Beatitudes – Art & Theology

Roundup: Worship album by Parchman inmates, major new acquisition at Toledo Museum of Art, and more

November 1, 2023November 24, 2023 Victoria Emily Jones1 Comment

SPOTIFY PLAYLIST: November 2023 (Art & Theology): In this month’s playlist I nod, in part, to All Saints’ Day (November 1), Christ the King Sunday (November 26), and world events. It includes “Ad Ana” (How Long), a setting of Psalm 13 in its original Hebrew by Miqedem (a Tel Aviv–based band made up of Shai Sol [previously] and three other musical artists from a mix of Jewish and Christian backgrounds), and “Touba” (Blessed), a sung recitation of the Beatitudes in Arabic by the Sakhnini Brothers [previously], Arab Christians from Nazareth, with oud and keyboard accompaniment.

As American Thanksgiving is November 23, you may also want to check out my Thanksgiving Playlist, comprising songs of gratitude. Originally created in 2021, each year I add to and remix the list as I encounter new recordings. One of the newer additions is “He Has Made Me Glad” by Leona Von Brethorst, based on Psalm 100, as arranged and performed on organ by the amazing Cory Henry.

The Christian life consists of both praise and lament, both tears and laughter—which is why in any given worship service or Art & Theology playlist or blog post, as in the biblical psalter, you can find songs that express joy and others, heaviness. They don’t negate one another but rather give fuller expression to the breadth of religious experience.

+++

NEW ALBUM: Some Mississippi Sunday Morning by Parchman Prison Prayer: After a bureaucratic process that took over three years, music producer Ian Brennan was finally granted permission in February to record a Sunday worship service at the Mississippi State Penitentiary, aka Parchman Farm, a notorious prison with a rich musical history. The prison chaplains convened a unique service of inmate singers from various Christian denominations ranging in age from twenties to seventies, who were given turns at the mic and even collaborated on a few tracks. Brennan said he wanted to give the men a platform for their voices to be heard. All profits from the album benefit the Mississippi Department of Corrections Chaplain Services.

Here’s “You Did Not Leave Me, You Bless Me Still,” a cover of a Melvin Williams gospel song sung by J. Sherman, age sixty-three.

“You can hear the way Sunday services are particularly restorative for someone incarcerated – not simply because of the promise of redemption, but the solace of not being alone,” writes Sheldon Pearce for the Guardian. “Some Mississippi Sunday Morning feels like these men reaching out for the things such a barbaric system tries to deny them: compassion, intimacy, and mercy. The songs are not just purges of anxieties accrued on the inside or calls for the Lord’s embrace, but also pleas to be acknowledged as a person and not an ID number.”

(Thanks to Art & Theology reader Ted Olsen for alerting me to this! He compared the album to Angola Prison Spirituals, recorded in the 1950s.)

+++

PODCAST EPISODE: “Sarah Clarkson: The Gift of Beauty,” Life with God: A Renovaré Podcast, October 20, 2023: Sarah Clarkson, author of This Beautiful Truth: How God’s Goodness Breaks into Our Darkness, speaks with Renovaré community life director Nathan Foster about her struggle with OCD and, amid the great suffering wrought by that illness, how God’s goodness has been mediated to her by beauty—in nature, poetry, music, story, tea, ritual, and so on. Responding to the idea that beauty is a luxury for the affluent, she says, “Well, [it is] if beauty is about having a perfect house. But beauty is healing those who have been hurt in a war zone. It’s creating shelters where children can have refuge. It’s rebuilding what has been destroyed. . . . Beauty is a defiance of the forces of evil and disorder and destruction because it is [their] opposite: where evil tears down, beauty creates; where there is absence, beauty fills.”

+++

PRESS RELEASE: “Toledo Museum of Art Adds Armenian Gospel Manuscript with 46 Paintings to the Collection”: After centuries passing through private collections, in June the Pozzi Gospels, a sixteenth-century illuminated manuscript from Armenia, entered the collection of the Toledo Museum of Art, which will make it more accessible to the public. (I’m not sure when the book will go on display. And it doesn’t have an object page on the museum’s website yet.) The artist and scribe of this extraordinary, sumptuous manuscript was Hakob Jughayets’i. His forty-six full-page miniatures and marginal decorations combine Christian iconography with Byzantine, Islamic, and Buddhist design elements.

