The Iconography of the Nativity

Alexander the Great, Apocalypse, art, Bethlehem, Faith, Icons, Imagination, incarnation, inspiration, Nativity, Painting, Ravenna Italy, Savonarola, vision

What Makes a Nativity Scene?

The gospels remind us the story of Christ’s birth isn’t necessary for our salvation. Only our faith in Christ’s saving work for us on the cross is necessary “to transform our humble body that it may be conformed to the body of his glory, by the power that also enables him to make all things subject to himself.” (Philippians 3:21, alternate translation). Mark has no infancy narrative at all, while John’s gospel speaks of the Greek Logos (Word), who is present with God at creation and as co-creator.

Luke and Matthew both have birth stories. Matthew gives us the ancestry of Jesus, the Wise Men or Magi from the East, and the massacre of the innocents. John the Baptist also figures large in Matthew’s text. Luke brings in the shepherds, the host of angels, and the angel’s annunciation to Mary of her impending birth of a savior.

Luke 2:6-7 notes this point about the birth of the Christ child: “While they were there, the time came for her to deliver her child. And she gave birth to her firstborn son and wrapped him in bands of cloth, and laid him in a manger, because there was no place for them in the inn.”

Gail W. painted a simple nativity in one class session.

This bit of text sets the scene for all the artists of every era to exercise their imagination. What does a first century CE manger look like? What animals would be there? Would the visitors come by day or night? Who would visit a woman who got pregnant while she was still “betrothed?” In every age, gossip travels fast, even without the internet. Traveling traders and business people carried news from town to town.

After all, word had spread how Joseph, “being a righteous man and unwilling to expose her to public disgrace, planned to dismiss her quietly.” (Matthew 1:19). No wonder there was no room for them at the inn. No respectable place would have them. Or we could be generous to the local folk and say Mary and Joseph travelled slowly because her imminent due date was the cause of frequent stops. A donkey ride might not be the most comfortable ride in one’s late trimester. Either way, if they were late arriving, the rooms may have been booked full already.

The Church of the Nativity, which dates to the 4th CE, was built over the cave in Bethlehem where early Christians believed Christ was born. From Apocryphal sources we learn the traditions of the cave and the stable. The Infancy Gospel of James (chapter 18) also places the Nativity in a cave, but the Gospel of Pseudo-Matthew combines the two locations, explaining that on the third day after the birth “Mary went out of the cave and, entering a stable, placed the child in the manger” (chapter 14).

Roman Sarcophagus of Stilicho. It’s found today beneath the pulpit of Sant’Ambrogio basilica in Milan, Italy.

The earliest images of the nativity which currently exist are from 3^rd CE sarcophagus panels. The earliest Nativity scene in art was carved into a sarcophagus lid once thought to be for a Roman general, Stilicho, who died in 408 CE. The ox and the ass and two birds are the only figures that appear in addition to Jesus, swaddled in his manger. Our typical cast of characters, including Mary and Joseph, do not appear may be because this sculpture illustrates a prophecy from the Old Testament. Isaiah 1:3 reads, “The ox knows its master, the donkey its owner’s manger…” This Nativity also has relevance to the Eucharist because believers are nourished by the “fodder” of Christ’s flesh, just as the animals receive their sustenance from the manger’s hay. The animals aren’t mentioned in the New Testament, but from the Apocryphal sources mentioned above.

Tim’s Nativity: simplicity rules here—only the lights of the great star, the light of the Christ child, and the minor lights of the heavens.

Nativity with Flight to Egypt in the upper part—from the 4th and 5th centuries, Athens, from before the Middle Ages, and technically “Roman” art. (often referred to as “Early Christian”).

Next added were the shepherds, during the 4th and 5th CE, such as this example from the Palazzo Massimo. We find it on the sarcophagus Marcus Claudianus, on the upper tier, on the left. This dates from around 350 CE, found today in the Museo Nazionale Romano, Palazzo Massimo alle Terme, Rome.

Sarcophagus of Marcus Claudianus (Rome, Italy), Palazzo Massimo: Early Christian art is interesting because it can be hard to spot the stories as you know them. Except it seems, the Nativity, in the upper left corner, 330-335CE.

The sculptor carved the sarcophagus in the style called “continuous frieze” because all the figures line up and their heads are of equal height. The appearance of grape harvest imagery on the lid is ambiguous; it appears on both pagan/secular and Christian sarcophagi with identical elements. From left to right on the lid: nativity scene of Jesus, sacrifice of Isaac, an inscription naming the deceased, an image of the deceased as scholar, and a grape harvest scene.

Carvings on the front of the Marcus Claudianus sarcophagus include: Arrest of Peter, miracle of water and wine (with a possible baptism reference), an orant or praying figure, miracle of loaves, healing a man born blind, prediction of Peter’s denial, resurrection of Lazarus and supplication of Lazarus’ sister.

This stone relief carving depicts the detail of the Nativity from the 4th and 5th centuries from the Palazzo Massimo, on the Sarcophagus of Marcus Claudianus (Rome, Italy).

A Carolingian Era (751-887) Nativity scene from the British Museum

Eastern Orthodox icons retain the cave imagery while the Western art traditions use a stable or ruins of a classical structure in the nativity scenes. The first is according to tradition and the western imagery reminds the viewer the ancient past with its many gods is no longer ascendant.

The one change we see in the 6th century is the inclusion of Mary lying on a mattress type bed. It may have appeared earlier in art, but we have no surviving example to date an earlier occurrence. Later, we see more actors in the drama appearing, but often they don’t arrive all at once. The wise men visit, or the shepherds visit, but not in the same artwork.

Wise Men Visiting the Birth of Christ, 6th CE

A 10th century ivory panel from Trier, still very much following the now 700+ year old Roman models;
things changed much more slowly in the Middle Ages than they do now.

By the time of the 11^th CE, the nativity scene was becoming more elaborate , but was not yet in full flower. By the 13^th CE, the magnificent portal of the St. Lawrence cathedral, in Trogir, Croatia, by the Master Radovan and his associates has a strong narrative of the many parts of the nativity story. The city of Trogir, a World Heritage Site since 1997, is known as one of the best-preserved Romanesque-Gothic cities, the core of which consists of forts, religious and secular buildings, with the Rector’s Palace and the City Loggia standing out. Its Romanesque churches are supplemented with Renaissance and Baroque edifices.

Romanesque style portal of the St. Lawrence cathedral, in Trogir, Croatia, by the Master Radovan and his associates

The detail of the portal is worth a closer look. In the center, in between the curtained “bunkbeds,” the Virgin and Child rest on the upper tier. The animals also look on in this section. Below the manger scene is a ritual bath. In my Christian world view, I called this the “baptism of Jesus.” In his Hebrew life, he would have undergone a ritual cleansing immersion bath before going to the temple for his circumcision. This ritual would mark him as a covenant member of the nation and people of God. The two elderly people on the left of this scene are most likely Simeon and Anna, prophets who speak to the child’s fulfillment of scripture.

Details of Romanesque style Portal of St Lawrence cathedral in Trogir, Croatia.

Above all this at the center top are the star, with the angels on the left and on the right. Filling the space on the left side of the portal are the shepherds and their herds, while the Magi and their steeds occupy the right side. The Magi ride horses, unlike our modern nativities which have camels.

Sixth-century CE mosaic at the Basilica of Sant’Apollinare Nuovo in Ravenna, Italy

In England, the Venerable Bede (d. 735) wrote the Magi were symbols of the three parts of the world—Asia, Africa, and Europe. They signified the three sons of Noah, who fathered the races of these three continents (Genesis, chapter 10). By the late Middle Ages, this idea found expression in art, and artists began to depict one of the kings as a black African. The kings sometimes have their retinues, which include animals from their presumed places of origin: camels, horses, and elephants are the most common. As with the shepherds, the artists often represented the three kings in the various stages of life: young, middle aged, and old age.

Gentile da Fabriano’s Adoration of the Magi, 1423

Artists added more exotic animals to the nativity scenes in the 15^th CE when trade and travel were expanding beyond the continent. Gentile da Fabriano’s Adoration of the Magi (painted in 1423) presents a remarkable range of animals. Alongside the traditional ox, donkey, sheep (and a couple of dogs thrown in for good measure), the chaotic scene includes a camel, cheetah (or leopard), hawks and monkeys.

“Cabinet of Curiosities”
Engraving from Ferrante Imperato, Dell’Historia Naturale (Naples 1599)

The inclusion of animals which were not native to Europe helped Gentile da Fabriano to emphasize the three wise men’s journey from the Far East, but also to impress viewers with its exoticism and visual richness. This would have reflected very well on the painting’s patron, the rich Florentine banker Palla Strozzi, as it reinforced his connections to foreign lands. In this era, many rich citizens had a collection of exotic animals and imported wares, just as wealthy people today have collections of art, yachts, or sports cars to showcase their riches.

Sandro Botticelli, “Mystic Nativity” (1500), oil on canvas, 42.7 × 29.5 inches (108.5 × 74.9 cm) (image via Wikimedia Commons), now in National Gallery of London.

An even more elaborate nativity comes from the hand of Botticelli, who worked in the wealthy merchant city of Florence, Italy, in 1500. Savonarola was a fanatical preacher who aimed to morally reform the city of Florence, which had a global reputation for artistic output and lavish lifestyles. Savonarola condemned secular art and literature, decried the city as a corrupt and vice-ridden place bloated with material wealth, and, after warning of a great scourge approaching, saved the Florentines by convincing the French king and military to deoccupy and recede during the Italian War of 1494–98.

The people thought of him as a prophet and came from miles around just to hear him preach his apocalyptic message. He preached a sermon telling the people of Florence they could become the new Jerusalem “if only its civilians would part with and burn their luxuries, opulent fineries, and give up their pagan or secular iconographies.”

Botticelli fell under Savonarola’s influence during this time, for his art changed from decorative to religious. The 12 angels at the base of the composition each hold a ribbon that the artist inscribed with the 12 privileges or virtues of the Virgin Mary, which came from a sermon Savonarola delivered about a vision he once experienced. Another unusual aspect is that the three kings welcome Jesus empty-handed, rather than with gold, frankincense, and myrrh — influenced by Savonarola’s sermon, though it could be their ultimate gifts are their prayers and devotion.

Mike brought his good humor to class with a Grinch portrait

Sometimes it’s impossible to know whether the artist was inspired by a non-biblical element or by an apocryphal text in a Nativity scene or if the artistic depiction came first. In their book, Art and the Christian Apocrypha, David R. Cartlidge and J. Keith Elliott contend in the making of early Christian art, written and visual sources are interdependent. “The developing consensus is that oral traditions, texts (rhetorical arts) and the pictorial arts all interact so that all the arts demonstrate the church’s ‘thinking out loud’ in both rhetorical and pictorial images” (2001, xv).

