Soichi Watanabe – Art & Theology

Christmas, Day 8: “Again and again his name laughs in my mouth”

January 1, 2025January 1, 2025 Victoria Emily Jones2 Comments

A praising of God is what laughter is, because it lets a human being be human.

Laughter is a praise of God, because it lets a human being be a loving person.

Laughter is praise of God because it is a gentle echo of God’s laughter, of the laughter that pronounces judgment on all history.

Laughter is praise of God because it foretells the eternal praise of God at the end of time, when those who must weep here on earth shall laugh.

The laughter of unbelief, of despair, and of scorn, and the laughter of believing happiness are here uncannily juxtaposed, so that before the fulfillment of the promise, one hardly knows whether belief or unbelief is laughing.

—a found poem by Kathleen Norris, made up of sayings by Karl Rahner, from Amazing Grace: A Vocabulary of Faith (Riverhead, 1999), pp. 257–58

LOOK: You Shall Laugh by Soichi Watanabe

Watanabe, Soichi_You Shall Laugh — Soichi Watanabe (Japanese, 1949–), *You Shall Laugh*, 2011. Oil on canvas, 16 × 12 in. (41 × 31 cm). Kwansei Gakuin University Chapel, Kobe, Japan. Photo courtesy of the artist.

Soichi Watanabe is a Japanese Christian artist who served as the 2008–9 artist in residence at the Overseas Ministries Study Center (OMSC) in New Haven, Connecticut (now at Princeton Theological Seminary). OMSC published a catalog of his work, titled For the Least of These: The Art of Soichi Watanabe, in 2010, featuring forty-three of his paintings.

Watanabe doesn’t supply facial features for his human figures because he wants viewers to be able to see themselves in the characters portrayed. He concentrates on form and color.

I was introduced to this painting of his through the OMSC-sponsored Zoom presentation he gave on February 3, 2021. There he said, “We can laugh as the love of God is being poured out on us . . . the laughter of knowing that the Lord is with us in pain and sorrow.” The wave shape at the bottom, he told me in an email, is a reference to the tsunami of March 11, 2011, which wiped out his home city of Ishinomaki and accelerated his mother’s dementia.

Watanabe also painted a companion piece, With Those Who Weep, which shows the same three figures huddled together in a mass, one comforting the two who are crying. Together, the paintings encourage us to fully feel our griefs and our hurts, and to be present to one another through those experiences, but also to hold on to joy, which transcends circumstance.

The artist pointed out to me that the three figures in You Shall Laugh resemble a flower spreading out its petals. The kanji for “bloom,” he says, originally meant “laugh” and was written as “birds sing, flowers laugh.”

LISTEN: “Jesus soll mein erstes Wort” (Jesus shall be my first word) from Gott, wie dein Name, so ist auch dein Ruhm (God, as your name is, so also your praise is to the ends of the world) (BWV 171) | Words by Picander (Christian Friedrich Henrici), 1728 | Music by Johann Sebastian Bach, 1728 | Performed by Kathleen Battle and Itzhak Perlman on J. S. Bach: Arias for Soprano and Violin, 1991

Jesus soll mein erstes Wort
In dem neuen Jahre heißen.
Fort und fort
Lacht sein Nam in meinem Munde,
Und in meiner letzten Stunde
Ist Jesus auch mein letztes Wort.

Jesus shall be my first word
uttered in the new year. 
Again and again 
his name laughs in my mouth, 
and in my last hour
Jesus will also be my last utterance.

English translation © Pamela Dellal, courtesy of Emmanuel Music Inc. Used with permission.

This aria is the fourth movement of a cantata Bach composed for his church in Leipzig for New Year’s Day 1729. January 1 is also the Feast of the Holy Name of Jesus, since Jesus was given his name when he was eight days old (Luke 2:21). Read the full libretto of BWV 171 here, and listen to the full cantata here. (It’s only sixteen minutes.)

For the excerpt I’ve chosen a recording by the legendary American operatic soprano Kathleen Battle, who is accompanied by the equally famous Israeli American violinist Itzhak Perlman.

Easter Hymn from the Early Church

May 3, 2024May 4, 2024 Victoria Emily Jones2 Comments

Watanabe, Soichi_To God Be the Glory — Soichi Watanabe (Japanese, 1949–), *To God Be the Glory*, 2009. Acrylic on canvas, 52 × 39 in. Collection of the Overseas Ministries Study Center at Princeton Theological Seminary.

This is the paschal feast,
the Lord’s passing from death to life:
so cries the Spirit.
No type or telling, this, no shadow.
Pasch of the Lord it is, and truly.

You have protected us, Jesus,
from endless disaster.
You spread your hands like a mother
and, motherlike, gave cover with your wings.
Your blood, God’s blood, you poured over the earth,
giving life, because you loved us. 

The heavens may have your spirit, paradise your soul,
but oh, may the earth have your blood!

This feast of the Spirit
leads the mystic dance through the year.
New is this feast and all-embracing;
all creation assembles at it.