The Sam Fogg gallery, which exhibited the manuscript last year as part of The Medieval Body, created this short video about it, narrated by art historian Jack Hartnell:

Creation of Eve and Temptation (Pozzi Gospels) — Hakob Jughayets’i (Armenian, ca. 1550–1613), The Pozzi Gospels, 1586. Paper with blind-stamped brown leather binding, 403 folios with 46 full-page illuminations and numerous marginal miniatures, 7 3/4 × 5 3/4 in. (19.8 × 14.5 cm). This spread shows the Creation of Eve and the Temptation of Eve.

The Pozzi Gospels is one of nine extant illuminated manuscripts by Hakob. For more information, see Hakob’s Gospels: The Life and Work of an Armenian Artist of the Sixteenth Century by Timothy Greenwood and Edda Vardanyan (2006).

+++

VIRTUAL MUSIC COLLECTION: Armenian Spiritual Music Special Vol. 1: NTS Radio in London has curated ninety minutes of traditional Armenian Christian music. (They’ve done the same for Byzantine chant, Welsh hymns, Hildegard von Bingen, and numerous other categories.) I wish the lyrics and translations were provided, but regardless of my understanding of the words, what beauty. [HT: ImageUpdate]

“Those Who Carry” by Anna Kamieńska

February 7, 2022 Victoria Emily Jones3 Comments

van Gogh, Vincent_Women Carrying Sacks of Coal in the Snow — Vincent van Gogh (Dutch, 1853–1890), *Women Carrying Sacks of Coal in the Snow*, 1882. Chalk, brush in ink, and opaque and transparent watercolor on wove paper, 32.1 × 50.1 cm. Kröller-Müller Museum, Otterlo, Netherlands.

Those who carry grand pianos
to the tenth floor   wardrobes and coffins
the old man with a bundle of wood hobbling toward the horizon
the lady with a hump of nettles
the madwoman pushing her baby carriage
full of empty vodka bottles
they all will be raised up
like a seagull’s feather   like a dry leaf
like an eggshell   a scrap of newspaper on the street

Blessed are those who carry
for they will be raised

This poem was originally published in Polish in Anna Kamieńska’s 1984 collection Dwie ciemności (Two Darknesses), © Paweł Śpiewak. It is translated into English by Grażyna Drabik and David Curzon in Astonishments: Selected Poems of Anna Kamieńska (Paraclete Press, 2007). Used by permission of the publisher.

The Beatitudes (Artful Devotion)

October 28, 2020October 25, 2023 Victoria Emily Jones2 Comments

Finished Haywood Street Fresco — Christopher Holt (American, 1977–), *Haywood Street Beatitudes*, 2018–19. Fresco, 9 1/2 × 27 ft. Haywood Street Congregation, Asheville, North Carolina. Photo: John Warner.

“Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

“Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted.

“Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth.

“Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they shall be satisfied.

“Blessed are the merciful, for they shall receive mercy.

“Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God.

“Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called sons of God.

“Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness’ sake, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

“Blessed are you when others revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely on my account. Rejoice and be glad, for your reward is great in heaven, for so they persecuted the prophets who were before you.”

—Matthew 5:3–11

+++

SONG: “Beatitudes” by Bernice Johnson Reagon | Performed by Sweet Honey in the Rock, live at Carnegie Hall, November 7, 1987

“Bernice Johnson Reagon (born October 4, 1942) is a song leader, composer, scholar, and social activist who in the early 1960s was a founding member of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee’s Freedom Singers in the Albany Movement in Georgia. In 1973 she founded the all-black female a cappella ensemble Sweet Honey in the Rock, based in Washington, DC. Reagon, along with other members of the SNCC Freedom Singers, realized the power of collective singing to unify the disparate groups who began to work together in the 1964 Freedom Summer protests in the South. ‘After a song,’ Reagon recalled, ‘the differences between us were not so great. Somehow, making a song required an expression of that which was common to us all. . . . This music was like an instrument, like holding a tool in your hand.’” [source]

Reagon was the creator and host of the Peabody Award–winning NPR series Wade in the Water: African American Sacred Music Traditions, which originally aired in 1994 in twenty-six parts. (All the episodes are freely accessible online!) Under Reagon’s guidance, the production team traveled all over the country to record baptismal and congregational services, concerts, and interviews with a range of performers, composers, and community members. A four-CD set was released as a companion to the series.