Gail W.’s open perspective nativity inspired by the renaissance artists

When we artists imagine the nativity today, we add to the basic scripture text all of the Hollywood movies we’ve seen, the stories we’ve heard around the fireplaces and altars of our instruction, and every Christmas card and artwork we’ve ever seen. Our memories of Christmas are often more important than Christmas itself. This is because we have an idea of how Christmas is supposed to BE, but the birth of Christ wasn’t what either Mary or Joseph thought it was going to be. Just as most of us, they hoped to be at home and near family, not “away in a manger, no crib for a bed.”

Cornelia worked in the geometry of the scene. I might rework the sky.

God brought the Savior of all into our world into a humble setting, not to a royal palace. God brought to the birthplace of Christ strangers from distant lands and marginalized people from their homeland to have the first opportunity to worship the newborn king. God excluded the political rulers because they were out to destroy this unusual king.

We are part of the Christian community now, so we sometimes miss the disruptive nature of Christ’s birth. As part of the in/dominant group today, we might have a tough time reading the Bible’s challenges to self-satisfaction and complacency.

Birth of Alexander the Great, mosaic, Roman villa near Baalbek, Lebanon, 4th CE

We often forget while these depictions of the Nativity were evolving, the segment of the Roman Empire that was still pagan were also representing famous births, that predate the standard depictions of the Nativity of Christ. For example, in a Roman villa near Baalbek, Lebanon a fourth century mosaic of the Birth of Alexander the Great at first sight almost exactly resembles what later became a standard depiction of the Nativity of Christ. This mosaic, today in the National Museum of Beirut, shows the newborn Alexander the Great being bathed in a circular fluted basin by a female figure labelled ‘Nymphe’, while his mother Olympias reclines on a bed watched by an attendant.

Compare this with the icon of the Wise Men Visiting the Birth of Christ, from the 6th CE pictured above. In the lower right corner of this nativity scene, we see a small depiction of the Christ child being bathed, with water being poured over his head. (Obviously a United Methodist, but a precursor since John Wesley wasn’t born yet!) Our Christian iconography is derived from pagan sources. By this I mean we reimagined the pagan iconography and repurposed it for our own spiritual practices and purposes.

One of our other challenges is the calendar. We in the West use the Gregorian calendar, from the 16^th CE, while the Orthodox Church still follows the Julian calendar, which was in use during the time of Christ. This is why the Orthodox community still celebrates Christmas and Easter on different dates than the Western churches. In the Orthodox Church, they celebrate Epiphany as the baptism of Jesus rather than the arrival of the Magi (Three wise men), which the Western Church celebrates on 6 January. On the Gregorian calendar, this Orthodox Epiphany celebration is January 19^th. They celebrate this date as the Baptism of Jesus, rather than the arrival of the wise men. Their Epiphany is located in the baptism rather than the nativity. That’s a whole other theological discussion beyond the iconography of the nativity!

DeLee: The No Room Inn, mixed media, private collection

I mention this fact of the two calendars because I’m always “calendar challenged.” It’s not a senior citizen thing, because this was my problem even when I was in my twenties also. Sometimes I put too many commitments on my calendar, and other times I underestimate the time to complete my tasks. Then again, there’s always the unexpected interruptions. Always the interruptions. I came to understand in my ministry my list of tasks to do were not my actual work, but instead these interruptions were the opportunities which God would bring to me to do God’s chosen ministry.

So, I’m a few days late on the Western calendar for the visit of the Three Kings, having missed January 6^th, and I’m a few days early for the Orthodox calendar. As Goldilocks said, “Not too hot, not too cold, but just right!”

The last art pieces our class made in 2024 before the holidays and the snowstorms were our nativity paintings. I asked each person to use their imagination and to bring the essence of the nativity to their creative process. Some of us quickly realized our images and used our second meeting to do a personal project or another version of the nativity scene. Others of us took both sessions to perfect our one image. I blame the Christmas cookies and our lack of hand and mouth coordination. Sometimes it’s hard to chew and paint at the same time!

Our first class of 2025 was an instance of “calendar challenge”—I thought we were having it, but the group didn’t. The next week, a major snow storm canceled class every where for everyone. Friday, January 17, should be a good day to begin a new project! We’re going to do some mixed media, along with weaving projects in the days and weeks to come. You don’t need skills, but a willingness to try.

Joy, peace, and a hope for better weather!

Cornelia

The Magi and the Manger: Imaging Christmas in Ancient Art and Ritual

The Magi and the Manger: Imaging Christmas in Ancient Art and Ritual – The Yale ISM Review

The Nativity Tympanum on the Sarcophagus of Stilicho

https://www.christianiconography.info/Wikimedia%20Commons/nativitySarcophagusStilicho.html

UNESCO monuments in the Croatian Academy of Sciences and Arts Glyptotheque

https://gliptoteka.hazu.hr/unesco/en/trogir.html

The Apocryphal Gospels—PseudoMatthew—has Latin text and translation
https://www.google.com/books/edition/The_Apocryphal_Gospels/Cmbtm4ZZXF0C?hl=en&gbpv=1&dq=M.+Berthold+has+argued+that+Pseudo-Matthew&pg=PA75&printsec=frontcover

The Infancy Gospel of James (2nd century) |http://www.ccel.org/ccel/schaff/anf08.vii.iv.html

The Arabic Infancy Gospel (5th-6th century) http://www.ccel.org/ccel/schaff/anf08.vii.xi.html

The Gospel of Pseudo-Matthew (8th or 9^th century) http://www.ccel.org/ccel/schaff/anf08.vii.v.i.html

Web Gallery of Art, searchable fine arts image database

https://www.wga.hu/frames-e.html?/support/zearly/1/1sculptu/sarcopha/1/9claudi2.html

Nativity – Visual Elements in the Nativity — Glencairn Museum

https://www.glencairnmuseum.org/nativity-visualelements

Johann International: Search results for Nativity http://johanninternational.blogspot.com/search?q=Nativity

Revisiting Botticelli’s Evocative “Mystic Nativity” https://hyperallergic.com/978201/revisiting-botticelli-evocative-mystic-nativity/

ORTHODOX CHRISTIANITY THEN AND NOW: Origins of the Icon of the Nativity of Christ
https://www.johnsanidopoulos.com/2018/12/origins-of-icon-of-nativity-of-christ.html

Light Overcomes the Darkness

art, Bethlehem, Christmas, Faith, Hanukkah, hope, Israel, Light of the World, mystery, Nativity, suffering, Ten Commandments

“The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it.” —John 1:5.

Work in progress: Light Shines in the Darkness

Some of us can hear these words with hope, two thousand years after John’s gospel was first written. These words come as a ray of hope, like a flashlight’s beam bursting into a collapsed mine to let imprisoned workers know help and life-giving oxygen is on the way. For the people in the first century who lived under the Pax Romana—the peace of Rome—not everyone had the same rights and privileges as the citizens of Rome. The conquered lands, including the nation of Israel, were under military occupation and suffered brutal taxation and unfair application of the laws.

More importantly, obedience to the emperor and the empire was required, which for the Jewish people meant making a sacrifice in honor of the emperor. Because this act would acknowledge a human being as a god, the Jews were between a rock and a hard place. If they denied the emperor, they were unpatriotic. If they sacrificed to him, they committed blasphemy against their God. After all, we find one of the great commandments in Exodus 20:2-3:

“I am the LORD your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery; you shall have no other gods before me.”

We take religious freedom and expression as a given here in the United States, since the first European settlers to these shores came here with the express purpose of worshipping God in their own way. Unfortunately, they also persecuted the next groups who arrived and who worshipped differently. After gaining independence from England, America has been one of the few nations of the world in that one of its core values is to honor every faith tradition and allow each person to worship freely (or not) God as they want.

Insisting on the priority or preference for one religion isn’t historical or grounded in our constitution. We find this in both Article VI of our Constitution, which prohibited religious tests for federal office holders, and in Article I of the Bill of Rights:

“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”

In this present time, when certain groups of Christians (Christian Nationalists) want to claim an alternative history of our national origin and our national destiny, they also are trying to rewrite our history to make it fit their purposes. This elevates their religious group above others and gives them preference over other Christian denominations as well as other faiths and nonbelievers. When these other groups become persecuted or marginalized, the whole suffers, while a few prosper.

The situation was much the same back in the first century CE, when tax farming was a corrupt practice in the Roman provinces. A family bought the rights to a tax area, collected whatever they wanted, and gave the due to Rome. The rest they kept as profit. No wonder folks hated the local tax collectors: they were not only greedy, but they colluded with the occupation. The priests in the temple made sure they never rocked the boat, so they could keep up their rituals and practices of the law, both scriptural and secular.

Therefore the people yearned for a savior, a messiah. In every age, in the stillness of the night, in the darkness of despair, when hope was flickering to an ember, a voice of a prophet would arise. These prophetic voices weren’t often heard, but occasionally one voice would pierce the gloom like a bright light in a dark cave. When a prophet speaks a true word from God, people recognize it as true because it speaks the truth of God, reminds people they belong to God, calls the people back to God, and tells them the consequences of their resulting behavior. Prophecy isn’t just about fortune telling.

Poets are often the prophets of their age. The first stanza of William Butter Yeats’ Ode speaks both toward that first century past and to the second coming:

“Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.”

Final State: The Light Shines in the Darkness

If we lose hope, if we give up on the hope of redeeming our world and ourselves, we will fall into despair and nihilism. These emotions are not good. We won’t listen for the still small voice of God in the dark and quiet spaces anymore. We won’t hear the voice of God in the weed growing in the crack in the pavement of the sidewalk as we go about our daily tasks. We will fail to hear the promises of new hope and new strength when the crocuses pop through the snow next spring.

Art and poetry keep us connected to the magic and mystery of the Spirit of God. A steady diet of news and television is a soul killer. If you find your attitude going south, I recommend you limit your news consumption to two hours or less per day. Replace those other hours with sunlight, exercise, cooking, a new hobby, fiction reading, journaling, or whatever. If you keep getting drawn back into the distressing activity, remember to let go, and return to a better activity. Optimism and a sense of hope will carry us further than negativity will. As Isaiah 6:13 says,

“Even if a tenth part remain in it, it will be burned again, like a terebinth or an oak whose stump remains standing when it is felled. The holy seed is its stump.”

Or as my daddy always said, “Don’t let the bad guys grind you down.” Of course, this sentiment had some bad medical school Latin he and his friends translated when the going got tough and the sleep got short in his younger days. “While I breathe, I hope,” is “Dum spiro spero,” in Latin. It’s been one of my favorite sayings. Night doesn’t last forever, and morning will come. Dawn will break! There will be a new day and a fresh opportunity to do at least one thing better. To make a difference in one person’s life, to make a difference for the good for someone, somewhere. I may be just baking cookies to bring to overworked volunteers somewhere, who are doing good for others, but I can bring a bright light to someone’s day today. I don’t have to save the entire world.

