Art and Spiritual Literacy

I am a devoted fan of Sister Wendy Beckett. I can think of no more articulate person able to express the beauty and deep meaning of artworks than she. I have taken the great liberty of simply reproducing pages from her wonderful little books on 'Love' and 'Silence'. I find her commentaries inspire meditation and contemplation like no other. What is unique is the way she brings her religious experience to bear on her extraordinary depth of knowledge and perception of art. You must decide for youself but to my mind below are wonderful illustrations of spiritual literacy in art. Perhaps we could start with her commentary on the 'Jewish Bride'.

She entitles commentary on Rembrandt's Jewish Bride - 'tender reverence'. It will take some time to load onto your computer but it will be worth it.

"Reverence is the deepest form of respect, a serious desire to recognise another as important in his or her own right. It accepts that we are not central to the universe. It is this attitude of tender humility that Rembrandt expresses with such power in The Jewish Bride. His couple are not in their first youth, or beautiful in any classical sense, but are both infinitely moving in their expression. We at once know that they love each other. Each gives love and receives it. Love is supremely beautiful, but like a golden chain the man has placed round the neck of the girl, it also binds. Each is surrendering freedom, but willingly so, thus facing the truth that we cannot have everything; if we love, we make a delimiting choice. They do not even need to look into each other's eyes. Rather they ponder with wonder, the implications of their blessedness and the meaning of total commitment."

Next I have chosen Sister Wendy's commentary on light as so breathtakingly depicted in Vermeer's Young Woman with a Water Jug.

"The gate that silence opens up within us leads to light. Light exposes with an almost merciless radiance and, in the exposure, reveals the beauty of the real. Vermeer always painted this holy light. He may seem, on first looking, to be depicting a young women, standing at a half-opened window, wrapped peacefully in her own thoughts, but she and her surroundings are merely the pretext. Vermeer's intensity is focused on the light itself, only visible to us as it falls on the material world. It shimmers on the woman's white headdress, glimmers on the copper of the jug and ewer, gleams with ineffable softness on the walls. Every element in the painting celebrates the presence of light, revealing and transforming. No painter has ever believed more totally in light than Vermeer - and hence the profoundly contemplative nature of his art."

As Sister Wendy implies silence is usually the essence of deeper prayer. Rembrandt's Women with a Pink is silence.

"The capacity for silence - a deep creative awareness of one's inner truth - is what distinguishes us as human. All of us, however ordinary or flawed, have at heart a seemingly boundless longing for fulfilment, and it is their consciousness of this that makes Rembrandt's portraits so beautiful. The Woman with a Pink is lost in the depths of her private reflections. Her dark background is symbolically unimportant, lending greater expression to the soft brightness that plays upon her face. Visibly silent, she is explicitly encountering the mystery of being human. She does not contemplate the carnation (the "pink"), usually an emblem of love, but looks within, in silence, quiet and engrossed"

Last let me show you Rogier Van der Weyden's The Magdalen Reading. Sister Wendy heads her page Meditative Silence lets the painting take us into the art of contemplative reading.

"There are layers of silence. Van der Weyden's Magdalen is deeply silent, but she is reading. Her mind is active, and willed into activity. This then is a mitigated silence, since we are only receptive to the thoughts of what we are reading. The Magdalen is obviously reading the scriptures, and meditating on what she reads, but her silence is only between passages of reading and will be concerned with those passages. If we do not read with intervals of silent reflection, we will only understand a part of what we read. This fractured silence is good but imperfect. We all need to read, to keep the spirit alert, to have an inner texture, as it were, that can respond to absolutes of pure soundlessness."

These are just five pages from Sister Wendy's two extraordinary books. If you would like to buy them please send me an Email.