+++

The Haywood Street Beatitudes fresco was completed last year in the sanctuary of Haywood Street Congregation in Asheville, part of whose mission is “breaking down barriers that divide the ‘haves’ from the ‘have-nots’ and reminding each person of their worth, their goodness.” The principal artist is Christopher Holt, and he worked with a team of four others. To learn more about the fresco, visit the interactive website https://visit.haywoodstreetfresco.org/, which includes many photos and sketches that document the making process in detail, information about the people pictured and an interpretive guide, and comments from participants in the project. All the quotes and photos in this section I’ve sourced from there.

The Rev. Brian Combs, who is shown emerging from behind the stone wall on the right, founded Haywood Street Congregation in 2009 to be a place of welcome for those struggling with addiction and/or homelessness. “The most painful part of holding a cardboard sign at the intersection,” he says, “is not the humiliating public declaration of helplessness or having trash thrown at you, or watching the automatic doors lock down. By far, from what I’ve heard after a decade of listening, is the refusal of so many drivers, idling just feet away at the red light, to even make eye contact.”

Commissioning this fresco—a permanent medium in which paint joins with plaster, making the image inseparable from the church architecture—is one way in which Haywood Street is “affirming sacred worth, restoring human dignity, and sabotaging the shame of poverty.” Fresco painting reached its zenith in the Italian Renaissance, but “too often . . . religious art . . . was made over in the image of those in power who were paying for it. God was rendered European and male. Jesus was more prince than peasant. Salvation meant being upper class.” The Haywood Street Beatitudes contains a more racially and socioeconomically diverse set of individuals that is reflective of the makeup of the community. Its message is that “God continues to show up in everyday life among the unhoused and the housed, the poor and poor in spirit, the meek, the merciful, and the hungry.”

The skyline, with its Appalachian Mountain vista, offers an idealized portrait of Asheville. Some historical buildings are visible in the background, such as the racially segregated Stephens-Lee High School (on the top of the hill), which opened in 1923 and became a center for culture and arts and a source of pride for the Black community; it closed in 1965 as part of the county school board’s integration plan, and in 1975 most of it was bulldozed.

Haywood Street is most known for its Downtown Welcome Table ministry: family-style meals are served—with cloth napkins and on china plates!—on Wednesdays and Sundays in the church’s dining room, where people from all backgrounds are encouraged to come and eat together and enjoy fellowship. (Due to COVID-19 restrictions, meals are currently served to-go.) “We are a ministry that acknowledges each of us has gifts and each of us has needs. While some come with hunger from the body, others come with a hunger in their souls.” The website goes on to explain that visitors can “expect roles to be reversed. If you are coming to give, you might be asked to receive, to simply sit and have lunch. . . . If you are coming to receive, you might be called upon to serve.”

“Table is the defining metaphor at Haywood Street,” signifying relationship and togetherness. In the fresco, community members prepare the table and hold it up, led by Miss Mary (center); “keep the house open and be generous with your life,” she says. Holding her hand is Dave, a US Air Force veteran who grew up in Alabama in a culture where he was told never to touch a Black person. At Haywood he has overcome the prejudice he was formerly steeped in.

Other pictured individuals include Edward, the church organist; Robert, a gardener who arranges flowers for the altar and dining room tables each week; Soleil, a little girl who loves coming to Haywood Street for the desserts and who is whispering into Robert’s ear; Wayne (bottom right), who initially came to Haywood Street through its Respite ministry, which provides a safe place for homeless adults to rest, recover, and be cared for following a hospital discharge; and so on.

All are underneath the blessing hands of God and the rainbow of God’s promise.

Flanking the scene are two sentinel figures, each holding a light so that those in the darkness can find their way. The one on the left is modeled after Charles, a community member who died of cancer in May 2019, a few months before the fresco was completed. He was foundational to the church, as he lived on the streets and vouched for Haywood Street to all his friends when it was just getting started. His dog, Emma, sits in front of him, next to an open pouch of his woodworking tools. The other light-bearer, on the right, is Jeanette, a single mom who “came for lunch” one day between job interviews “and found love.” She is a care minister at Haywood Street and is on the board of directors. The two hold the Communion elements: Charles, a wine flask, and Jeanette, a sheaf of wheat.