If I can be a ray of light for someone today, I might give them hope. Hope is a gift. We should share it freely. Then hope would grow and “The people who walked in darkness have seen a great light; those who lived in a land of deep darkness—on them light has shined.” (Isaiah 9:2).

Joy, peace, and light,

Cornelia

Faith of Our Forefathers (May 1998) – Library of Congress Information Bulletin

https://www.loc.gov/loc/lcib/9805/religion.html

The Second Coming | The Poetry Foundation

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43290/the-second-coming

Picasso’s African Masks and Inner Mysteries

adult learning, art, Creativity, cubism, elections, Imagination, inspiration, Painting, picasso, renewal, The Lord of The Rings, Thomas Merton, vision

What is the key to open the door to the hidden mysteries? For Frodo and his fellow travelers in The Lord of the Rings trilogy, they needed to know the elvish answer to the riddle, “Speak friend and enter.” Gandalf knows this language, so they enter with ease. For years, the Egyptian hieroglyphics were unintelligible because we had no living person who knew the ancient language. After the discovery of the Rosetta Stone in Egypt with its three languages depicting the same text, the race was on to translate the pictographic writing.

In art school my fellow students and I worked in our shared studio classes daily, but sometimes we never made any progress. Then the day would come when the light bulb clicked on in one of our brains. When we took a break, instead of giving everyone’s work a cursory glance before going out for a snack, we would linger and take in the special magic of a unique vision. Where does this special insight come from? Is it a visitation from above? Or a piercing of the soul by divine artistic insight? Sometimes I think the rare and the strange shock us out of our ease and complacency.

Picasso: Self Portrait, oil on canvas, 1907.

Art historians divide Picasso’s early periods into his Blue Period (1901-1904), the Rose Period (1905-1907), the African-influenced Period (1908-1909), and Cubism (1909-1919). Some art historians call Picasso’s African Period his “Proto-Cubist” or primitive period. It lasted from 1907 to 1909. Picasso was 24 years old when he saw an exhibit of African art at the ethnographic museum at Palais du Trocadéro. He experienced a “revelation” and began to explore African art further. African masks and sculptures strongly influenced Picasso’s art for several years, when he began to paint in sculptural forms, earth tones, and in flattened sharpened shapes.

*Pablo Picasso in his Montmartre Studio,*1908, via The Guardian

Picasso had first seen an African mask at Gertrude Stein’s home. Recalling his visit to the Trocadéro Museum of Ethnology (now the Musée de l’Homme), Picasso said of the museum:

“A smell of mould and neglect caught me by the throat. I was so depressed that I would have chosen to leave immediately. But I forced myself to stay, to examine these masks, all these objects that people had created with a sacred, magical purpose, to serve as intermediaries between them and the unknown, hostile forces surrounding them, trying in that way to overcome their fears by giving them color and form. And then I understood what painting really meant. It’s not an aesthetic process; it’s a form of magic that interposes itself between us and the hostile universe, a means of seizing power by imposing a form on our terrors as well as on our desires. The day I understood this, I had found my path.”

That path led Picasso to what he called his “periode nègre” (black period) or African period. It lasted only a few years, to 1909, but it turned Picasso into an avid collector of African art, masks, and sculptures that inspired him for the rest of his career.

Picasso: Woman with joined hands, 1907, Paris.

In our art class we chatted about how these masks inspired Picasso. Picasso used a palette of earthy tones, overlapping browns, and yellows with dark reds. By using Cubism, he explored a simplified geometry and the redefinition of perspectives. He tried to reveal objects from a different vantage point—from the mind, not only how the eyes perceive them. His Les Demoiselles d’Avignon signified a radical break from the naturalism that had defined Western art since the Renaissance, derailing former notions of what art was supposed to look like.

Picasso: Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907), oil on canvas.

People criticized Picasso’s two-dimensional women as unfeminine, for their confrontational demeanor was a complete departure from the traditional depiction of female beauty. Artists and critics alike received the work negatively and saw its menacing sex workers as promiscuous and unfit for Paris salons. Picasso rolled up the canvas, considered scandalous even amongst his innermost circle, and stored it in his studio for years to come. Yet this groundbreaking painting influenced his future works.

As Thomas Merton wrote in No Man Is an Island:

“In an aesthetic experience, in the creation or the contemplation of a work of art, the psychological conscience is able to attain some of its highest and most perfect fulfillments. Art enables us to find ourselves and lose ourselves at the same time.”

Picasso broke through the accepted boundaries of Western culture and discovered his true spirit in through the voices of the ancestors speaking from the African past. He met the other and found himself. By bringing the African masks into his studio, Picasso lived out the message of Hebrews 13:2—

“Do not neglect to show hospitality to strangers, for by doing that some have entertained angels without knowing it.”

As artists today, who seek to find their own true self and unique voice, we must both find ourselves and lose ourselves. We must lose our preconceived notions of who we should be and discover our true selves. Some artists use this as license to be caricatures of an artist, but actual artists have work ethics because they have obligations to galleries and clients. Looking like an artist and being an artist are two different things. Finding our true selves is not only a task for creatives, but also a lifetime journey for all people engaged in spiritual growth. We all can recover the image of God, which is our true self, by both God’s grace and our cooperation in doing good to all.

We artists are not here to make pretty pictures, but to break down the boundaries between our walls that keep us estranged from God and neighbor. We are not as bold as Picasso! Most of us are not risk takers. Willingness to leap out in faith is what marks a famous artist. That same riskiness is what marks the prophets of the Bible. Prophets never praise the status quo, but remind the people of the nature of their God:

“For the LORD your God is God of gods and Lord of lords, the great God, mighty and awesome, who is not partial and takes no bribe, who executes justice for the orphan and the widow, and who loves the strangers, providing them food and clothing.” (Deuteronomy 10:17-18)

Isaiah 1:17 reminded the people of his day, “learn to do good; seek justice, rescue the oppressed, defend the orphan, and plead for the widow.” Jesus will pick up this same voice in Matthew 25:40, “And the king will answer them, ‘Truly I tell you, just as you did it to one of the least of these who are members of my family, you did it to me.’”

So how will we find our unique voice and creative expression today? The more we steep our heart and mind in the great spiritual writings of the ages, particularly those of whom have come through great suffering or difficulties, the closer we will come to understanding our own challenges in life. These hardships are not hurdles or barriers to our progress, but refiners of any weakness that needed to be strengthened.

As my teachers always said, “We test you, not to see how ignorant you are, but to see what we failed to teach well.”

I always liked their attitude better! I did not feel so dumb when I missed the right answer on their tests. I always liked art better, for more than one answer could be correct. If we work within the parameters of the assignment, we can interpret the art with our own vision and style.

Our recent class with the African masks was a big diversion from our usual method of working. First, the masks are from a different culture. They are as much of a culture shock to us as they were to Picasso. He had the privilege of buying them in the Parisian curio shops, so they sat around in his environment. We only had images. The mystery of these objects might not connect to us as they did to him.

Mike brought several masks from his home collection. He decided to paint one that spoke to him. Like Picasso, he had an emotional connection to this mask. He made a successful rendering of the object before him. Unfinished, he would bring it back to the next class.

Tim worked on a mask representing his wife. He first painted his background with a dark wash, then began drawing a lighter design on top of it. The contrast of the dark and light without the middle tone was difficult for me to look at, but he seemed to be enjoying getting the big shapes down. I often let people work without jumping into change their activity. I figure they will learn more from going down a dead-end road by themselves than if I stop them before they go there. They will ask about this, and we will talk about it. They will not do it again. A little suffering leads to learning if we do no harm to the body.

Gail S. understood the concept of simplifying the faces into a mask. She chose a photo of herself and her granddaughter. With two mask shapes, she had multiple decisions to make. As with the others, her work was unfinished at the end of class.

This was a difficult and challenging lesson for everyone. Asking students to make an emotional connection and render the object also was aspirational. It also gave me an opportunity to see where they were on this learning journey. I will not issue this sort of challenge again for a while. I was afraid I had been boring them, but maybe not. I may need to bring brownies next Friday to make up to them. For some, they may be “grief snacks,” while for others, they will be “encouragement food.” If my bunged-up shoulder permits, I will indulge in grief baking. Otherwise, I will just eat the chocolate ice cream in my freezer, and ask for understanding.

I painted a Trump mask to get my emotions out and not have them bottled up inside. If we dislike an attribute in another person, it is because we have that attribute in our own life. I can get incredibly angry, but I bottle it up and it hurts me. I do not often let anyone else see it, so it can make me sick from holding it in. Whenever someone calls you a name, I remember the old song my parents taught me when I was a child:

“Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me.”

Anger is a difficult emotion for many people, especially for women. It is a “culturally unacceptable behavior,” for we have always expected strong emotions from men, but this expectation is changing over the generations. Proverbs 14:29 reminds all of us,

“Whoever is slow to anger has great understanding, but one who has a hasty temper exalts folly.”

The Old Testament often speaks of God’s anger, but this is because God’s people keep finding other gods to worship instead of the one true God. Psalms 145:8-9 reminds us of God’s true nature:

“The LORD is gracious and merciful, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love.

The LORD is good to all, and his compassion is over all that he has made.”

The hidden mystery is in plain sight. It is the word of hope we hear: We are not sinners in the hand of an angry God. We are all beloved and God’s everlasting grace is redeeming us always. When things fall apart, God works to reframe and renew, even if we have difficulty recognizing God’s new creation or wanting to take part in God’s plans for the new heaven and the new earth.

Joy, peace, and recovery,

Cornelia

Historical Influence of African Art in the Modern Art Movement – ARTDEX

Historical Influence of African Art in the Modern Art Movement

Pablo Picasso – Artists – Mnuchin Gallery

https://www.mnuchingallery.com/artists/pablo-picasso#:~:text=Picasso’s%20early%20work%20can%20be,Cubism%20(1909%2D1919)

Stealing beauty | Art | The Guardian

https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2006/mar/15/art

Historical Influence of African Art in the Modern Art Movement – ARTDEX

Historical Influence of African Art in the Modern Art Movement

Sticks And Stones May Break My Bones – Meaning & Origin of The Phrase

https://www.phrases.org.uk/meanings/sticks-and-stones-may-break-my-bones.html

Pumpkins and Gourds

adult learning, art, Creativity, Faith, generosity, inspiration, Ministry, nature, Painting, picasso, pumpkins, shadows, Spirituality, suffering, Winston Churchill

Sometimes I can work for hours and end up with nothing to show for it. In grammar school, I could use the excuse, “The dog ate my diorama.” Today my primary reason is “The latest iOS upgrade sent my file into the far realms of the cloud and smashed it to smithereens while it was traveling to some unknown destination.” I can be thankful at least my mind only goes on occasional jaunts to Pluto, but it returns after those excursions after a time. And no worse for wear, not that anyone would ever notice.