Joy to all creatures, honor, feasting, delight!
Dark death is destroyed
and life is restored everywhere.
The gates of heaven are open.
God has shown himself human,
humanity has gone up to God.
The gates of hell are shattered,
the bars of Adam’s prison broken.
The people of the world below have risen from the dead,
bringing good news:
what was promised is fulfilled.
From the earth has come singing and dancing.

This is God’s passing!
Heaven’s God, showing no stinginess, 
has joined us together with God in the Spirit.
The great marriage hall is full of guests,
all dressed for the wedding, 
no guest rejected for want of a wedding garment.
The paschal light is the bright new lamplight,
light that shines from the virgins’ lamps.
The light in the soul will never go out.
The fire of grace burns in us all,
spirit, divine, in our bodies and in our souls,
fed with the oil of Christ.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Join, then, all of you, join in this great rejoicing.
You who’ve been working the vineyard from the early hour
and you who came later,
come now and collect your wages.
Rich and poor, sing and dance together.
You who are hard on yourselves, you who are easy,
honor this day.
You who have fasted and you who have not,
make merry today.

The meal is ready: come and enjoy it.
The calf is a fat one: you will not go away hungry.
There’s kindness for all to partake of and kindness to spare.

Away with pleading of poverty:
the kingdom belongs to us all.
Away with bewailing of failings:
forgiveness has come from the grave.
Away with your fears of dying:
the death of our Savior has freed us from fear.
Death played the master: he has mastered death.
The world below had scarcely known him in the flesh
when he rose and left it plunged in bitter mourning.

Isaiah knew it would be so. [Isa. 14:9]
The world of shadows mourned, he cried, when it met you,
mourned at its being brought low, wept at its being deluded.
The shadows seized a body and found it was God;
they reached for earth and what they held was heaven;
they took what they could see: it was what no one sees.
Where is death’s goad? Where is the shadows’ victory?

Christ is risen: the world below [hell] is in ruins.
Christ is risen: the spirits of evil are fallen.
Christ is risen: the angels of God are rejoicing. 
Christ is risen: the tombs are void of their dead.
Christ has indeed arisen from the dead,
the first of the sleepers.

Glory and power are his for ever and ever. Amen.

This text is a composite of excerpts from two Easter sermons spuriously attributed to John Chrysostom (ca. 347–407) and drawing inspiration from Hippolytus of Rome (ca. 170–ca. 235), which I adapted from Walter Mitchell’s English translation from the original Greek that appears in Adalbert Hamman, OFM, ed., Early Christian Prayers (Chicago: Regnery Gateway, 1961), 31–35. The source texts can be found in the Patrologia Graeca 59:741–46 and 59:721–24. They probably date to the fourth century.

Pentecost art from Asia

May 15, 2016August 15, 2024 Victoria Emily Jones17 Comments

Ten days after Jesus ascended into heaven (and fifty days after his resurrection), his Holy Spirit descended on the apostles, manifesting as “tongues of fire” (Acts 2:3). This miraculous gift enabled the apostles to speak in languages foreign to them but native to the many Jews from abroad who were gathered in Jerusalem for Shavuot (called “Pentecost” by Hellenized Jews), a festival of giving thanks for the harvest and for God’s provision of the Torah. For the first time the gospel of Jesus Christ was proclaimed to a global audience. Three thousand people came to faith that day, and the Christian church was born.

The Spirit is still at work in the dissemination of the good news today, breathing life into cultures all over the world and thereby building up an incredibly diverse body of Christ.

The arts are one expression of this diversity.

In the introduction to his groundbreaking book Each with His Own Brush: Contemporary Christian Art in Asia and Africa (New York: Friendship Press, 1938), Daniel Johnson Fleming writes,

As at Pentecost, Parthians, Medes and Elamites heard the message, “every man in his own tongue wherein he was born,” so we see Chinese and Japanese and Indians expressing Christianity’s universal language, each with his own brush. For when the spirit of God descends upon any people, new forms of beauty appear, new artistic gifts are revealed, adding another testimony to the universality of the Christian faith.

Since the publication of this book almost seventy years ago, Christianity has grown exponentially in Asia, as have indigenous artistic expressions of the faith. In 1975 Japanese theologian and arts advocate Masao Takenaka published the heavily illustrated book Christian Art in Asia, highlighting the robust variety being produced on the continent. Three years later the Asian Christian Art Association was founded to encourage the exchange of ideas between Asian artists and theologians. Their magazine, Image (not to be confused with the Seattle-based quarterly), has showcased local talents even further. Dozens more books have been published in English on individual Asian artists, countries, and the Asian Christian art movement in general. For the latter, see the beautifully designed The Christian Story: Five Asian Artists Today, plus The Bible Through Asian Eyes.

Below is a sampling of Asian art on the theme of Pentecost. Some works were made using traditional art forms or techniques—Chinese papercutting, Japanese flower arranging (ikebana) or stencil printing (kappazuri), Indian cloth dyeing (batik)—while other artists have chosen to work in oils and acrylics, collage, or glass. Some depict native people and settings—for example, Thai dancers wrapped in sabai, or a group sitting under a thatched roof in Indonesia—while others prefer ethnic and geographic ambiguity. There’s no single style that epitomizes the art of any country.