It is well to begin the Advent season pregnant, willing to labor for something you have long wanted to birth.
What is your "baby" right now? Mine happens to be Jesus as his is the chapter of my memoir I’m at work to birth.
I first met Jesus, one Christmas in fact. My mother saved the evidence, a Christmas Eve church bulletin of 1946 with my eight year old small neat printing in its corner: Where did he come from? Some days I wish I had photographic evidence for Jesus. Some days I long to see what he really looked like. Some days I wish I could put him neatly between the pages of a scrapbook, saved forever. Men were short then. Maybe he looked more like Danny DeVito, chunky with a swinging perky gait, than El Greco’s long lean bearded version. One thing I’m pretty sure of is he wasn’t blonde! But maybe he looked like my Jewish grandfather I never met.
Thank God I am not pregnant for real. Only spiritually so. Pregnant with curiosity and wonder and a nagging occasional desire for proof.
But in the real world I am led back to remembering my own child birthings, not just the pain of labor and delivery but the thrill of giving it a big push and seeing a tiny bulge of slicked hair begin to emerge, followed by a squished up squinty-eyed little face, then a whole body about the size of a vole, naked and ugly except to parental beholders. A first draft.
In spite of your relief that it’s all over you can’t wait for it to begin, this new life you will love and share, hate and fight, worship and grieve. I have four children, now adults of wonder who belong to their own families and the world, not me.
The only grace birth doesn’t bear is beauty. There is nothing beautiful except in the eye of Love. It’s not a photo op beauty. The moment deserves to be spared advertisement. It deserves modesty. It’s a manger moment, but you don’t think the historical natural scene really looked like the icon do you? But that’s why we have icons to serve as windows into mystery, not reality shows.
So I am aghast that women in this process are being asked to smile for the little handheld devices pointed in their direction when they are sweaty, hair all stringed out, face stripped of all cosmetics. There is nothing glamorous about it, but everyone wants it on record.
Why? Because technology has provided a way that it can be.
Why not? Because this moment goes on record in the heart, not the camera.
What will we not trivialize next in 140 Twitter characters? What is sacrosanct from the eye of the touch screen? Where are the boundaries on techie addiction?
Leave the poor woman and her newborn alone please. Do not try to take away the holy from this picture by sending it out to 100,000 of your “friends” on Facebook. The kid doesn’t even have a real face yet? And his Mommy’s is streaked with strain and puffed with exhaustion.
And the same thing goes for breast cancer. There is nothing glamorous about it. OK so we’ve seen Demi More’s swollen belly and we’ve seen someone else’s noble scarred breastless space. Isn’t that enough showing off? Now we have to wear pink rubber bracelets that say I “heart” boobies, pretend that we are somehow proud to have survived the amputation or to still have intact nipples.
Ok, but only if all this display raises tons of money for research for cures and better treatments. Breast cancer is NOT a women's issue (not meant to be sarcastic)and deserves a campaign that is dignified, not tainted with sexist voyeurism.
Scandal of overexposure, immodest at best, exhibitionist at worst.
A woman priest friend would say, “Jesus would puke!” (Adult Jesus. Baby is entitled.)
Showing posts with label religous art and technology. Show all posts
Showing posts with label religous art and technology. Show all posts
Wednesday, December 1, 2010
Tuesday, January 6, 2009
Xray Vision
Just before Christmas this year I read an article in the Boston Globe (December 23, 1008) with this line in it: "The painting that is now a horizontal nativity was once a vertical crucifixion."
At first I thought it should be reversed— that the Renaissance painter, Jacopo Tintoretto, would have painted a Nativity scene before a Crucifixion scene. But not so. Using Xray technology at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, curators have discovered that the Tintoretto "Nativity" painted in 1580, contains a fascinating "hodgepodge" of images, a painting behind the painting.
To the trained eye "Nativity" has been an embarrassment, although it is enormous and presides over the museum's Koch gallery "It's off," said an asistant curator.
For example, a bearded shepherd, supposed after all to be entranced by the new baby in the crib is instead focused upward toward the sky not the central event. No parent in his or her right mind when snapping the one millionth photo of a newborn baby would aim for the sky.
It seems that the artist changed his mind and chopped up the original crucifixion canvas for reasons not known, pieced together a new vertical canvas, painted over the old subject matter and came up with "Nativity" (1580) It's a cut-and-paste job. It's not rare to paint over things but "to cannibalize your own picture is a very rare thing in European art," according to the curator.