Today will be different. I am determined. I am convinced. I am also wearing my Bat Girl costume, so I will not let the powers and principalities of evil defeat me. I will fight against the darkness of the night and bring the light to the hidden places. When we start a new venture, the only way we can gain experience is by failing. In fact, failure is how we learn. The best teachers set up the learning process in structured practices which build upon each prior experience. We also observe our students to note if we need to reteach a lesson from a different point of view to cement their understanding before we move onto the next phase.

Mr. Rogers was still breaking world records in running for his age group at age 100. He died on November 14, 2019, while in hospice care at the age of **101**.

No one learns to lift a huge weight in their first exercise class. They begin to lift progressively heavier weights until they can lift the heaviest weights possible. No one becomes a world class artist in kindergarten, but sensitive teachers guide them from an early age to focus and hone their skills. Later, once they absorb what their masters can teach them, artists begin to find their own personal expressions and style. Art also provides an emotional outlet for people who have no aspirations to become a professional artist. Some people only want to explore their creativity, enjoy playing with the colors, get out of the house, and interact with others. Socialization and challenging our minds are important activities for a healthy life.

Sir Winston Churchill
*Still Life, Fruit*, ca. 1930’s
Heather James Fine Art

“Happy are the painters for they shall not be lonely. Light and color, peace, and hope, will keep them company to the end, or almost to the end, of the day.”

Winston Churchill wrote this in Hobbies in 1925. reflecting on the solace painting had provided him since the death of his daughter Marigold.

Hans Hoffman, The Pumpkin, oil on canvas, 1950, 36” x 48”.

One of the great teaching artists, Hans Hoffman, was known for his quote:

“The ability to simplify means to eliminate the unnecessary so that the necessary may speak.”

When we see a landscape, a still life, or a face, most of us get overwhelmed with the myriad details. We want to focus first on the details, instead of the bigger shapes. This gets us in trouble every time. What do the time management gurus tell us over and over? Write down your list. Number your biggest priority. Do it first. Always do the biggest, hardest, and nearest in time deadline things first.

This is how we make our basic sketches on our canvas. Get the big shapes on the canvas first. They do not have to be a great outline, but a general gesture that takes up the space of the object, proportionately to the other objects. Often, we treat our marks as if we are chiseling in stone. With paint, we can let it dry and go over it and no one will know the difference.

As we paint big to small, we can paint the darks, the lights, and the middle tones. This allows us to blend the colors together if that is our desire. Sometimes the blank white canvas fills us with trepidation. We may think our first sketch might be somehow “wrong.” There are no wrong marks in art class, but we may make many marks on the way to fulfilling our mind’s ideas in life. Winston Churchill has a remarkable story of his personal experience learning to meet the open maw of the great white canvas. It once terrified him as much as “Jaws” does the modern movie goer.

Picasso Cubist Still Life with Watermelon

This week we approached our seasonal gourd and pumpkins from several different directions. We looked at zen tangle designs, realism, and pumpkin patch photos. We also looked at paintings that focused on the stems and vines. We also looked at Picasso’s still lifes. He was a master of the Cubist patterns and simplification of forms. He did not try to make the objects look real, but made shapes, which were pleasing to the eye.

Michael painted an exuberant pumpkin with a giant green stem and his usual textured background. He enjoys his time in art class and his work shows it.

Gail S. painted a multicolored group of pumpkins attached to a sinuous vine. She brings her knowledge and background in nature as a park ranger to her artwork. She always has an interesting design element to her work.

Gail W. Started with a realist rendering, but ended up with thin layers of paint overlapping at the edges of the pumpkin creases. When she asked what was going on in her painting technique to cause this, I noticed she was using water to thin her paints. “When you thin your paint so it is transparent, then when it overlaps, you get a solid line. Use your paint straight out of the tube next time.” She took her painting home, added another layer of paint straight from the tubes, and decorated the whole with zen tangle designs, using a fine point marker.

I put my gourds in an interior setting, as if they were on a tabletop near a window, which looked out onto a blue sky. I added a tree branch bereft of autumn leaves, as if a cold and rainy day had preceded the day of this painting. The barren landscape outside contrasts with the luscious treatment given the gourds inside. Each gourd has its own personality and spirit. They are more than mere natural objects.

They brim with the reproductive power of nature, as a testimony to the promise of tomorrow’s abundance, even in the face of today’s barrenness. One gourd casts a shadow, while the other does not. A viewer might feel some psychic dissonance because a realistic rendering would have both objects cast a similar shadow. The space is not “real,” but “spiritual” instead.

This is the promise of a faithful God for those who believe in God’s steadfast love and providence. As we hear in Habakkuk 3:17-18, we can have trust and joy during trouble:

“Though the fig tree does not blossom,

and no fruit is on the vines;

though the produce of the olive fails,

and the fields yield no food;

though the flock is cut off from the fold,

and there is no herd in the stalls,

yet I will rejoice in the LORD;

I will exult in the God of my salvation.”

In a world in which the good often suffer and evil seems to prosper, we always remember God is still at work to fulfill our daily needs, if not all our infinite desires. We will not want. Those who have the heart of God will always share with those who have less. Those who are greedy and don’t share God’s generous nature will stay stingy. This is how we know who is doing the work of God—the people who are loving God and neighbor both. .

Joy, peace, and providence,

Cornelia

SCHEDULE FOR 2024:

November 8—Painting

November 15—No Class—Vacation

November 22—No Class —Vacation

November 29—No Class—Thanksgiving

December 6—Painting

December 13— Painting

December 20— Painting

December 27—TBD —holiday season and school vacation calendar

Painting as a Pastime – International Churchill Society

Painting as a Pastime

When He Wasn’t Making History, Winston Churchill Made Paintings | Artsy
https://www.artsy.net/article/artsy-editorial-making-history-winston-churchill-made-paintings

Hans Hofmann: Quotes

https://www.hanshofmann.net/quotes.html

The Eisenhower Matrix: How to Prioritize Your To-Do List [2024] • Asana
https://asana.com/resources/eisenhower-matrix

Creating a Picasso Still Life

art, brain plasticity, Cezanne, change, Creativity, Habits, Healing, Imagination, inspiration, Painting, perspective, picasso, purpose, renewal, Spirituality, vision, war

Einstein never said, “If we do the same thing every time, but expect a different result, this is the definition of insanity.” So why do artists return over and over to the still life? For that matter, why do preachers repeatedly use the same scripture texts for their sermons? Some of my former congregation members might have said I was overly fond of certain verses. The scalawags among them might have thought I did not get my point across the first five times I preached a version of the sermon text. As Jesus was wont to say in Luke 14:34-35 about Salt:

Picasso: Self Portrait, 1907, oil on canvas, National Gallery of Prague

“Salt is good; but if salt has lost its taste,

how can its saltiness be restored?

It is fit neither for the soil nor for the manure pile;

they throw it away.

Let anyone with ears to hear listen!”

I always kept my sermon notes just in case I had a difficult week and might need a backup sermon, but I never used these notes. I wrote each of those sermons for a time and a place, but they were never useful for the current time or the present location. Likewise, an artist brings their emotions and experiences of the present time to each working session in the studio. Sometimes an artist is chock full of energy and power, full of joy and life. Their paintings or works exude these same emotions. At other times, the cares and chaos of the world intrude into the otherwise peaceful precincts of the artist’s workplace. These emotions and troubles will also be visible in their work, for artists are in tune with their times.

Picasso: Still Life with Dead Pigeon, oil on canvas, 1941, Nagasaki Prefectural Art Museum

This year in the adult art class I’m teaching at Oaklawn UMC, the students are getting lessons not only on how to paint, but on awakening their individual creative voice. These lessons are part art history and part “thinking like an artist” by painting in another artist’s style. The week before, we worked on a typical still life painting. For this session, we worked on what we saw in front of us, but tried to make an emotional connection with the objects. When most of our energy is going to getting proportions in proper order, shadows cast in the right direction, following the shape of the objects, and the colors correct, putting our emotions into the work comes in a distant fifth or last.

Morandi still life: he painted the same vessels so often, they became as friends who shared their innermost secret thoughts with him.

To be sure, our class is still analyzing the containers as physical objects more than feeling or experiencing the vessels as objects with personality. We have not yet become friends with the objects, or really gotten to know them on a deep and intimate level. This is also a problem in our society today. We are not willing to know others too deeply, and we aren’t likely to let many others know us too deeply either.

This isn’t a problem confined to older people. For my own demographic, meeting new people seems a mite risky these days in the online world because we never know who is behind that chatbot or Facebook account who seems so charming. For younger people, who sometimes never seem to come up for air from the online world, this online reality can seem more real than the three-dimensional world in which we live. (I was today old years when I learned the latest online AI fad is personalizing your own chatbot companion. I wonder if these chatbots have Asimov’s 3 Laws of Robotics ingrained in their program guardrails.)

Having empathy with inanimate objects is difficult. Artists bring into their own studio the objects which interest them. A teacher brings in objects her students can approach, given their skill level. I will blow that concept out of the water this Friday with some crazy Halloween pumpkins but, if the subject matter is consistently too difficult, many students will give up if the challenge is too far out of reach.

Picasso Still Life, oil on canvas, 1937, private collection.

In the second session when our class saw these same liturgical vessels, we chatted about Picasso and cubism. Cubism had several different forms of expression, but we focused on synthetic cubism, a later phase of the cubist style dating from about 1912 to 1914. It had simpler shapes and brighter colors. Synthetic cubist works also often include collaged real elements such as newspapers and cardboard. These works have interesting designs, such as multiple points of view (perspective), overlapping shapes which make their own patterns, and linear outlines. This style is an outgrowth of the work of Cézanne, who said: “A work of art which did not begin in emotion is not art.”

Gail S. took a cubist vision to our same three pots

If you’ve ever tried to put on your socks in the morning beginning with a different foot than normal, you can begin to appreciate how difficult it is to imagine how to create an artwork in a fresh style. If we were to ever have a stroke or a traumatic brain injury, relearning how to do simple tasks is much the same.

Tim’s first effort. He was one week out from surgery. His body was devoted to recovery, not to thinking about cubism.

Our brains can handle the rebuilding project, but we will feel strange doing it! This is because we are building new neural circuits and pathways in our brains. Going to work or the grocery store by taking a different route also feels strange, as does a golfer trying to reconstruct their swing pattern.

Tim took a second week to elaborate on his still life. It’s a better solution! Amazing what happens when our bodies have extra energy to give to creative projects.

