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Still Life Sermon by Cynthia A. Jarvis August 2, 2009, Presbyterian Church of Chestnut Hill I Kings 10:14-25 Matthew 6:22-33
“If you aren’t an artist or enthusiastic museumgoer,” wrote editor and author Lil Copan in a recent Christian Century, “thinking about still lifes might feel like a repeat look at your breakfast bowl. Except, wait, you didn’t really look at your breakfast bowl, did you? You used it, threw it in the sink and left the luminous object there in a puddle of milky water. But what if that bowl—and the still life form—were an example of the way in which we learn to see, to boil down some essentialness of life into a moment, an object, or an idea. What if still life painting is the spiritual practice of discovering something in the places we forget—daily—to look?” In the middle of the season set aside for seeing, Jesus invites us to behold the things of this earth as though they were still lifes: “Consider the lilies of the field…” he says in his Sermon on the Mount. He might just as well have said, “Consider the apples” as did Cezanne or “Consider the thunderstorm” as did Beethoven or “Consider the red wheelbarrow” as did William Carlos Williams, artists being born to pay particular attention to “the things of this world with eyes wide open to the beauty and glory of the eternal” (The Book of Common Worship 1946). Later Jesus will consider a mustard seed, a lost coin, a fig tree. No doubt in the latter objects there is a lesson to be learned. I find no lesson in the lilies; only the lilies and the lingering that leads to seeing. According to naturalist and essayist Annie Dillard, you and I see in two different ways. One way of seeing necessitates verbalization. “Unless I call my attention to what passes before my eyes,” she says, “I simply won’t see it….I have to maintain in my head a running description of the present.” Dillard goes on to say that when she sees in this way, she analyzes and pries. “I hurl over logs and roll away stones; I study the bank a square foot at a time, probing and tilting my head.” Mostly we verbalize what we see in silence, an inaudibly whispered voiceover that begins when we wake each morning and does not end even as we sleep. Then there is the experience of sitting in front of a Phillies fan who feels compelled to verbalize every pitch thrown, every ball caught, every base rounded, impervious to your backward glance. We are verbal creatures who have in our heads and (sometimes unfortunately) on our tongues a running description of the present. This way of seeing is critical to the way Western theologians and Presbyterians in particular consider the things that pertain to God. In the beginning, God spoke, eliciting the running description that is Scripture as faith muddles toward understanding. How could it be otherwise? “The Christian Church begins by listening to the address of the prophets and apostles,” writes Karl Barth, “which was not babbled, or mimed, or put to music, or danced, but spoken and written in statements and groups of statements.” Our response to God’s Word has produced tomes on the inner life of the Trinity as well as treatises on the outward appearance of Christian discipleship. We analyze and pry into the Almighty as our minds trying to grasp the meaning of the mystery revealed in the life, death and resurrection of a first century Jew. But it could be otherwise. There is another way of seeing according to Dillard which involves not analyzing and prying but a letting go. “When I see this way I sway transfixed and emptied,” she notes. I take it that the Eastern church, more inclined to the mystical, sees in the way that is self-emptying, a kind of kenotic plunge into the given, the simple, the remembered presence. Whereas the Reformation and the Enlightenment disenchanted the world by sticking to the facts and human reason, Eastern Orthodox believers see the depth of things resounding before their very eyes. I also take it that the artist, the poet, the composer sees as one who has relinquished the speech that pries in favor of swaying transfixed and empty before the given world. “Cezanne made a living thing out of a teacup,” wrote Russian painter Wassily Kandinsky, “or rather in a teacup he realized the existence of something alive. He raised still life to such a point that it ceased to be inanimate. He painted these things as he painted human beings, because he was endowed with the gift of divining the inner life in everything. His color and line are alike suitable to the spiritual harmony.” Consider the lilies, said Jesus. Do not analyze them or pry into their usefulness but lose yourself before them until your commentary ceases and the lilies’ essential life claims a moment of your own. The Western mind misses this Eastern way of seeing in the gospels, misses that Jesus speaks in parables more than propositions, misses the life within stones that cry out or the reality of the birds of the air that neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns but simply are. Moreover where we see something [or someone] to be used and thrown into the sink, Jesus pauses in the presence of outcasts and women, of lepers and sinners to see a life. He counsels us to consider the lilies because each is of inestimable value in the eye of God. The rub, says Dillard, is that we cannot go out and try to see in this