Shout-out to Alexandra Davison, director of Culture Care RDU and a docent at the North Carolina Museum of Art, whose blog post “Lent, COVID-19 & the Beatitudes on Haywood Street” introduced me to this fresco.

+++

I’ve addressed the Beatitudes in previous Artful Devotions, which feature

For more Beatitudes-related art, see the Visual Commentary on Scripture exhibition “Blessed,” curated by Rebekah Eklund, a professor of New Testament, theology, and ethics at Loyola University Maryland. I appreciate how she addresses descriptive versus prescriptive interpretations of the Beatitudes. She examines (1) an illumination from a French medieval moral treatise that shows seven women in a “virtue garden,” each representing a different beatitude; (2) an Ethiopian-inspired canvas painting by contemporary American artist Laura James, which places the Beatitudes in the context of chattel slavery; and (3) the central panel of the Ghent Altarpiece [previously], where seven groups of saints gather round a bleeding Lamb.

“All three artworks place a Christ-figure in the centre: the tallest tree in the middle of the garden tended by prayer, an African Jesus with open arms delivering the Sermon on the Mount, or the slaughtered Lamb standing triumphantly on the altar of his sacrifice and surrounded by angels. This centrality suggests Christ’s role not only as the speaker of the Beatitudes but also as their embodiment and fulfilment.”

This post belongs to the weekly series Artful Devotion. If you can’t view the music player in your email or RSS reader, try opening the post in your browser.

To view all the Revised Common Lectionary scripture readings for All Saints’ Day, cycle A, click here.

Forever Blessed (Artful Devotion)

October 30, 2019October 30, 2019 Victoria Emily Jones2 Comments

Kussudiardja, Bagong_Christ and the Fishermen — Bagong Kussudiardja (Indonesian, 1928–2004), *Christ and the Fishermen*, 1998. Oil on canvas. Source: Ron O’Grady, ed., *Christ for All People: Celebrating a World of Christian Art* (Asian Christian Art Association, 2001), page 67

But the saints of the Most High shall receive the kingdom and possess the kingdom forever, forever and ever.

—Daniel 7:18

And he lifted up his eyes on his disciples, and said:

“Blessed are you who are poor, for yours is the kingdom of God.

“Blessed are you who are hungry now, for you shall be satisfied.

“Blessed are you who weep now, for you shall laugh.

“Blessed are you when people hate you and when they exclude you and revile you and spurn your name as evil, on account of the Son of Man! Rejoice in that day, and leap for joy, for behold, your reward is great in heaven; for so their fathers did to the prophets. . . .”

—Luke 7:20–23

Christians believe that the forever kingdom foreseen by the Old Testament prophet Daniel (in the vision that precedes the above verse) is the same kingdom that Jesus inaugurated in the New Testament. As Jesus preached the Beatitudes, he described those who would possess said kingdom: the meek, the merciful, and so on.

Daniel’s vision was of “one like a son of man” who was given, by the Ancient of Days, everlasting dominion over all peoples. Jesus uses the title “Son of Man” for himself all throughout the Gospel of Luke. He is the ruler of that expansive kingdom that had been prophesied about centuries earlier. It’s a kingdom that extends across the realms of earth and heaven, which will one day be joined back together. Its citizens are the saints of old (who trusted in God’s promises) and the saints of today.

On All Saints’ Day (November 1) we remember the powerful spiritual bond we have with our fellow “citizens” in heaven. We celebrate the examples they have left us, giving thanks for their lives.

Below is a song by a living saint that invites us into God’s kingdom and to “see with new eyes,” paired with a painting by a saint who has passed on, which shows Jesus building the kingdom.

+++

SONG: “Behold Now the Kingdom” by John Michael Talbot | Performed by John Michael Talbot and Terry Talbot, on The Painter (1980)

Grammy Award–winning singer-songwriter John Michael Talbot came to faith in 1975 while rock-’n’-rolling and shortly after joined the Jesus Movement. He converted to Catholicism in 1978 and two years later founded the Brothers and Sisters of Charity, an integrated monastic community with celibate brothers and sisters, singles, and families. He now lives at St. Clare Monastery in Houston, where he is still writing and producing music, donating all his proceeds to charities. On the album The Painter, he sings with his brother, Terry.