As a comparison, we can look at the great hurricane which came through North Carolina recently and took out the big interstate highway that runs through the mountains and valleys. The sooner the highway construction engineers can come inspect the ground, the better. They must decide if the land is safe for rebuilding and then check the infrastructure also. They may need to redesign the road to current standards and also the underlying roadbed. When the great 1900 hurricane hit Galveston, rebuilding the city took twelve years. People were still living there, and life was going on, but the city began a process of raising the land levels and building a sea wall that took that extensive time.

Cornelia’s overlapping shapes and shifting perspectives

Change doesn’t happen overnight. Every sales or leadership training session I’ve been in has emphasized the idea “Three weeks are necessary to build a habit.” The origin of this myth has nothing to do with habit formation. Instead it comes from a 1960 self-help book Psycho-Cybernetics, in which plastic surgeon Maxwell Maltz wrote how his patients took about 21 days to become used to their new appearance after surgery.

He did no double blind, peer reviewed study to verify this, but his book applied this 21-day timeline to many other wide-ranging aspects of self-transformation in life. He also believed three weeks was the time people needed to adapt to a new house or change their mind about their beliefs. (He also didn’t live with a preteen girl child who enjoyed rearranging the living room every night just to see how her mom negotiated a new obstacle pattern in the dark when she came home from a sales call.)

If artists want to make paintings which are technically proficient and resemble the objects they see, they are only halfway to creating a good painting. They must also bring who they are and allow the voice of God to speak through their hand to make a masterpiece. In this way we separate artists into the good and the great, the ordinary and the masters. Not all of us will be prophets who listen to God’s word, but all of us can and should silence our hearts and minds of the world’s chatter and claims so the word of God can pierce our hearts.

Picasso: Guernica, 1937, 11’ x 25.5’,
Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía (MNCARS), Madrid, Spain

Rabbi Nahum Ward-Lev describes how the ancient prophets listened for God’s liberating word:

“At its heart, the prophetic witness was a way of listening, listening beyond the social norms of the day, listening to the word of the liberating God. The prophets urged the people to listen to God’s word because the discourse of the king, princes, and wealthy landowners was too narrow and was limited to the interests of these elites. This conversation did not include the voices of suffering people. The prophets, in God’s name, offered a much broader discourse, a conversation that listened to and addressed the needs of the poor and the disadvantaged….

The prophetic listening tradition is alive today to inspire people to listen beyond the established conversation. The prophetic tradition challenges us to listen especially to the cries of those who suffer and to listen to the voice of alternative possibility, to the voice of God.”

Picasso: Still Life—fruits and pitcher, oil and enamel on canvas, 10 3/4 x 16 1/8 inches, Guggenheim Art Museum, NYC.

Making a painting is quite different from making a work of art. This is why house painters aren’t called artists. They may cover a surface with color and not make a mess, but their heart and soul isn’t in their work. Learning to risk our vulnerability and emotional expression is also part of art class, just as much as learning what colors to mix to make orange or green. Picasso, quoted in Alfred H. Barr Jr.’s Picasso: Fifty Years of his Art (1946), understood this:

“The artist is a receptacle for emotions that come from all over the place: from the sky, from the earth, from a scrap of paper, from a passing shape, from a spider’s web.”

We have these same experiences also, but we don’t realize these are part of the artist’s toolbox. These ordinary moments of life are also the extraordinary means of God speaking to us, if only we have ears to hear and a heart and hands ready to be used by God for God’s good purposes.

Joy, peace, and prophecy,

Cornelia

Quote Origin: Insanity Is Doing the Same Thing Over and Over Again and Expecting Different Results—Quote Investigator®. The origin of the quote is misattributed to Albert Einstein, but it originated in the 12-Step Anonymous groups in the 1980’s.

https://quoteinvestigator.com/2017/03/23/same/

Isaac Asimov’s “Three Laws of Robotics”:

A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
A robot must obey orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.

https://webhome.auburn.edu/~vestmon/robotics.html#:~:text=A%20robot%20may%20not

How Long Does It Really Take to Form a Habit? | Scientific American

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-long-does-it-really-take-to-form-a-habit/

Nahum Ward-Lev, The Liberating Path of the Hebrew Prophets: Then and Now (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2019), 133, 134, 135–136.

https://cac.org/daily-meditations/living-presence-liberating-journey/

Meet My AI Friends, by Kevin Roose, NYTimes gift article

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/09/technology/meet-my-ai-friends.html?unlocked_article_code=1.Uk4.9sLW.VYS9bW4dc3ib&smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare

Pablo Picasso – Oxford Reference
https://www.oxfordreference.com/display/10.1093/acref/9780191826719.001.0001/q-oro-

art, Attitudes, Creativity, Faith, Fear, generosity, hope, Icons, Imagination, inspiration, Israel, Light of the World, Ministry, Painting, poverty, renewal, Spirituality, suffering, Sun, United Methodist Church, vision

The first bright light of creation must have been an awesome sight. Of course, only God was there to see it or hear it. The earth was a formless void, and darkness covered the face of the deep. Genesis 1:3 tells us, “Then God said, “Let there be light;” and there was light.”

John Martin: The Creation of Light, Mezzotint, 1825, Royal Collection of the Arts, London.

I have often wondered if God’s creation of light was accomplished with sound. If at one time only darkness existed, then suddenly light appeared, would this sudden change happen like an atomic bomb flash? Not with the bomb’s destructive evil and force, but with the creative and life-giving energy of God’s power and love. While scripture tells us we hear God’s voice in the sheer silence (1 Kings 19:11-12), this is after God has created everything which we humans might worship instead of God. When God first created light, what was the power behind God’s words?

George Richmond: The Creation of Light, Tempera, gold, and silver on mahogany, 1826, support: 480 × 417 mm, frame: 602 × 539 × 66 mm, Tate Gallery, London.

Maybe no one cares, for if no one is in a forest to hear a mighty oak fall, can we say it ever made a sound? Just because human beings weren’t created yet does not mean the light did not come into existence or make a noise. We might as well say bombs are not leveling towns in Ukraine and Gaza merely because we are not running from the falling bricks and dust. Yet, we can see the pictures on television and know these facts as true.

We are in a trickier situation when we try to find information to prove the existence of the creation of the first light and the facts of its origin. We are certain light was created, for light now exists. Tracking light’s history to its birth story is the challenge!

*The Creation of Day and Night*, by Francisco de Holanda, *De Aetatibus Mundi Imagines, 1543.*

When the Old Testament says God created light, the ancient readers understood this word to mean a special light, not the light of the sun, moon, or the stars. God created these lesser lights on a later day, so they possess a different form of light from the first light. The early Hebrew philosophers distinguished between chomer, matter, and tzurah, the form or function of an object. A raw material has chomer, matter, but once it’s made into an object, it acquires the form or tzurah.

Michelangelo’s The Separation of Light from Darkness, (c. 1512), the first of nine central panels that run along the centre of the Sistine Chapel ceiling.

At the beginning of creation, nothing had form. It was all matter. Then God created the Ohr Ha-Ganuz, or the Hidden Light. This special light played a critical role in Creation. Just as regular light allows us to see and relate to our surroundings, the Hidden Light enabled the different elements of creation to interact with one another. It dispelled the initial state of darkness when all objects were isolated and disconnected from one another. Through this special light, the universe’s myriad objects acquired purpose and function and were able to work together towards a common goal.

About 13.8 billion years ago, our universe ballooned outward at an incredible speed. Everything we see today, which was once packed tightly together, expanded in a roiling mass of light and particles. It took 380,000 years for this hot, dense soup to thin and cool enough to allow light to travel through it. This first light, dating back to the formation of early atoms, we call the cosmic microwave background and we can still detect it today.

The Advanced Simons Observatory in the Atacama Desert in Chile is on the forefront of research for detecting cosmic microwave background radiation to give us a better picture of the early universe, its evolution, and the many phenomena within it. Beyond the cosmic microwave background, they will hunt for and study the birthplaces of distant stars, the contents of interstellar dust, exo-Oort clouds—spherical shells of ice and dust at the edges of solar systems—and several other phenomena. But, given the unique capabilities of this observatory, they are also open to finding some unexpected and unexplained puzzle pieces in the universe that we did not know we were missing.

Before there were any stars or galaxies, 13.8 billion years ago, our universe was just a ball of hot plasma—a mixture of electrons, protons, and light. Sound waves shook this infant universe, triggered by minute, or “quantum,” fluctuations happening just moments after the big bang that created our universe. The question we first asked, “Did the creation of light make an audible sound?” is related to the “cosmic wave background radiation” that the observatory in the Chilean desert is seeking.

Although scientists call this moment the Big Bang, it was not a loud explosion. Instead, it was more like an imperceptible humming because this first moment happened when the universe was denser than the air on Earth and sound waves could travel through it. This covered the first 100,000 to 700,000 years. As the universe cooled and expanded, the sound waves grew longer and and the sounds lower. As the universe continued to expand, the wavelengths became so long the sounds became inaudible to the human ear.

NASA Sound File Magnified of Big Bang Microwave Radiation

For this sound file, the patterns in the sky the Planck Observatory observed were translated to audible frequencies. This sound mapping represents a 50-octave compression, going from the actual wavelengths of the primordial sound waves (around 450,000 light-years, or around 47 octaves below the lowest note on the piano), to wavelengths we can hear.

Creation: Bright Beam, stage 3 in the studio

Maybe as you read this, you wonder, why do artists have an interest in science? This is an attribute of artists from Leonardo in the Renaissance down through the Impressionists who studied the play of light and atmospheres on surfaces in the 19^th century. Today we know the speed of light means we are always seeing a “late arriving sunbeam.” The speed of light gives us an amazing tool for studying the universe. Because light only travels a mere 300,000 kilometers per second, when we see distant objects, we’re always looking back in time. If we the universe clock backwards, right to the beginning, and you get to a place that was hotter and denser than it is today. So dense that the entire universe shortly after the Big Bang was just a soup of protons, neutrons, and electrons, with nothing holding them together.

Lentil and ancient grains pasta soup, held together by melted cheese—metaphor for the early universe

The moment of first light in the universe, between 240,000 and 300,000 years after the Big Bang, is known as the Era of Recombination. The first time that photons could rest for a second, attached as electrons to atoms. It was at this point that the universe went from being opaque, to transparent. The earliest possible light astronomers can see is the cosmic microwave background radiation. Because the universe has been expanding over the 13.8 billion years from then until now, those earliest photons were stretched out, or red-shifted, from ultraviolet and visible light into the microwave end of the spectrum.