way. “All I can do is try to gag the commentator, to hush the noise of useless interior babble that keeps me from seeing just as surely as a newspaper dangled before my eyes. The effort,” she says, “is really a discipline requiring a lifetime of dedicated struggle; it marks the literature of saints and monks of every order East and West, under every rule and no rule, discalced and shod. The world’s spiritual geniuses seem to discover universally that the mind’s muddy river, this ceaseless flow of trivia and trash, cannot be dammed, and that trying to dam it is a waste of effort that might lead to madness. Instead you must allow the muddy river to flow unheeded in the dim channels of consciousness; you raise your sights; you look along it, mildly, acknowledging its presence without interest and gazing beyond it into the realm of the real where subjects and objects act and rest purely, without utterance.” “Consider the lilies…” says Jesus. Were we to embrace the discipline requiring a lifetime of dedicated struggle to let go in order to see, were we to make a conscious effort to gag the commentator in order to look without thinking now and again, what would be different about our days? Taking Jesus at his word in the first place, there is a chance we may be less anxious. If ever anxiety has overtaken you, you know the breathlessness that literally attacks your being with the blows of apprehension. Aside from drugs, the antidote often involves breathing deeply. Put another way, the breath that is life, the breath that was the gift of God’s Spirit of life at creation overcomes our anxious fears with a great trust in the God who clothes the grass of the field and so will care no less for us. We stop. We breathe deeply. We give the world a steady look. A lily catches our eye long enough for us to let go the fearful belief that our lives are in our hands. We trust ourselves into God’s keeping and are presently swaying transfixed and emptied at the sight of birds in the air. To wit, in his introduction to a book of photography by Helen Levitt, James Agee concludes that “…although it would be foolish to hope that a purification of the sense of sight can liberate and save us, any more than anything else is likely to, it might nevertheless do much in restoring us toward sanity, good will, calm, acceptance and joy.” Taking Jesus at his word there is also a chance, in the second place, that we might lose our carefully calculated life and so find the life of gladness for which we were made. Ulrich Zwingli called it “the reckless abandon of those who believe.” I continue to be astounded that the productive, serious, straight-jacketed Reformers thought we were made, first thing out of the catechetical shoot, to glorify God and enjoy God forever. Enjoyment requires time and occasion as does praise. Considering the lilies evokes both in us. To repeat Lil Copan’s opening query: What if still life painting is the spiritual practice of discovering something in the places we forget—daily—to look? Or as artist and art critic Meyer Shapiro observed in response to the apples of Cezanne, “Still life engages the painter (and also the observer who can surmount that habit of casual perception) in a steady looking that discloses the new and elusive aspects of the stable object. At first commonplace in appearance, it may become in the course of that contemplation (that consideration) a mystery, a source of metaphysical wonder.” I think such wonder loosens the grip we have on our days even as it calls out of us the gratitude and joy missed when we daily forget to look. Finally there is every chance that our own strangely still life will be surprised by the light that steady looking lets in. “The eye” says Jesus “is the lamp of the body. So, if your eye is healthy, your whole body will be full of light.” Keep your eye on the sparrow, says Jesus. Consider the lilies. But I would add, live with an eye steadied on Jesus. See the things of this world through his eyes and in the light of his glory. “I cannot cause light,” says Dillard, “the most I can do is to try to put myself in the path of its beam.” Following him puts us on that path. He, of course, sees us first, a long way down the road, surrounded by the anxious darkness, holding fast to a life we cannot keep forever, and simply says “Hey! Come over here and get a load of these lilies.” That is why I think in the season set aside for seeing it may be no coincidence that the literal light lingers. “Even as I write these words,” words of the late poet Jane Kenyon, “it begins—the annual, ineluctable summer storm that smashes the fully open peonies….Tonight before the storm I went out with the kitchen shears and a basket. I cut every full-open peony in sight, quantities that I would never permit myself under other circumstances….Pick them, something told me, pick them and fill the house, and we’ll put our faces into them and inhale, and see the ants crawl on them, and leave the ants alone because life is precious and ought not to be crushed. “We are getting an education this summer in the humanities, I would say—in love despite fear….And daily we grow in the determination to cast off trouble like a garment in the heart and keep going, keep living, and living abundantly, with more awareness of each moment and more joy.” In what is left of this summer, says Jesus, consider the lilies…. Thanks be to God. |