+++

Bagong Kussudiardja (1928–2004) [previously] was a well-known dancer and choreographer from Indonesia who combined classical Javanese dance with modern dance, the latter of which he studied under Martha Graham in the 1950s. He was a Christian, and several of his dance-dramas were based on events from the life of Christ: the Nativity, the Crucifixion, and the Ascension, for example. He was also a visual artist who pioneered batik painting in Indonesia, although he worked in oils too. In 1958 he founded Pusat Latihan Tari Bagong Kussudiardja (Bagong Kussudiardja Center for Dance), followed by Padepokan Seni Bagong Kussudiardja (Bagong Kussudiardja Center for the Arts) in 1978, which is still flourishing. He was honored with a Google Doodle on his birthday in 2017.

Kussudiardja’s Christ and the Fishermen shows Jesus on an Indonesian beach (notice the traditional fishing boats in the background) wearing modern dress: a blue bathing suit, a white tank top, and yellow-rimmed sunglasses. He gestures expressively as he preaches to his new disciples who, in their contouring, are reminiscent of shadow puppets (wayang).

+++

For All Saints’ Day devotions from the previous two lectionary cycles, see:

“Sky World,” featuring a song in Mohawk by Theresa Bear Fox and a fancy dance by Apsáalooke hip-hop artist Supaman
“Around the Throne,” featuring an early Renaissance altarpiece from Italy and a late Renaissance motet from Spain

For other thematically related Artful Devotions, see:

“Shine Like a Star,” featuring a contemporary Ukrainian icon and an American folk song from the 1953 Ruth Crawford Seeger songbook, American Folk Songs for Christmas
“Cloud of Witnesses,” featuring a Paduan dome fresco of heaven and a hymn by Brian Wren and Gary Rand

This post belongs to the weekly series Artful Devotion. If you can’t view the music player in your email or RSS reader, try opening the post in your browser.

To view all the Revised Common Lectionary scripture readings for All Saints’ Day, cycle C, click here.

Blessed Are (Artful Devotion)

February 12, 2019August 23, 2022 Victoria Emily Jones5 Comments

Come ye blessed by Nathaniel Mokgosi — Nathaniel Mokgosi (South African, 1946–2016), *“Come, ye blessed . . . ,”* 1980. This linocut is one of ten in a series on the Beatitudes. Source: *Christliche Kunst in Afrika*, p. 274

Blessed are you who are poor, for yours is the kingdom of God.

Blessed are you who are hungry now, for you shall be satisfied.

Blessed are you who weep now, for you shall laugh.

Blessed are you when people hate you and when they exclude you and revile you and spurn your name as evil, on account of the Son of Man! Rejoice in that day, and leap for joy, for behold, your reward is great in heaven; for so their fathers did to the prophets.

—Luke 6:20b–23

+++

SONG: “Blessed Are the Poor in Spirit” | Traditional, performed by Mitchell’s Christian Singers, on Mitchell’s Christian Singers, vol. 2 (1936–1938)

The Great Depression had a devastating effect on America’s recording industry, but a gradual recovery started in 1934, and that’s when the gospel quartet climbed to ascendancy within the broader genre of African American religious music. One of the most celebrated groups of this period was Mitchell’s Christian Singers from Kinston, North Carolina, originally called the New Four but then renamed for manager Willie Mitchell.

Each of the members had a different day job—tobacco warehouse laborer, truck driver, stonemason, coal salesman—but they formed a habit of singing together in the evenings and were discovered by a local talent scout. They went on to record more than eighty sides from 1934 to 1940, and in 1938 they even appeared onstage at Carnegie Hall alongside other greats, including Sister Rosetta Tharpe and Count Basie, for a landmark program titled “From Spirituals to Swing.” (One review of the concert noted how Mitchell’s Christian Singers sang “with touching solemnity . . . intensity and abandon . . .”) But despite their extensive output and relative popularity, none of the members opted for full-time professional musicianship. They traveled out of state to make records from time to time but generally stayed close to home, performing at churches and community functions.

The recording above, from an August 11, 1937, studio session, features Louis “Panella” Davis, Julius Davis, William Brown, and Sam Bryant. It was reissued in 1996 by Document as part of a four-volume CD set of the group’s complete works.

This post belongs to the weekly series Artful Devotion. If you can’t view the music player in your email or RSS reader, try opening the post in your browser.

To view all the Revised Common Lectionary scripture readings for the Sixth Sunday after Epiphany, cycle C, click here.