LOOK: Golden Dawn by Richard Pousette-Dart
This abstract expressionist painting by Richard Pousette-Dart shows an explosion of light, and human bones, as I read it, reassembling—death being translated into life. I’m reminded of Ezekiel’s vision in the valley, of scattered skeletal remains coming back together, growing flesh, standing up, and receiving breath—a foretaste (one, of the descent of God’s Spirit at Pentecost, but also) of the coming resurrection of all the dead, the firstfruits of which was Christ.
LISTEN: The Protecting Veil: “Christ Is Risen!” by John Tavener, 1988 | Performed by the Ulster Orchestra, feat. Maria Kliegel, on John Tavener: The Protecting Veil; In Alium, 1999; re-released on The Essential John Tavener, 2014
This is section 6 of 8 from John Tavener’s The Protecting Veil, a work for cello and strings commissioned by the BBC for its 1989 Promenade season. It’s a Marian work, its title referencing the name of an Eastern Orthodox feast that commemorates the Mother of God’s miraculous appearance over Constantinople in the early tenth century to protect the Christians living there from a foreign invasion.
The “Christ Is Risen!” section is shimmering and exultant, evoking Jesus’s bursting out of the tomb. But about halfway through, the tempo slows and the mood softens, perhaps suggesting, after his triumphant victory over death, a quieter, tearful moment of reuniting with his mom.
The Protecting Veil, Tavener said, “is an attempt to make a lyrical ikon in sound, rather than in wood, and using the music of the cellist to paint rather than a brush.”
The painting featured above is no religious icon, but I see the gospel in it.
Art & Theology 