Today we have tools unavailable to the 15^th or 19^th centuries, but what we have in common is the human mind. Because we are created in the image of God, we have the same desire to create and shape our world and to understand our place in it. For some people, they find placing their trust in God’s absolute power over all creation and events as a way of understanding the problem of good and evil in the world. This justifies suffering and allows them to ignore the plight of the poor. Prosperity religion, which preaches the good prosper and the bad suffer, is a classic example of this theological belief. We United Methodists believe in doing good to all people, as often as possible, with all the means we can. As the gospel says in Matthew 25:37-40—

Then the righteous will answer him, ‘Lord, when was it that we saw you hungry and gave you food, or thirsty and gave you something to drink? And when was it that we saw you a stranger and welcomed you, or naked and gave you clothing? And when was it that we saw you sick or in prison and visited you?’ And the king will answer them, ‘Truly I tell you, just as you did it to one of the least of these who are members of my family, you did it to me.’

We know Jesus as the Light of the World (John 8:12)—

Jesus spoke to them, saying, “I am the light of the world. Whoever follows me will never walk in darkness but will have the light of life.”

Perhaps this ancient light of creation has not yet reached everyone who reads these words. I can only guess they ignore even the voice of the Old Testament prophet Isaiah (58:10):

“If you offer your food to the hungry and satisfy the needs of the afflicted, then your light shall rise in the darkness and your gloom be like the noonday.”

The sun will always shine when we help others. The light of Christ will burn bright in us to burn away our gloom and despair when we give a hand to others who are in need. Their lives will be brighter in turn. We often turn away from people in hard circumstances because we do not want to face the prospect that we one day might need a hand up. This strikes at our self image of invincibility and self sufficiency. We keep remembering “God loves a cheerful giver.” If we think only of this part of the verse outside of its context, we might think God only loves the giver. God also must love the one in need to provide the blessing for the giver. As we read in 2 Corinthians 9:7-8—

Cornelia DeLee: Creation: Bright Beam, acrylic on canvas, 16” x 20”, 2024.

“Each of you must give as you have made up your mind, not reluctantly or under compulsion, for God loves a cheerful giver. And God is able to provide you with every blessing in abundance, so that by always having enough of everything, you may share abundantly in every good work.”

As an old mentor of mine taught me, “Don’t do all the work for your people. You’ll rob them of the blessing of serving the Lord.” None of us can replace the eternal light of Christ, which has been traveling to us since the dawn of time, although the Light has been with God since before time began. This Light is even now permeating the universe, in a prevenient journey to the furthest distances of creation. There is no place the Light will not go before us. Even as we attempt a return to the moon and hope to go to Mars in the future, the light of Christ has already gone before us.

If this does not give you hope in what many think is a dark and despairing world, refocusing on the Light with us instead of the darkness that always seems so near might help to change your attitude.

Joy, peace, and light,

Cornelia

What Did the Big Bang Sound Like? | HowStuffWorks

https://science.howstuffworks.com/what-did-big-bang-sound-like.htm

Breishit: The Hidden Light of Creation

https://www.ravkooktorah.org/BREISHIT_67.htm

The science illuminated by the first light in the universe | Stanford Report

https://news.stanford.edu/stories/2023/07/science-illuminated-first-light-universe

When was the first light in the universe?

https://phys.org/news/2016-11-universe.html

The Creation of Light: William Blake and Francisco de Holanda/thehumandivinedotorg

https://thehumandivine.org/2022/02/27/the-creation-of-light-william-blake-and- francisco-de-holanda/

Cosmic Rainbow

Apocalypse, art, beauty, cosmology, Creativity, Faith, hope, inspiration, John Ruskin, Leonardo da Vinci, nature, Painting, purpose, sleep, Spirituality, Van Gogh, vision, William Blake

In times of cultural change and uncertainty, some faith-based communities turn to apocalyptic literature to find meaning, if not solace, for their suffering. Other communities of faith look forward to a future of hope and joy, even though they live in the same circumstances.

Apocalyptic literature is a genre of writing that appeared during times of crisis or persecution. It often presents a vision of the end times and the ultimate triumph of good over evil. Apocalyptic literature has several major characteristics:

“The supreme manifestation of Satan in this world is war.” By William Blake, 1805, apocalyptic painting with
tempera, gum, glue, and chalks, Tate Galleries, London.

Dualism: Apocalyptic literature often portrays a cosmic battle between good and evil forces, highlighting the struggle between light and darkness.
Symbolism: Deeper meanings and abstract concepts are represented by symbolic language and imagery.
Eschatology: Apocalyptic literature focuses on the end times (Greek eschatos last, farthest) and the ultimate judgment of humanity, exploring themes of divine justice and the afterlife.
Pseudonymity: Many apocalyptic texts attribute their authorship to famous figures from the past, using pseudonyms or false names.
Visions and Dreams: Apocalyptic literature often includes visionary experiences and dreams as a means of conveying divine messages and revelations.
The future is fixed and decided in apocalyptic literature, whereas with prophecy, people can change their future by repentance and restoring their relationship with God.

Since John was already in exile, “The Revelation to John” doesn’t bother to hide his authorship for his safety. He does claim it’s a vision of Christ mediated by an angel. It also checks the boxes of good vs evil, symbolism, the end times, and a fixed future. The actual date of this future isn’t revealed, however.

An interpretive mistake many make is to take this letter written to encourage the persecuted churches of the first century and project its message into our modern-day society. The symbols which were meaningful to John’s audience are for that historical context alone. Reinterpretations of these signs to make them relevant to our current geopolitical situation is bad scriptural interpretation.

Plate 12, First book of Urizen, by William Blake

What we can do is ask, “What can persecuted communities or suffering societies of the past teach us about resilience, hope, and faith?” Some will focus on God’s destructive forces to eradicate evil and harm. Belief in God’s power to overcome evil is a source of deep comfort for people without power. These are often the ones who feel excluded from the halls of power, but also those who believe their privilege and place is slipping away.

God’s fridge would be covered with photos!

Both these groups forget they are beloved of God, just as God loves all God’s children. Sometimes we forget God’s refrigerator is large enough to have the photographs of all the people of the world on its door, along with all our latest art works also. If that’s a humongous refrigerator, then that gives us an idea of the expansive reach of God’s love, mercy, and grace for all creation.

The First Day of Creation, by Francisco de Holanda (1545), with caption, “Let there be light.”

A negative outcome of this dualist, apocalyptic belief is extremist beliefs about the end times. Unfortunately, some extremist pastors have convinced their followers to end their lives to meet their predicted apocalyptic end of the world. The leader creates the fiction of an evil out-group to bind the members more closely to their cult and proclaims apocalyptic themes to brainwash their members. Numerous mass suicides worldwide have occurred as a result, including 914 people of Jim Jones’ People’s Temple. In 1997, 39 members of the Heaven’s Gate cult in San Diego, California, committed mass suicide by poisoning to coincide with the arrival of the Hale-Bopp comet, considering this a signal for their exit from Earth. Others have given away their entire nest eggs to apocalyptic cults because “no one will need money in the new creation.”

Paul Klee: Clarification, 1932, Oil on canvas, 27 3/4” × 37 7/8” (70.5 × 96.2 cm), The Berggruen Klee Collection, 1984 Accession Number: 1984.315.54

Some of us prefer to focus on The New Heaven and the New Earth instead, as found in Revelation 21:1-4—

Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth; for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and the sea was no more. And I saw the holy city, the new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband.

And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying,

“See, the home of God is among mortals. He will dwell with them; they will be his peoples, and God himself will be with them; he will wipe every tear from their eyes. Death will be no more; mourning and crying and pain will be no more, for the first things have passed away.”

What a day that will be! The last time God destroyed the earth with a great flood, God placed a rainbow in the sky as a promise the earth would never be destroyed again by water.

Leonardo da Vinci said, “Where the spirit does not work with the hand there is no art.” For some people, the only “good art” is representational art, or art which faithfully describes a landscape, portrait, or still life. With abstract art, colors carry emotions and shapes to form pleasing patterns for the viewer. What will the new heaven and the new earth look like? Revelation 21:11 says “It has the glory of God and a radiance like a very rare jewel, like jasper, clear as crystal.”

Stage 2—addition of gold and silver washes

While many today think of heaven as an earthly paradise, this concept is a Persian idea of an enclosed garden, much like the original garden of Eden. We tend to imagine a heaven as being a better place than the world we know, but imagining an altogether different world is next to impossible! Luke 20:27-38 is Jesus’ answer to the law-abiding Sadducees about how relationships work in heaven, and a reminder to us heaven isn’t just a perfect earth.

When I think of the providence of God, which is grounded in creation and is always recreating the face of the earth, I remember God’s promise to Noah in Genesis 9:11-13—

“I establish my covenant with you, that never again shall all flesh be cut off by the waters of a flood, and never again shall there be a flood to destroy the earth….This is the sign of the covenant that I make between me and you and every living creature that is with you, for all future generations: I have set my bow in the clouds, and it shall be a sign of the covenant between me and the earth.”

Stage 3—Added circles and more gold and silver washes

It is this cosmic rainbow of colors, the spiritual energies which most of us cannot see for the overwhelming ordinariness of daily life. We race from chore to chore, dash from task to task, and drop exhausted at the end of our days. We long for a better life, but we’re stuck on a galloping treadmill trying to keep our feet under us. I long to walk rather than run through my days. When I was younger, older people told me to slow down. As I hit middle age, I heard I would soon start slowing down. Now that I’m inching closer to 80, slowing down is finally becoming a reality!

Vincent Van Gogh said, “Paintings have a life of their own that originate in the soul of the artist.” We cannot see the new heaven and new earth unless we stop our busywork and allow God to attend to the business of our spiritual life. When we see the first glimmers of the new heaven and the new earth, we’ll realize how imperfect our world is and begin to help change it for the better, one small act of kindness at a time. This is soul work.

Sometimes that kindness first means being kind to ourselves, when we admit we can’t say YES to everything and everyone. When we admit we actually need eight hours of sleep for our health and a daily quiet time, and we can stop to study the flowers in the cultivated gardens of our neighborhoods and in our parks.

Cosmic Rainbow—acrylic on canvas, 24” x 30”, 2024.

Then we can be a beautiful rainbow, God’s light in this world for good, and bring the hope and joy of the end times to these times. We then will bring the radiance of the new heaven and the new earth to this present age and to these yearning people.

