Holy Communion – Art & Theology

SPOTIFY PLAYLIST: September 2025 (Art & Theology): A new monthly playlist featuring a range of faith-based songs, including “Day by Day” by Lowana Wallace and Isaac Wardell of the Porter’s Gate (especially apt for Labor Day!), sung below by Kimberly Williams; “Jesus of Nazareth” by the early twentieth-century hymn writer Hugh W. Dougall, performed in a bluegrass style by the Lower Lights; and a fantastic instrumental jazz arrangement by Alice Grace of the classic children’s song “Jesus Loves Me,” performed by the Indonesian group Bestindo Music (Grace is at the keys).

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VIDEO: “The Apostles’ Creed”: This video presentation of the Apostles’ Creed, one of the oldest statements of Christian belief, used across denominations, was created in 2016 by Faith Church in Dyer, Indiana, using twenty-one of its members to voice the lines. [HT: Global Christian Worship]

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CHILDREN’S PICTURE BIBLE: Godaku Tjukurpa (God’s Story): Nami Kulyuru, a long-serving Pitjantjatjara Bible translator and artist from Central Australia, had the vision to pass on the stories of the Bible to her grandchildren and other young Pitjantjatjara readers using traditional Anangu paintings, compiled in book format. She began the artistic work in 2021 but shortly after was diagnosed with a malignant brain tumor. Following her death in 2022, her friends and colleagues rallied together to complete the project, which was published last November by Bible Society Australia. [HT: Global Christian Worship]

Kulyuru, Nami_Woman by the Well — Nami Kulyuru (Pitjantjatjara, 1964–2022), *The Woman at the Well (*John 4*)*, 2021, from the bilingual book *Godaku Tjukurpa (God’s Story)* (Bible Society Australia, 2024)

Spanning the Old and New Testaments, Godaku Tjukurpa (God’s Story) features fifty-four Bible illustrations by Pitjantjatjara artists, along with descriptions in Pitjantjatjara and English. It is available for purchase through the Koorong website, but it appears that it can ship only to Australia or New Zealand.

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SHORT FILM: Feeling Through, dir. Doug Roland (2019): Nominated for an Academy Award in 2021, this eighteen-minute film is about a homeless teen (played by Steven Prescod) who encounters a DeafBlind man (played by Robert Tarango) on the streets of New York City. It was inspired by an actual experience writer-director Doug Roland had some years earlier. He partnered with the Helen Keller National Center to make the film, including casting a DeafBlind actor as co-lead, the first film to ever do so. You can watch Feeling Through for free on the film’s website, along with a “making of” documentary. Here’s a trailer:

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FEATURE FILM: Places in the Heart, dir. Robert Benton (1984): Set in Jim Crow Texas during the Great Depression, this film centers on the recently widowed Edna Spalding (Sally Field), a middle-age white woman who is struggling to run the cotton farm she inherited from her late husband and to make ends meet for herself and her two small children. To earn some cash, she takes in a boarder, Mr. Will (John Malkovich), a bitter World War I vet who is blind, and she hires Moze (Danny Glover), a Black drifter who is being harassed by the Ku Klux Klan, to teach her how to plant and harvest cotton. The three are thrown together out of necessity and help each other survive.

It’s a pretty good movie overall—and it won Sally Field her second Oscar for Best Actress—but what leads me to recommend it is its theologically profound closing scene, which shows the ordinance of Communion being celebrated at the local country church. First Corinthians 13:1–8, the famous “love” passage, is read from the pulpit, and the choir launches into “In the Garden” (a hymn inspired by the risen Christ’s appearance to Mary Magdalene on Easter morning) as the plates of bread and grape juice are passed down the pews. The camera zooms in close on each congregant as they receive the elements, starting with a couple whose marriage had suffered due to infidelity but who, in this scene, silently reconcile.

On my first watch, what signaled to me that we had entered the realm of the imaginary (the mystical? the aspirational?) was the presence of Moze, who had left town the previous night after having been beaten by Klansmen; he’s here, with no visible wounds, in this conservative white church in the 1930s that very likely would not have welcomed him, being served the body and blood of Christ by a deacon. I believe that some of the white men in the pews in front of him are repentant Klansmen who, when Mr. Will identified them under their hoods by their voices the previous night, mid-assault, slinked away in shame. Within the row, too, is the mortgage collector who was in conflict with Edna, insisting that she sell the farm.

After Edna receives the elements, she passes them to her husband, Royce, who was dead before but here is very much alive. He then passes the elements to the young Black teen, Wylie, who had shot and killed him in a drunken accident, whom vigilantes then lynched. “Peace of God,” they say to each other—a traditional Christian greeting expressing love and reconciliation. The final frame lingers on Royce and Wylie, sharing the meal together, and I’m intrigued by the actors’ choices of expression: Wylie is serene, grace-filled, whereas Royce appears befuddled, perhaps recognizing for the first time the blessed tie that binds him to his Black neighbor, his brother in Christ.

