Often we refer to Lent as a journey. Leaving home to wander for the love of God—peregrinatio—is part of the Christian mystical tradition. In this post we will wander into the “mystical,” a word that may seem to imply extraordinary experience, and the “abstract,” a word indicating something without immediately graspable substance.
Merriam Webster’s definition of “mystical” includes “having a spiritual meaning or reality that is neither apparent to the senses nor obvious to the intelligence.” If art has spiritual meaning, does this mean that abstract art is mystical? Can we hope to receive spiritual meaning from an abstract painting as we do from a religious one? Can being deprived of recognizable figures and stories lead us to inner clarity?
“Like great poets and great artists, the great mystics are examples of extraordinary human achievement who challenge and inspire even those who may not share their commitments,” writes Bernard McGinn, foremost contemporary writer on Christian Mysticism, in his introduction to an anthology by that name. To help us understand where the word mysticism originates, he writes
“Although the word mysticism is fairly recent…..the adjective mystical (“hidden” in Greek) has been widely used among Christians since at least the late 2nd century CE…..The mystical life is essentially a process, an itinerary or journey to God, not just a moment or brief state of what is often called mystical union, important as such moments may be.”
McGinn prefers the phrase mystical consciousness to mystical experience, the former being indicative of the inseparability of perception and sensibility from “the higher mental activities of understanding, judging, willing, and loving that form the conscious life of subjects, that is, of creatures defined by their ability to know and love,” and also “states of awareness in which God becomes present in our inner acts, not as an object to be grasped, but as the direct and transforming center of life.”
Using the idea of a journey, can we remember a work of art which at a turn or a stop in our lives lit up our consciousness and illuminated our way? Are these experiences with art mystical? Or perhaps a better question to reflect on is, Did the art transform our ability to know and to love?
When it comes to art that mystifies or overwhelms, we do not have to import our own meaning to it. If it has something to say to us we will know if only we surrender to it for a time, because the elements of its meaning are already in us.
Surrender to art is like gazing into the sky. Sooner or later our negligible dimensionality, our being just a little mirror to vastness sinks in. In witnessing the sky we become constellated by its contents. We become oriented to ourselves who have elements of sky in our eyes, lungs, and blood.
above, Red Cloud, Piet Mondrian, oil, 1907
One might think that the mystical in art is mostly in the eye, or in the response, of the beholder. But whatever our taste is in art and however we feel about “mysticism”-- however we relate to those objects — is far removed from God’s knowing and loving—God’s preference for everything that is made. (Gen 1:31)
Preference for creation is mirrored by art which is not formed by mannerism or mimicry, but through discerning what it reveals. Not overstepping “the modesty of nature” is mystical consciousness in art. As Shakespeare’s character Hamlet instructed some actors:
Suit the action to the word, the word to the action, with this
special observance, that you o'erstep not the modesty of nature:
for any thing so o'erdone is from the purpose of playing, whose
end, both at the first and now, was and is, to hold as 'twere the
mirror up to nature: to show virtue her feature, scorn her own
image, and the very age and body of the time his form and
pressure.
The Eucharist is a drama. Those who serve in liturgical worship act with consciousness similar to what Hamlet advises above–holding a mirror to the meaning of the life, passion, death, and resurrection of Christ with symbolic gestures matched to and not overstepping the words of the liturgy, showing “the very age and body” of Christ until His coming again.
The seasons of Advent and Lent draw us into the drama deeply while they reflect each other, as shown in the poem by Donald Hall called “Advent” which ends:
When I know that the grave is empty,
Absence eviscerates me,
And I dwell in a cavernous, constant
Horror vacui.
Horror vacui—fear of vacant spaces such as abstract art or contemplating the mystical may conjure in us. Where something rises, space is left behind and the question of what to do with it.
In his essay “The Unsayable Said," Donald Hall writes of poetry in relation to the body in a way that sounds Eucharistic to me: “The body is poetry's door; the sounds of words—throbbing in legs and arms; rich in the mouth—let us into the house of reading a poem…..”
Our bodies are God’s door, the bread and wine in the mouth let us into the house of receiving Christ.
“We speculate; speculation does no harm when it acknowledges itself,” Hall writes. “We must never assume that the poem, appearing simple, hides an intellectual statement that only professors are equipped to explicate.”
So it is with the strange simplicity of the bread and wine—as we speculate and reflect on the Eucharist we do not import meaning to it, but rather grow in knowing and loving by it. We ask God to just “say the word,” and we receive. This is the only mystical experience many Christians are conscious of as being their own.
When we speak of the “mystery” of the Eucharist, we speak of the meaning of the consecrated bread and wine that cannot be contained by our mouths or comprehended with sense or intellect. Similarly, an abstract painting may hold the “unsayable said,” and we may want to stand before it, bearing silent witness.
Stations of the Cross: Lema Sabachtani, Barnett Newman, 1958-1966 (source: Wikimedia commons)
Some Cathedral Arts notes:
April is National Poetry Month and Eastertide, and it is time to sign up for reading Wallace Stevens with Evan Craig Reardon on Zoom on April 18 & 25. This a free opportunity for peregrinatio with a skilled poet and friends. No prior experience with poetry is required. Click HERE to register.
The Cathedral’s former vicar, Fr Jonathan P. Beck, has moved on to become Priest-in-Charge at Trinity Church in Potsdam. There have been multiple poetry sightings (citings?) at his sermons HERE.
Save the Date: We are looking forward to bringing poet, musician, and priest Malcolm Guite to the Cathedral on Saturday, November 4, 2023 to speak on the Psalms for our annual Bible Symposium. You can listen to a conversation between Malcolm and the Cathedral Dean, Leander S. Harding, from our 2021 poetry celebration HERE.
Do join us for the Meditation on the Passion of Christ choral service preceded by an organ recital, and during Holy Week and Easter.