Theories about Tintoretto's motivation abound of course, just as they do in a whodunnit mystery novel. It made me think of a line from Yeats' poem "The Magi." The poet describes the three sages silhouetted against the dark blue sky, traveling "hoping to find once more/ being by Calvary's turbulence unsatisfied,/ the uncontrollable mystery on the bestial floor." (Now I have cannibalized the poem by lifting the lines from the whole. But that's what Xray vision is; it focuses you where you need to see more. And spiritual Xray vision can help us detect the Holy in the oddest places, like crucifixes and gathered stable beasts peering at a newborn.
I wonder if, like the Magi in the ancient biblical story, Tintoretto was also unsatisfied with the gruesome death scene and suddenly needed to remember and re-present the birth. By Xray both are there.
Too bad we can't just cut up life like a canvas and pick and choose the parts that satisfy us. But we can remember and most of us do. Nevertheless, life is a mixed bag and, unlike horse and carriage or love and marriage, you really can't have life without both birth and death, the vertical and the horizontal always present in shadow form, one hovering in the background as the other for a time takes center stage. Then they switch, like Tintoretto switched his canvas's in focus and direction.
But it's all there by Xray.
Medical science takes Xrays to find disease, yes, but to determine as well the proper focus for healing and life-saving treatments.
It is spiritually healing I think, for us to live as peacefully as we can with this annoying mix. For at any moment the worst can become the best. If you polish up your spiritual Xray vision you can find life in death, blessing in curse—and even the reverse.
Good religion is always about transformation, things not being what they seem. With soul vision (spiritual Xray) I can sometimes see, when I take time— gaze enough, assume divine presence and ask for it— the Holy in the vulnerable beastly flesh, resurrection hope in a suffering death, the picture behind the picture behind the picture.
At first I thought it should be reversed— that the Renaissance painter, Jacopo Tintoretto, would have painted a Nativity scene before a Crucifixion scene. But not so. Using Xray technology at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, curators have discovered that the Tintoretto "Nativity" painted in 1580, contains a fascinating "hodgepodge" of images, a painting behind the painting.
To the trained eye "Nativity" has been an embarrassment, although it is enormous and presides over the museum's Koch gallery "It's off," said an asistant curator.
For example, a bearded shepherd, supposed after all to be entranced by the new baby in the crib is instead focused upward toward the sky not the central event. No parent in his or her right mind when snapping the one millionth photo of a newborn baby would aim for the sky.
It seems that the artist changed his mind and chopped up the original crucifixion canvas for reasons not known, pieced together a new vertical canvas, painted over the old subject matter and came up with "Nativity" (1580) It's a cut-and-paste job. It's not rare to paint over things but "to cannibalize your own picture is a very rare thing in European art," according to the curator.
Theories about Tintoretto's motivation abound of course, just as they do in a whodunnit mystery novel. It made me think of a line from Yeats' poem "The Magi." The poet describes the three sages silhouetted against the dark blue sky, traveling "hoping to find once more/ being by Calvary's turbulence unsatisfied,/ the uncontrollable mystery on the bestial floor." (Now I have cannibalized the poem by lifting the lines from the whole. But that's what Xray vision is; it focuses you where you need to see more. And spiritual Xray vision can help us detect the Holy in the oddest places, like crucifixes and gathered stable beasts peering at a newborn.
I wonder if, like the Magi in the ancient biblical story, Tintoretto was also unsatisfied with the gruesome death scene and suddenly needed to remember and re-present the birth. By Xray both are there.
Too bad we can't just cut up life like a canvas and pick and choose the parts that satisfy us. But we can remember and most of us do. Nevertheless, life is a mixed bag and, unlike horse and carriage or love and marriage, you really can't have life without both birth and death, the vertical and the horizontal always present in shadow form, one hovering in the background as the other for a time takes center stage. Then they switch, like Tintoretto switched his canvas's in focus and direction.
But it's all there by Xray.
Medical science takes Xrays to find disease, yes, but to determine as well the proper focus for healing and life-saving treatments.
It is spiritually healing I think, for us to live as peacefully as we can with this annoying mix. For at any moment the worst can become the best. If you polish up your spiritual Xray vision you can find life in death, blessing in curse—and even the reverse.
Good religion is always about transformation, things not being what they seem. With soul vision (spiritual Xray) I can sometimes see, when I take time— gaze enough, assume divine presence and ask for it— the Holy in the vulnerable beastly flesh, resurrection hope in a suffering death, the picture behind the picture behind the picture.
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