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Bearings:
One of the best ways we can learn spiritually from one another is to share personal stories of the spiritual impact works of art have on us - the buildings, the music, the paintings, the sculpture - in the presence of which we have experienced epiphany, even conversion. In a culture dominated by thought and words, our Western Protestant world, conversion experiences are often couched as events triggered by speech. A preacher or perhaps an inner voice speaks to us and things change inside us. But our shared religious experience can tell us that symbols contain within themselves inexhaustible reserves of converting power and we can be surprised by joy - and terror - and become suddenly sensitized to the grace of God when we open ourselves to them. Anglicans are sometimes mocked for their interest in the aesthetic, and we should be able to laugh at ourselves for what is often an exaggerated interest in good taste. And yet that laughter shouldn't shake our respect for something we know and love - the power of sacramental symbol and image to embody and communicate life-changing grace. When we share our stories of religious experience, one of the most powerful themes that comes through is the uncanny way in which our religious experiences are timely. Just by coincidence - only it seems it never is mere coincidence - just when we need something so deeply, we turn a corner and encounter something that 'speaks to our condition' as Quaker spirituality puts it. Somehow, when we are ready and not before, we have an encounter. The cathedral we happened to enter while traveling because we had an hour to kill before the train, the song that happened to be on the radio when we switched it on at random, the painting in the art gallery we would have missed if we hadn't obeyed the impulse to turn aside, the sculpture in the garden we wouldn't have had time to contemplate if our friend hadn't been delayed, the poem that stood out from the page when we were merely looking at books at random in the store to while away a moment. Spirituality has a lot to do with gaining a sense that we have our own unique story about how God's grace has worked in our lives. These moments when God uses symbols and images to touch us can play an important role, just as the moments when we have had grace-filled encounters with living people, the human angels that have come to us 'just at the right moment' throughout our lives. And these grace-filled encounters have a double importance. They are not only milestones on the journey of conversion. They continue to yield new meanings as time goes on. Sometimes epiphany events are "a whisper which memory will warehouse as a shout." The original events can be fleeting, but over time our later experience brings them out in their fullness, just as the chemical bath in the dark room develops the dim negative into a vivid picture. In Eastertide I always remember a moment turning a corner in the Tate Gallery in London and confronting the painting by Sir Stanley Spencer, "Resurrection in Cookham Churchyard." This huge canvas depicts with glorious earthiness and apparent naiveté the opening of the graves in the painter's local churchyard on the last day. The different generations buried there over the centuries are struggling up as if from long sleep and beginning to take stock of one another. In the middle there is a young man just emerging looking to one side with a serene and serious expression - the artist's self-portrait. I was a young and troubled adolescent, anxious and struggling with depression I tried to keep secret. Back then the painting was regarded as dated and unfashionable and relegated to a stairwell. I stayed rooted to that spot on the stairs for an hour, moved to the very core of my being by the force of the resurrection gospel. It is a memory I can visit again and again because the force of this strange and eccentric work of art never diminishes. Its quirkiness has a lot to do with the Englishness that is a taproot of Anglicanism, and our response to the mystery of incarnation. The Gospel is about God's raising up not ideas, not thoughts, not souls, not spirits, but our bodies. The creed obstinately and cryptically affirms the resurrection of the body. It is all of me that is being taken up day by day into the immensity of God's cherishing memory. And it is all of us that is being taken up, since we only have real existence in relationship and there is no me without you too and there is no us without all of humanity. Christ is not fully risen until we have made up all that is lacking in his afflictions (Colossians 1:24) and until he has raised up what we have lived, made, done and created with him. Martin L. Smith is a well-known spiritual writer and priest. He is on the staff of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.
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