“I don’t get it. It’s just not my thing.” That was my father’s reaction to contemporary art after my sister and I took him to the Tate Modern several years ago. He has a pretty rationalist, scientific kind of mind and while he enjoys more traditional representational art he just can’t get into anything more abstract. He knows that there are ways of understanding these paintings but he feels both uninitiated in these systems of thought and also unconvinced that there is really anything there worth paying attention to.
My father is actually a very strong Christian but it’s interesting to notice that those words “I don’t get it. It’s just not my thing” is also the kind of thing people will also say about faith. They too recognise that there are systems of religious thought about which they feel ignorant and they too are sceptical that these systems do really refer to anything real or important.
We have been generously loaned a wonderful abstract painting by a member of this congregation which we are displaying in our side chapel. So I wonder if this common reaction to religion and abstract art might lead us to reflect on how non-representational art might be appropriate to a church setting, aid us in our prayers and help us grow in faith. Aside from the superficial aesthetic pleasure, is there any point in having this painting on our service book covers and hanging in our church?
Art has certainly not always been considered an appropriate aid to the Christian faith. Emerging out of Judaism, the early church inherited the Hebrew Law’s prohibition on images that could be worshipped as idols. The book of Deuteronomy states: “Since you saw no form when the Lord spoke to you at Horeb out of the fire, take care and watch yourselves closely, so that you do not act corruptly by making an idol for yourselves.” The first Christians followed this prohibition and early Christian art is restricted to symbols like the Greek letters chi rho and, of course, the cross.
Looking back from a very visual culture like ours the Old Testament prohibition on images might seem rather austere and puritanical. But the concern is a sensible one: the burning bush through which God communicated with Moses at Horeb is an image of inexhaustibility, it refuses to confine or contain God. And that is therefore faithful to the nature of God – we cannot find an image (or indeed a set of words) that will sum up and encapsulate the reality of God. God is always beyond our constructs and definitions. God is the irreducible reality. So we need to be very wary that any image (or other construct) that we use to gain access to God does not pretend to depict the whole truth, to exhaust the signification of the reality behind the image.
It was thinking along these lines that many Christians felt images to be just too dangerously reductive, too restrictive in exploring the Christian faith. But others felt that, so long as these images weren’t regarded as the last word, so long as they point beyond themselves to some greater truth, they might help us to encounter an element of God’s reality. In other words, perhaps certain images, considered in the right way, could avoid become idols and instead be regarded as icons of God.
An excellent example is the icon of the Trinity painted (or written as we say) by Andrei Rublev in 1410. That famous icon of the 3 angels, seated at a table and inviting the viewer to join them, was based on the Old Testament reading we heard this morning. It doesn’t draw from scripture an obvious image of what God might look like in a way that could be idolatrous. But rather it takes this curious story of hospitality shared with anonymous strangers as a more subtle image that illustrates something of the nature of a Trinitarian God living in communion.
These disputes about whether images were idols or icons were significantly resolved in the 9th century by John of Damascus who drew on the passage we heard from the letter to the Colossians: “He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation”. St John argued that Christianity had moved beyond the Old Testament’s crude prohibition on images because it could no longer be said that no material image was capable of revealing the divine nature. On the contrary, God has been decisively, fully revealed in a human life, incarnate in the material world. Jesus was more than an image, but an image he certainly was, a revealer of the divine nature to those who encounter him. Jesus is the icon of God, and consequently, John of Damascus argued it is possible that other images “share a mystery and, like sacraments, are vessels of divine energy and grace… Through the intermediary of sensible perception our minds receive a spiritual impression and are lifted toward the invisible divine majesty.” Art can tell us something about the nature of God, even if not exhausting that all that can be said.
So from this point, Christians felt more comfortable exploring the use of art in worship and spirituality. But clearly, the arguments did not disappear. The Reformation saw the re-emergence of these concerns and iconoclasm was always part of most reformation movements, smashing the images of the past that were felt to have become idolatrous. And I think that in our heritage-obsessed age we should be reticent to see this instinct as simply mindless destruction. The dangers of idolatry are still as live and real today as they have ever been. How much do our images of God (whether material or mental) restrict our understanding of God, closing down new depths of truth and meaning that we can discern in God? Many of us have idolatrous images of God as unequivocally male, as authoritarian, as white and western, as an embodiment and endorser of our lifestyles and values. Believing in a God beyond our fixed ideas is very hard but we need to be constantly aware that our constructed images of God are usually ones that exclude others from God’s embrace, that restrict God’s love or perhaps allow us to live complacently and unchallenged in our prejudices and privileges.
So with these concerns about idolatry in mind, abstract art is an interesting phenomenon. It seems less prone to becoming an idolatrous image. It is not clear what is depicted and these images are not easily categorised or defined. We may stare at the image for ages, seemingly fruitlessly. Or we may shrug our shoulders and walk away saying “I just don’t get it. It’s not my thing.” But perhaps what an abstract painting like this does more than anything is simply train us to look, train us to be attentive. And its expressionist style reminds us that what it signifies is beyond the immediate, perhaps indeed beyond expression itself.
This morning’s gospel story reminds us that patient attending is at the heart of Christian life. It is very desirable, even in church life, to take the Martha-role. There is something reassuring, some delusion of control, in rushing around being busy and organising things. But without prayer there is no point to the church. If you do not pray you are not in a real relationship with God.
And prayer is simply about sitting at Jesus’ feet. It’s about looking and listening and attending what is beyond the immediate, reflecting on what words and images might draw us beyond ourselves and our preoccupations into the reality of the invisible God.
Contemporary culture is peculiarly Martha-like. Most people I know are absurdly busy and have taken deep into themselves the self-deception that our own achievements are what really count in life. So perhaps the gift of contemporary art, particularly paintings such as this, might be in slowing us down and helping us to recover something of Mary’s role of patient attending.
Take some time over the next few months with this painting. Sit in front of it and allow its size and depth of colour to draw you in. The artist said to me that his best paintings are those where he himself is able to relinquish control. The canvas becomes simply a space where what will be revealed is revealed. I can’t think, therefore, of a better aid to prayer – not an idol seeking to restrict our understanding of God, but an icon that creates a space for us to relinquish control, to attend to what lies beyond the image and to allow what will be revealed in us to be revealed.
No doubt some of us will share my father’s assessment of abstract art: “I don’t get it. It’s just not my thing.” And I am sure there are also some of us here who still feel that way about faith in Christ and view church primarily as a social event, simply a locus of yet more human activity. But Jesus says to you as he says to Martha: “you are missing the better part”. Come and sit with the one in whom the fullness of God was pleased to dwell. Look beyond the surface of the image and be transformed by the power of the invisible God.