Jacob’s ladder – Art & Theology

Roundup: New film book, “Sawubona,” conceptual art, and more

February 16, 2025February 20, 2025 Victoria Emily Jones1 Comment

NEW BOOK: A Whole Life in Twelve Movies: A Cinematic Journey to a Deeper Spirituality by Kathleen Norris and Gareth Higgins: Published last October by Brazos Press, this excellent book comprises twelve chapters reflecting on fourteen movies (two chapters feature a complementary pair), drawing out story, insights, and meaning. It’s authored by the award-winning American spiritual memoirist and poet Kathleen Norris (Acedia and Me; The Cloister Walk; Dakota: A Spiritual Geography) and the Irish writer, peace activist, retreat leader, and festival organizer Gareth Higgins. Each chapter contains two mini-essays—one by each author, the second responding to the first, sometimes disagreeing on points—and a section of “Questions and Conversation,” which make the book especially fitting for a film/reading club. There’s also a “For Further Viewing” section in the back, with many more recommendations, several of which are new to me and which I’ve been watching (e.g., Le Havre, Love Is Strange, Patti Cake$) and really enjoying!

I so appreciate the variety of films featured in the book—which come from different eras, cultures, and genres and address different themes—and I like that the writers don’t overdetermine the films’ meanings to try to make them fit a Christian agenda, which is sometimes a trap that people writing on Christianity and film fall into (influenced partly, I’m sure, by publishers’ demands, to make the marketing easier). Norris and Higgins are simply two Christians writing about their shared love of cinema, and I had so much fun listening in on their conversations.

You may also want to check out the Substack that Norris and Higgins write together, Soul Telegram: Movies & Meaning, whose purpose is “to help people find the most life-giving movies, and to write about them as a way of reflecting on the meaning of our lives.” See also the recent Habit podcast episode “Kathleen Norris watches movies,” where Norris discusses Paterson, Babette’s Feast, After Life, and more.

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SONGS:

>> “Oh Mercy (Long Way to Go)” by Glen Spencer and David Gungor, 2024: Debuted by the Good Shepherd Collective on December 8, 2024. Watch on Instagram below, or this cued-up YouTube video.

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>> “Sawubona” (I See You) by Jane Ramseyer Miller, 2012: The most common greeting used by Zulu people is “Sawubona,” literally meaning “I see you,” with the implication of “My whole attention is with you. I value you.” The word conveys a deep witnessing and presence, acknowledgment and connection. A standard reply is “Ngikhona,” “I am here.” This humanity-honoring exchange that occurs regularly in South Africa was set to music by the American choral director Jane Ramseyer Miller and is performed in the video below by the Justice Choir, a grassroots movement that encourages more community singing for social and environmental justice.

The song is authorized for free noncommercial use, and sheet music is available from the Justice Choir Songbook.

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PODCAST EPISODE: “Taylor Worley: Sacramental Eyes and Conceptual Art,” The Artistic Vision, January 31, 2025: Dr. Taylor Worley is a visiting associate professor of art history at Wheaton College, the author of Memento Mori in Contemporary Art: Theologies of Lament and Hope (Routledge, 2019), and a recipient of a grant from the Templeton Religion Trust, which he has used to research the intersection of conceptual art and Christian contemplation. He’s also become a friend of mine, as we often run into each other at conferences!

In this recent podcast interview, he talks about his most amazing teaching experience to date; helping Protestants like himself recover a sacramental ontology of the world; asking questions verbally versus aesthetically; death and mortality; what conceptual art is, and why it’s “real art”; what the esteemed Roger Scruton got wrong in his documentary Why Beauty Matters; the “Art of Attention” study he conducted with a psychophysiology colleague in the modern wing of the Art Institute of Chicago (which I participated in! here’s one of the three pieces I was tasked with looking at for five straight minutes while hooked up to a heart-rate monitor); and why artists inspire him.