Joy, peace, and rainbows,

Cornelia

what are the five major characteristics of apocalyptic literature – brainly.com

https://brainly.com/question/35289093

World’s most chilling cults

https://www.france24.com/en/live-news/20230424-world-s-most-chilling-cults

Paradise Definition & Meaning – Merriam-Webster

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/paradise

Middle English paradis, paradise “the Garden of Eden, heaven,” borrowed from Anglo-French paradis, borrowed from Late Latin paradīsus, borrowed from Greek parádeisos “enclosed park or pleasure ground” (Xenophon), “the Garden of Eden” (Septuagint), “the abode of the blessed, heaven” (New Testament), borrowed from an Iranian word (perhaps Median *paridaiza-) cognate with Avestan pairidaēza- “enclosure,” nominal derivative of pairidaēz- “build a barrier around,” from pairi- “before, around” (going back to Indo-European *per-i, whence also Sanskrit pári “around, about,” Greek péri “around, in excess”) + -daēza- “heap up, build” (occurring only with prefixes), going back to Indo-European *dhoi̯ǵh-éi̯e-, iterative derivative of *dhei̯ǵh- “knead, shape” — more at PERI-, FEIGN

NOTE: As an independent derivative of the verb, Avestan daēza- “heap, pile (of earth, stones)” has been compared with Greek teîchos (neuter s-stem) “wall, fortification,” toîchos (masculine) “wall of a house or enclosure,” Sanskrit dehaḥ “body,” dehī́ “wall, embankment,” Oscan feíhúss (accusative plural) “walls.” For a Germanic derivative from the same verbal base with a different sense, see DOUGH.

OAKLAWN FRIDAY ART CLASS

adult learning, art, Attitudes, brain plasticity, change, cognitive decline, Creativity, hope, renewal, summer vacation, Uncategorized, United Methodist Church

WE’RE BACK!!!

The older I get, the faster time flies! When I was a child, summers were long and lazy times. I actually got so bored, by the first of August I’d start to play school. I’d line up my brothers and the neighborhood children and pretend to teach them. It was our way of “playing ourselves into a new reality.”

Children practice life lessons during their play experiences. We can also play our way into learning a new skill in art class. All we need is a “beginner’s mind.” The Japanese Zen term shoshin translates as ‘beginner’s mind’ and refers to a paradox: the more you know about a subject, the more likely you are to close your mind to further learning. As the Zen monk Shunryu Suzuki put it in his book Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind (1970): “In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert’s there are few.”

Jerzy Nowosielski: Landscape with a vision of the Sun, oil on canvas, 1965, National Museum of Krakow, Poland.

In a similar vein, Picasso once said, “When I was young, I could paint like Raphael, but it took me my whole life to learn to draw like a child.” Part of our art class experience is to learn to suspend our adult ego’s need to constantly be ranking, besting, and giving into our competitive natures. We learn more when we give up our egos and our needs to protect our false selves, and allow our true selves to learn. This story in Luke 9:46-48 on “True Greatness” speaks to this:

“An argument arose among them as to which one of them was the greatest. But Jesus, aware of their inner thoughts, took a little child and put it by his side, and said to them, “Whoever welcomes this child in my name welcomes me, and whoever welcomes me welcomes the one who sent me; for the least among all of you is the greatest.”

Mary Delaney, Xanthium Spinosum, from an album (Vol.IX, 98). 1778. Collage of coloured papers, with bodycolour and watercolour, on black ink background
© The Trustees of the British Museum

Our first meeting will be Friday, September 6, at 10 am in the old Oaklawn UMC fellowship hall. Bring your own acrylic paints, brushes, and a canvas or canvas panel to paint on. We begin with a short visual inspiration from some great art works, so that we can wonder and be filled with awe at some great artists’ works.

I’ll give some direction on the skill we’ll work on in the session, and then everyone is free to bring their own unique expression to their paintings. We don’t copy my work and judge how well a person can match it. Instead, we learn from the masters or from real life. We can learn to stretch our own skills to create something new.

Of course, making great art isn’t our first purpose. As we age, the harsh truth is we will lose our ability to learn new skills until we lose our memory of what we just ate for breakfast or how to work the tv remote. Challenging our brains is one of the best ways to keep our brain cells firing and “chatting with one another.” We can actually grow new neurons as we grow older. Our brains don’t have to shrink like a cotton shirt washed in hot water. Socialization and encouragement also helps to keep our brains young. Teaching this class helps me stay young! We help each other in this matter.

Of course, making art means we have to give up our desire to be perfect. Children always have a “beginner’s mind,” so they are free to explore and experiment. Artists quickly learn perfection comes from practice, or working at it. Every baby stumbles and falls as they learn to walk, but we dotting adults still encourage every trembling step. This is what art teachers also do. I’ve always had a rule in my classes, especially when I taught in middle school:

“No Negative Talking about People or Art.”

This includes a student’s own art works. My students always had to give at least three positive comments about their work before they spoke about the negative. “My work needs improvement” is better than saying, “My work stinks!” After all, this way of thinking is more positive than negative and helps to build confidence in a person.

God would post your art on Heaven’s Refrigerator

Of course, we’ve all grown up and worked in environments where negativity is the rule. Art class is a place of grace because this is how life should be. If we can transform a blank canvas into a field of color, why can’t we transform our communities and our world into fields of hope, joy, and love?

Perhaps because we try to make everyone copy/fit into our idea of the proper end product, rather than allow everyone discover their own creative response to the given subject of the day. The museums of our world are richer and more vibrant because artists have listened to the Spirit of the Creating God. We might do well to realize God’s creative energies are varied and vibrant also, just as Isaiah wrote about his vision of God’s Glorious New Creation:

“For I am about to create new heavens and a new earth;

the former things shall not be remembered or come to mind.

But be glad and rejoice forever in what I am creating;

for I am about to create Jerusalem as a joy, and its people as a delight.” (65:17-18)

I hope to see you there. I don’t charge for the class sessions, since this is one of my ministries as a retired elder in the United Methodist Church. As John Wesley once said, “The World is my Parish.” When we grow in confidence in the joys of creating, we find more beauty in the created world. Optimism is one of the side benefits of the creative life, not fame or riches, and sometimes not even accomplishment. Just the act of being a co-creator with the creating God helps us to find more peace in life.

Joy and Peace,

Pastor Cornelia

How to foster ‘shoshin’ | Psyche Guides

https://psyche.co/guides/how-to-cultivate-shoshin-or-a-beginners-mind

The Creating God

art, Attitudes, change, Creativity, Evangelism, Faith, garden, Healing, Holy Spirit, hope, Imagination, incarnation, inspiration, john wesley, Light of the World, Ministry, Painting, purpose, Reflection, renewal, shadows, Spirituality, vision, Work

In the dead heat of summer, our gardens aren’t putting forth the fruit of our planting. Maybe the animals of our neighborhood have made their too frequent nightly visitations, so our harvest is skimpy. We can forget God is a both a creating god and a recreating god as well. The first words of the alternate NRSV translation of the Bible’s first book Genesis (a word meaning “origin”) are—

First stage: string, fabric scraps, and under painting

“When God began to create…”

In the old KJV, Genesis 1:1 reads—“In the beginning, God created the heaven and the earth.”

I appreciate even more the next verse from Genesis 1:2—

“The earth was a formless void and darkness covered the face of the deep, while a wind from God swept over the face of the waters.”

Alternate translations read— “while the spirit of God or while a mighty wind” swept over the face of the waters. This reminds us nothingness and darkness aren’t problems for God, who is able to bring glorious light to any situation.

Psalms 139:12 speaks of the nature of God:

“Even the darkness is not dark to you; the night is as bright as the day, for darkness is as light to you.”

I’ve lived for over half a century with chronic depression, so I can recognize darkness, not only in my own life, but also in the lives of others. Most of my ministry and even my secular work was done with a calling to bring others to the light of hope and confidence that anything was possible.

In art classes, I asked my students to trust in ABC—Attitude, Behavior, and Consequences. If they had a Positive Attitude, they would have Positive Behavior and work on their assignments. If they worked, they would see Positive Consequences or Improvement over time. Asking people who’ve been told they can’t do art to believe they can learn even if they aren’t “talented” is a big ask, but if they have faith in this promise, they discover it’s true.

When I sold insurance, I asked people to trust in the idea of making a small sacrifice now to prevent a greater loss later. Also, if they had no loss, they shared in a community to underwrite the group losses and keep the cost of protecting their own property low. Not everyone has the light to see this benefit of community, but for those who do, I could help keep their consequences from being a disaster.

Second stage: overpainting, printed circles, and added ruler lines

When I entered the ministry, I discovered congregations who had lost their faith in the God who could make something out of nothing This began with the creation story, the choosing of the nation of Israel to be God’s people (even though they were once no one’s people), and feeding them in the extended wilderness wandering before they arrived at the promised land. The Bible is full of examples of God’s providing more when people have too little to sustain them: Elijah and the widow of Zarephath, the feeding of the crowds with a few fish and loaves, and the water turned into wine. These modern people didn’t have a “recreating faith” that God could work in their lives today, just as God had once worked in the lives of others in the days of Christ.

That is what we call a “dead faith,” or as John Wesley put it in his notes on the New Testament at 2 Timothy 3:5— “An appearance of godliness, but not regarding, nay, even denying and blaspheming, the inward power and reality of it.”

It’s dead, because the Spirit isn’t at work in it. I used to tell my beloved evangelism professor, the late Dr. Billy Abraham, the first place we needed to do evangelism was in the local church, because folks hadn’t heard the good news. If they weren’t excited enough to have a living faith, they wouldn’t go out and spread the good news to others.

I’ve never been a cheerleader, although I did have some time in my high school pep squad. I was more often involved in making the football banners and pep posters for the other sports activities. Also debate team took up much of my time. One of the best practices I learned in debate was positive points sell better than negative ones. Also, it’s better to make the same point over and over with different facts and examples.

When I say our God is a creating and recreating God, I can point to the beautiful verses of John 1:1-5—

“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being. What has come into being in him was life, and the life was the light of all people. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it.”

As believers in the Holy Trinity, the Word made flesh is Christ, so he was co-creating with God the Father and God the Holy Spirit from the beginning. By virtue of the incarnation, Christ takes on our flesh to redeem us and make us whole again. This comes to completion through the cross. When we place our faith in Christ’s act of love for all creation, we are made one with Christ, and one with God. The Holy Spirit brings us ever closer to the true nature of Christ, until we’re perfected in love of God and neighbor.

I painted on unprimed canvas, just to see what would happen. Also, because I knew the paint surface would be different than the usual texture on the primed canvas. After I painted several different colors in blocks with the scrap pieces of cut canvas used as “masking tape,” I decided to use a mix of iridescent gold and silver acrylic paints to glaze over the under painting. I also added some circles and straight lines. I’ve collected a few jar tops recently, I used some string elements, and I had a school ruler left from my last teaching job back in the 1980’s. (Yes, I keep things. They are tools of the trade. My Sears Craftsman staple gun from art school finally died after half a century of use.)

