why have I become a burden to you? Why do you not pardon my transgression and take away my iniquity? For now I shall lie in the earth; you will seek me, but I shall not be.
>> “Lamb of God” by The Many: From the EP Have Mercy (2021) by The Many [previously], “an uncommon, intentionally diverse collective making music for people to sing together about peace and justice and a world where all belong.” This song is an adaptation of the ancient Christian liturgical prayer known as the Agnus Dei. The music is by Gary Rand, and the lyrics are by Gary Rand and his daughter, Lenora Rand. Click here to purchase an individual MP3 recording or sheet music, or visit the group’s Bandcamp page.
Lamb of God, with love poured out you suffer with the world. Have mercy. Have mercy. Lamb of God who suffers with the world, grant us peace, grant us peace.
Art & Theology 