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LECTURE: “Spirituality and Art in the Twenty-First Century” by Aaron Rosen: For its fourth annual keynote on October 23, 2024, the MSU (Michigan State University) Foglio Speaker Series on Spirituality hosted Dr. Aaron Rosen, a writer, curator, and educator on religion and the arts. He is a practicing agnostic Jew married to an Episcopal priest and the author of Art and Religion in the 21st Century (Thames & Hudson, 2015). His presentation is so well-structured and spotlights a vast range of artworks! It starts at 5:05 of the video below; the Q&A is not included.

Rayner, Stephanie_Boat of Eternal Return — Stephanie Rayner, *Boat of Eternal Return*, 1998–2012. Pine, tulip poplar, mahogany, ebony, moose ribs, guanaco coccyx, mare pelvis, ruler, dice, DNA sequencing gels from the Human Genome Project, score of Mozart’s Requiem, cello components, hand-worked glass, spirit level, 9 × 30 × 2 1/4 ft.

Azevedo, Nele_Minimum Monument — Néle Azevedo (Brazilian, 1950–), *Minimum Monument* (detail), Chamberlain Square, Birmingham, England, 2014. Sculpted ice.

In the talk, Rosen explores how art can facilitate or exemplify four spiritual states:

Attention
– Simplicity
– Repetition
– Memory
Wonder
– The Uncanny
– Technological Sublime
– Sublime Silence
– Darkness
– Ecological Lament
– Ecological Hope
Care
– Resilience
– Replenishment
– Maintenance
– Recognition
Belonging
– Homecoming
– Pilgrimage
– Sanctuary
– Sharing Sacred Space

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VIDEO INTERVIEW: “VCS Creative Conversations: Ben Quash with Steve Reich”: “This film continues our series of ‘Creative Conversations’. In these conversations, living artists working in a variety of different artistic media discuss how the Bible and its legacies of visual and theological interpretation operate as a vital resource for their own creativity. In this film, VCS [Visual Commentary on Scripture] Director Ben Quash interviews the legendary American contemporary composer Steve Reich. They discuss the profound role of the Bible in transforming both the subject matter and the style of Reich’s music, reflecting especially on his settings of the Abraham story, the episode of Jacob’s ladder, and texts from the Psalms.”

Spiritual imagination in the art of Igor Paneyko

January 9, 2017January 9, 2017 Victoria Emily Jones3 Comments

I spend a lot of time “art surfing” the Internet, following click-trails that start maybe with a Google image search of a subject I’m researching and then end up somewhere totally different. One of those trails this weekend led me to the work of Ukrainian New Wave artist Igor Paneyko.

Paneyko was born on March 2, 1957, in the city of Stryi in the Lviv Oblast region of western Ukraine, in the foothills of the Carpathian Mountains. From 1975 to 1981 he studied at the Lviv State Institute of Applied and Decorative Art (now the Lviv National Academy of Arts), then spent a year working in Khiva, Uzbekistan. He currently lives and works in Uzhhorod, Ukraine, near the Hungarian border, in the region known as Transcarpathia.

Other than this general biographical information, I can find little else about the artist. An exhibition promo from 2012 suggests that he is a private person who’s “wary of publicity,” though he does exhibit his work. Using the Ukrainian spelling of his name, Игоря Панейка, yields more results than a search in English, but information is still sparse.

Many of Paneyko’s paintings are of visionary landscapes with floating, haloed figures. Candles, moons, and ladders (see Genesis 28:12) are often featured. Much of his work seems to me to carry on the legacy of Symbolism, a late nineteenth-century art movement that developed new and often abstract means to express psychological truth and the idea that behind the physical world lay a spiritual reality. Symbolists sought to give form to the ineffable, such as dreams and visions, and they emphasized emotions, feelings, ideas, and subjectivity over realism, often addressing the themes of religious mysticism and death. Gustav Klimt and Odilon Redon are two of Symbolism’s greatest artists.

Below is a compilation of some of Paneyko’s paintings that I find particularly appealing. I don’t know the specs for any of them, besides the year of those that have it painted large enough on the canvas, but I’ve linked each of them to its online source.

These first five are, to me, visually stunning. Ground and sky are not discernible from each other but rather interpenetrate, creating sacred space and evoking wonder.