I’ll be working some more of these experiments for a while. Creating and recreating our lives is what keeps us new every morning. As someone who has been renewed and recreated more than one time can attest, along with the prophet Jeremiah,

“For surely I know the plans I have for you, says the LORD, plans for your welfare and not for harm, to give you a future with hope.” (29:11)

Joy and peace,

Cornelia

John Wesley’s Notes on The New Testament, 1755:

2 Timothy 3:5—“holding to the outward form of godliness but denying its power. Avoid them!”

The Witness of the Cross

art, Creativity, crucifixion, Faith, Holy Spirit, Holy Spirit, Imagination, inspiration, john wesley, Love, mandala, nature, Painting, perfection, Rumi, Spirituality, suffering, Sun, United Methodist Church, vision

We are a people who follow Jesus, “the pioneer and perfecter of our faith, who for the sake of the joy that was set before him endured the cross, disregarding its shame, and (who) has taken his seat at the right hand of the throne of God,” as the writer of Hebrews 12:2 reminds us. The suffering servant motif of Christ was once a model all early Christians expected to inherit and emulate.

The Suffering Servant

Paul spoke to this suffering model in his letter to the Romans:

“…How can we who died to sin go on living in it? Do you not know that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death? Therefore, we have been buried with him by baptism into death, so that, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, so we too might walk in newness of life. For if we have been united with him in a death like his, we will certainly be united with him in a resurrection like his.” (6:2-5)

Paul’s first sentence is perceptive because he recognizes many who call on the name of Christ nevertheless go on living an unchristlike life. In the early Christian centuries, many didn’t get baptized until they were near death because they weren’t ready to change their wicked ways. The early Christian habit of hyper-delayed baptism is well attested by the later fourth century. Apparently, the reasoning behind waiting until fairly late in life was the belief baptism cleansed sin once and only once. Consequently, any meaningful sin after baptism could leave one in a serious lurch in the economy of salvation. We have the well-known example of the early 4th CE Emperor Constantine who delayed baptism until his deathbed.

Of course, this is a misunderstanding of the Holy Spirit’s work of perfecting our human nature, but it took many centuries to work this out. We can thank John Wesley for our understanding the works of grace in the ongoing process of Christian Perfection. Baptism washes us from the stain of original sin, which is common to all humanity. Baptism also anoints us with the Holy Spirit to be continually with us and bring us to know God’s saving love in Jesus Christ.

As we grow in faith and the Spirit of God calls us to give our lives to Christ, we are justified from past sins. Some faith communities stop here, so they need over and over justification. They have no ongoing theology of sanctifying grace. We United Methodists do have this great gift, which we can give to the world. When we aren’t going on to perfection in love quite as fast as our neighbors wish we were, it’s because we’re being stubborn and resisting God’s grace.

W. H. Auden says it best:

“We would rather be ruined than changed,

We would rather die in our dread

Than climb the cross of the moment

And let our illusions die.”

The Cross and Self-Denial

The cross is ever a witness to our willingness or unwillingness to bear the cross of Christ. As Jesus told his disciples:

“If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will find it. For what will it profit them if they gain the whole world but forfeit their life? Or what will they give in return for their life? (Matthew 16:24-26)

Often we interpret this verse in terms of giving up material possessions, but we can never give up outward things unless we’re first willing to give up our false images of ourselves. We might want to be large and in charge, or soft and sweet. Perhaps our self image is invested in being holy and serious. We may even be the class clown. These are only masks behind which we hide our truths and vulnerabilities.

Jesus spoke a parable in John 12:24-25—

“Very truly, I tell you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains just a single grain; but if it dies, it bears much fruit. Those who love their life lose it, and those who hate their life in this world will keep it for eternal life.”

If we want to be changed, we must die to our ordinary selves, and then rise as a new creation. If we remain the same, we won’t be much, but if we’re willing to take on the image of Christ, we can be a new creation of the first order.

How The Witness was made

Ukrainian children’s hospital bombed by Russia

This is how art gets made. I saw an image of a bombed-out children’s hospital in Ukraine. Because the photographer had cropped it in a certain way, I saw an image of a cross on the brickwork. Those rectangular bricks contrasted with the diamond shaped wire work in the darkened areas in the four outer quadrants. I usually weave the whole painting surface, but this time I wove only the cross area. That was a challenge. I had to invent a new way to secure the woven canvas strips on the wooden stretcher strips.

As I painted the first layer, I made all the contrast of bright colors in the cross and dark blues and reds in the outer quadrants. The next day, I added a gold wash over the cross squares and painted diamond line patterns over the dark quadrants. I came back to add silver into the diamond shapes and to touch up the diagonal lines. I also painted the sides of the canvas to unify it.

Adding blocks of color to the cross of witness

I began with a gritty black and white image, but ended up with bright colors, silver and gold. This too is a metaphor for for the change which we undergo when we die to old selves and begin our transformation into the wholeness of the new creation in Christ. As Paul wrote to the Corinthians:

Gold cross and diamond shapes in the dark quadrants

“So if anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation: everything old has passed away; see, everything has become new! All this is from God, who reconciled us to himself through Christ, and has given us the ministry of reconciliation; that is, in Christ God was reconciling the world to himself, not counting their trespasses against them, and entrusting the message of reconciliation to us.” (2 Corinthians 5:17-19)

The cross isn’t a means to divide us from one another, just because we hold varying views on baptism, holy communion, pastoral authority, and scriptural authority or interpretation. The cross stands as a witness to all who are willing to give up their identities to their old egos and claim the only one uniting all persons every day.

Unity through the Cross

This is the Christ, whose love was so great for all creation, he was willing to be lifted up on the cross to draw all humankind unto himself. As Jesus said in John 12:32-33—

“And I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all people to myself.” (He said this to indicate the kind of death he was to die.)

We want to have our Big Mac and Eat it too.

Delusional Mathematics

As we self interested people today have difficulty with many of the words of Christ, we resort to our cafeteria style of choosing which bites we want to enjoy. If a dish in the line is too expensive or not on our diet plan, we can ignore it. The problem with Christ is how we can ignore one claim upon our faith, reject another, and keep another. As a dieter from way back days, I splurged on many a Big Mac or Whopper and large fries, which I washed down with a giant Diet Coke. Unfortunately, my body didn’t follow the same mathematical logic of my mind. I was practicing delusional math.

“Cheeseburger and fries, with a side of Diet Coke.”

“This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you. No one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends. You are my friends if you do what I command you” (John 15:12-14). John Wesley, in his sermon, The Almost Christian, talks about those who have the outward form of Christianity, but not the inward being. They can be recognized by their attendance at Sunday services, their good deeds, and their attention to the outward shows of ritual. Inside, however, their hearts aren’t filled with love, but with anger, spite, or mere duty instead. They lack sincerity, which is a classic characteristic of one who wears a false mask.

The Last Presidential Assassination

When Ronald Regan was shot by a would-be assassin, his diary recorded his thoughts on his excruciating experience.

“Getting shot hurts. Still my fear was growing because no matter how hard I tried to breathe it seemed I was getting less & less air. I focused on that tiled ceiling and prayed. But I realized I couldn’t ask for God’s help while at the same time I felt hatred for the mixed-up young man who had shot me. Isn’t that the meaning of the lost sheep? We are all God’s children & therefore equally beloved by him. I began to pray for his soul and that he would find his way back to the fold.”

The Altogether Christian

To be a Christian in the true sense, Wesley says the “Altogether Christian” requires us both to “love God and neighbor in our hearts until nothing else exists.” This means even our enemies. I personally find this the most difficult part. I can hold a grudge with the best of the nonbelievers. Yet I don’t find myself calling those people evil or deranged, like so many others who seek to find a reason for their scapegoating.

I can still see people, even myself, as part of flawed and fallen humanity.

Christian Perfection

Wesley defines the pure faith: “Now, whatsoever has this faith, which purifies the heart, (by the power of God, who dwelleth therein,) from pride, anger, desire, from all unrighteousness, from all filthiness of flesh or spirit; which fills it with love stronger than death, both to God and to all mankind; love that doth the works of God, glorying to spend and be spent for all men, and that endureth with joy, not only the reproach of Christ, the being mocked, despised, and hated of all men, but whatsoever the wisdom of God permits the malice of men or devils to inflict: whosoever has this faith, thus working by love is not almost only, but altogether a Christian.”

Under John Wesley’s exacting standards, we may all be “almost Christians,” but the good news is we can always hope in the one who gave his life to begin a new life in us and others. If we pray for our enemies’ faults, which we spot so easily because they are our own, God will help to heal both them and us.

The Cross Supplants Division

An ancient wisdom story told among the rabbis says the students were questioned on the difference between night and day. All their answers marked divisions: some prayers are said only at certain hours, or there isn’t enough light to distinguish one field or a house from another. The rabbi grew frustrated and cut them off. “You only know how to divide! Daylight begins when you can look on your neighbor’s face and see a friend, not an enemy.”

In this time of division, the witness of the cross reminds us Christ died for all humanity, so no one is outside the love of Christ. If we’re to love our neighbor as ourselves, caring for the poor and marginalized should be a priority for the people of faith. Our neighbors don’t stop at our borders, for our world is interconnected.

Migrations were a fact back in Abraham’s day, when Egypt was the land of opportunity. We ought to treat immigrants better than the Pharaohs treated the Hebrew people. Moreover, in our current political landscape, we might want to quit name calling and playing to the lowest denominator of our bases. Policy statements won’t get sound bites on television, but that’s a good thing. Sound bites play to our false selves and not to our true selves in Christ Jesus.

DeLee: Sun Mandala, 2022, private collection

I can close with a poem from the Persian poet Rumi:

I only speak of the Sun
because the Sun is my Beloved
I worship even the dust at His feet.

I am not a night-lover and do not praise sleep
I am the messenger of the Sun !
Secretly I will ask Him and pass the answers to you.

Like the Sun I shine on those who are forsaken
I may look drunk and disheveled but I speak the Truth.

Tear off the mask, your face is glorious,
your heart may be cold as stone but
I will warm it with my raging fire.

No longer will I speak of sunsets or rising Moons,
I will bring you love’s wine
for I am born of the Sun
I am a King !

Joy, peace, and sacrificial love,

Cornelia

—W. H. Auden, The Age of Anxiety: A Baroque Eclogue (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011), 105.

Baptismal Trajectories in Early Christianity, Part III: Toward an Explanation – Ad Fontes
https://adfontesjournal.com/church-history/baptismal-trajectories-in-early-christianity-

Wesley’s Sermon Reprints: The Almost Christian | Christian History Magazine
https://christianhistoryinstitute.org/magazine/article/wesleys-sermon-reprints-almost-

The Regan Diaries—

https://www.amazon.com/Reagan-Diaries-Ronald/dp/006087600X?_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr=&linkCode=sl1&tag=jeffjaccom-20&linkId=472649155c0e042b8192d46f0dbbfcb8&language=en_US&ref_=as_li_ss_tl

Rumi: Ghazal (Ode) 1621
Translated by Azima Melita Kolin and Maryam Mafi
Rumi: Hidden Music, HarperCollins Publishers Ltd, 2001

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