This scene speaks powerfully of the invitation of the Lord’s Table—open to all, even the most morally odious, who would come in humble confession of (and turning from) sin and reliance on God’s mercy through Christ, which heals and transforms. Partaking of the meal are various people from the community—people who have cheated on their spouses; people with ornery dispositions; people with narrow economic interests, who fail in compassion; people who have stolen; people who have committed cruel, racist, violent acts; people driven to drink, leading to fatal harm; people who have silently allowed racial terror to reign in their town. All these sinful, forgiven people make up the body of Christ, are united under his cross. They’ve often hurt one another, but the Holy Spirit is at work making them a new creation. I see this final scene as a picture of heaven, where wrongs are redressed, and of the “beloved community” Martin Luther King Jr. talked about.

Places in the Heart is streaming for free on Tubi (no account required).

Last year when I was at the Art Institute of Chicago, I was transfixed by the pointillist painting Easter Mystery by the French artist Maurice Denis.

Denis, Maurice_Easter Mystery — Maurice Denis (French, 1870–1943), *Easter Mystery (Mystère de Pâcques)*, 1891. Oil on canvas, 41 × 40 1/8 in. (104 × 102 cm). Art Institute of Chicago. Photo: Victoria Emily Jones. [object record]

It shows three women dressed in mourning clothes arriving at Christ’s tomb (one ascending the hill, one kneeling, and one prostrate), only to find an angel at its entrance, announcing that Christ has risen. In the midground, visible through a veil of trees, the hand of God bends down to feed a group of white-clad women the body of Christ, a consecrated wafer that gives them eternal life.

Jesus’s teaching in John 6:48–58 is instructive here:

“I am the bread of life. Your ancestors ate the manna in the wilderness, and they died. This is the bread that comes down from heaven, so that one may eat of it and not die. I am the living bread that came down from heaven. Whoever eats of this bread will live forever, and the bread that I will give for the life of the world is my flesh.”

The Jews then disputed among themselves, saying, “How can this man give us his flesh to eat?”

So Jesus said to them, “Very truly, I tell you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you. Those who eat my flesh and drink my blood have eternal life, and I will raise them up on the last day, for my flesh is true food, and my blood is true drink. Those who eat my flesh and drink my blood abide in me and I in them. Just as the living Father sent me and I live because of the Father, so whoever eats me will live because of me. This is the bread that came down from heaven, not like that which the ancestors ate, and they died. But the one who eats this bread will live forever.”

The Art Institute audio guide (#841) provides the following commentary on the painting:

Maurice Denis belonged to a group of young French artists who called themselves the Nabis after the Hebrew word for prophets. The Nabis were interested in imbuing their subject matter with a sense of mystery and otherness. For Denis, a devout Catholic, an ordinary landscape could be loaded with manifestations of the divine. Denis sets this scene in the village of Saint-Germain-en-Laye, west of Paris, where he lived. The large house in the background would later become his home. In the foreground, an angel emerges from a cave, as if to announce Christ rising, to the mourning Virgin Mary and Mary Magdalene. Behind them are white-clad figures who hasten toward an astonishing sight, the hand of God himself, appearing miraculously from the trees to offer the Eucharist.

Denis strived for simple, flattened forms that sometimes verge on abstraction. He believed this process reflected spiritual purification, and he looked to the work of early Italian Renaissance art, and especially to the work of the painter monk Fra Angelico for inspiration. But he and the other Nabis were also deeply influenced by avant-garde French art. Here, Denis explores the effects of the pointillist technique of building up the picture surface with tiny dots of paint.

A 1994 exhibition catalog for Maurice Denis, 1870–1943 at the Musée des beaux-arts in Lyon expands on the artist’s technique in Easter Mystery. “By treating the surface with a kind of pointillist technique,” it reads, “he accentuates the gentleness of the curves, increases the light everywhere as in a mosaic, and endows the whole composition with an effect of airy lightness. . . . A spring landscape seems to be scattered with regularly spaced dabs of green paint, which work like a prism, breaking the light up into coloured particles. Denis used this method widely in order [in the words of Jean-Paul Bouillon] ‘to embody the truths of love and faith in perceptible form – making a surface quiver.’”

The quivering surface contributes to the mystical quality of the painting, in which mortality is taken up into immortality. By our partaking of the Eucharist, Christ assimilates us into his risen, living body, over which death has no dominion.

This painting is in the public domain, and you are free to use my photos if you wish. To view them in full resolution, right-click and open in a new tab (if viewing on a computer) or pinch to zoom (if viewing on a phone).

Tag: Holy Communion

Roundup: Pitjantjatjara picture Bible, “Feeling Through” short film, the reconciling Eucharist, and more

Easter Mystery by Maurice Denis (painting)