^ From 2005, we have a woman with a candle standing in contrapposto and covered in multicolored roses. The thin gold band around her head suggests a halo, and the purple burst behind her an aureola. It appears that she has come to pay devotion to Christ, as a wayside crucifix, whose patibulum supports the candles of previous pilgrims, is planted in the background. In the center of the woman’s chest, a little red kernel is encircled with light, representing the love that’s set aglow by her encounter; her loins, too, bear this mark—a possible allusion to the erotic language used by medieval mystics to describe their union with Christ.

^ Here a haloed woman—maybe an angel (are those wings behind her?)—carries a load of pears and apples. To the left is a rowboat with four other haloed figures, one of them a baby; to the right, a garden. Some associations that come to my mind are Eden, Flight to Egypt, ship of salvation, fruit of the Spirit.

^ In this one, the focal point is the bottom left corner, where a yellow-green-blue crescent moon balances atop a patchwork mountain, and a row of nightcapped sheep saunters sleepily away. On the other side of the mountain a newspaper party hat floats over a cross-marked graveyard. Maybe it’s because we’ve just come out of Christmas, but I think of Bethlehem after Christ’s birth: the Judean hills alive and vibrant, having been touched by angel song; the shepherds’ charges seeking rest after the flurry of activity; and spreading a shadow over the celebration, the Massacre of the Innocents—Herod’s extermination of the town’s infant male population. Continue reading “Spiritual imagination in the art of Igor Paneyko” →

Jesus as Ladder: Jyoti Sahi and Ralph Stanley in conversation with Genesis 28

June 27, 2016March 28, 2023 Victoria Emily Jones3 Comments

Jyoti Sahi is a prolific artist who founded an art ashram in Silvepura Village outside Bangalore in southern India. His paintings are infused with Christian spirituality, often depicting biblical narratives set on Indian soil.

Lord as Ladder of Perfection by Jyoti Sahi — Jyoti Sahi (Indian, 1944–), *Lord as Ladder of Perfection*, 2014. Oil on canvas.

Lord as Ladder of Perfection references Jacob’s dream from Genesis 28:10–22, wherein Jacob witnesses angels descending and ascending a cosmic ladder. This vision resurfaces in the New Testament, when heaven opens and angels are seen pressing in on the Son of Man (John 1:51), ministering to him in his passion and then heralding his resurrection.

By entwining Jesus in this ladder from Genesis, Sahi suggests that Jesus himself is our ladder—the One who connects earth to heaven, heaven to earth. By him, we can access God.

We are meant to identify with the figure in the bottom left corner of the painting, whose gender is deliberately ambiguous. In this figure you might see Jacob, or perhaps you see Mary Magdalene, who is often shown in art weeping at the foot of the cross and is traditionally understood to be the “sinful woman” who anoints Jesus’s feet with expensive perfume and tears in Luke 7:37–38. Either way, we are invited into the painting by this bent body, invited to worship Christ.

The cosmic implications of Jesus’s mediating role are suggested in a few ways. First, Jesus’s left leg is lifted in the pose of Nataraja (“Lord of the Dance”), an embodiment of the Hindu god Shiva. Nataraja’s dance destroys all obstacles on the path to liberation and prepares the universe for renewal, and here Jesus is grafted into that iconography. He dances, and the world is transformed.

Moreover, the four elements are present: earth, wind, fire, water. Earth forms the base of the painting, where the ladder, treelike, is rooted. Wind sweeps down in the form of a hamsa, a mythical swan-like bird, here signifying the Holy Spirit. Fire burns at the bottom right, a biblical symbol for cleansing and refining, and appears to be setting aflame a bush, a reminder for us to be attentive to God’s call, as Moses was. Straight down the center, water bursts forth from Christ’s side wound, a river of life that washes over the worshipper.

At the top, the ladder branches out and flowers.

Painted in 2014, Lord as Ladder of Perfection reminds me of the traditional hymn “Jacob’s Vision,” which likewise identifies the ladder of Jacob’s dream with the crucified Christ. I wrote about the hymn here—in particular, the beautiful cello-accompanied rendition sung by Ralph Stanley, who passed away on Thursday. I enjoy listening to it while I gaze at Sahi’s painting, as the two interpret each other.