“‘...for they are like angels;
and they are the children of God
because they are the ones who will rise.
...for to him all are alive.’”
I picked up doodling from my grandma. Throughout my academic career and even to certain meetings this day, I may create a page of images, squiggles, repeating patterns or random connections. As a child, I started drawing in earnest with comic characters and can still manage a respectable Garfield. In high school classes, college courses, and even two electives in seminary, I learned additional drawing and painting skills. The process of creating a piece of art can be an act of co-creation with God and I often experience it as prayer. The beauty of a masterpiece can pierce my heart and even the ugly or unusual can challenge my perspective and provide new insights or a path to strong human emotions. When I travel, I often visit art museums and while I pass by most of the works without affect, I am always in desperate search for the few that shake me open to the mystery of humanity, creation, or God.
I encountered the hyperrealism of Ron Mueck at the Hirshhorn in Washington, DC. One untitled sculpture was of a naked man seated on the floor in a corner of a gallery room, looking askance as I walked in the room. Playing with scale, the man was seven and a half feet tall seated: huge. The hyperrealism made it seem like he could move at any moment. It was all very unsettling and drew out of me hours of reflection on the nature of reality. Oddly, an exhibit at the Guggenheim in New York was an empty room except for an incandescent light bulb in the middle of the floor connected by a cord to a plug in the wall. It had been encased in a block of tinted ice, which had melted and evaporated leaving a series of lines on the floor. After my initial assessment of stupid worthlessness, I looked closer and noticed that the lines were like elevation lines on a topographic map and the seemingly flat concrete floor gave way to a rich texture. I realized that there is often a richness and mystery hidden in plain sight (or from plain sight). At the National Gallery in London, I was so moved by a painting of Saint Mary Magdalene at Christ’s tomb and her gaze into the eyes of the viewer that years later, when walking through Barnes & Noble at the Summit (that long ago), catching a glimpse of the image on a book cover, I was stopped in my tracks. It was like unexpectedly seeing a long lost love. A framed print now hangs in my office at the Pastoral Center.
I visited the Louvre in Paris and felt obligated to see the Mona Lisa. Waiting in line down a long corridor in which hung what seemed like hundreds of large scale oil paintings, each beautiful in its own right, I grew impatient. Entering the gallery, filled with people jostling to get to the front to see the Mona Lisa up close, I peered over their heads from the back of the room at the smaller than expected painting hanging alone on a wall. “Good enough,” I thought and turned to leave. Just before passing through the door, I changed my mind and shuffled, bumped, and angled my way to the front. Standing face to face, as it were, with the Mona Lisa was mesmerizing. Perfectly imperfect, extraordinarily ordinary, and beautifully plain, it was the graceful work of a master hand. As much as any painting ever had, it touched my soul. It was remarkable.
What will the resurrection of the body and life everlasting be like? I can’t even imagine, but I hope it is something like the experiences above: more real than real and revealing the hidden, with a sudden, shattering recognition of love. My mind is too small, but I hope it will be overwhelming beauty through and through. It is beyond my comprehension, but I hope each of us will be a masterpiece in our own right, the graceful work of the Master’s hand. The Sadducees, who deny there is a resurrection, try to trip up Jesus. Caught in their own opinion, not only are they missing the point, they’re missing out. Eternal life and eternal love are intertwined. Face to face, I can only imagine.