Today, we share two paintings entitled “How Long O Lord,” by Julie Barber, striking paintings, filled with anguish amidst genocide. The above one features the Arabic word سلام (Salam) and the other in Hebrew, שָׁלוֹם (Shalom), which both mean Peace. Perhaps your eye is drawn to the newspaper clippings in the background, or the people holding their children. It’s deeply expressive of pain, but also impresses upon us, and likely upon Julie as she was creating it.
We have a new poem from Cameron Preece, turning his attention to the creativity at the centre of the mystery of the Incarnation.
People who work with words, sound, colour, and craft often speak of the hidden life within things. The poet and priest, Gerard Manley Hopkins, spoke of this as their inscape, that unmistakable individuality each creature or moment carries within itself. Hopkins saw this as something more than character; it was the divine and deep pattern that makes a thing what it truly is. And he spoke of instress as the impulse or pressure that allows us to perceive that inner shape, the way the Divine pushes its meaning towards us through the world if we are attentive enough to receive it.
Centuries earlier, Maximus the Confessor described a similar movement through different language. He understood the Logos, the divine Word, as the source and coherence of all things, and the logoi as the countless expressions of that wisdom and intention scattered through the fabric of the world: in creatures, in relationships, in beauty, in our capacity to recognise meaning at all.
This poem stands where these intuitions meet. It wonders what it means for the one who sustains the world’s inner patterns to step inside them; for the artist not only to imprint meaning upon the work, but to inhabit it from within. It considers how the world might bear the quiet pressure of its maker’s presence, and how being human, ordinary, fragile, embodied, beautiful, might itself become a place where the deepest meanings press forward and become visible.
Who is this God
Who hides in flesh and blood
Who lies in and around bone and marrow
Who hides within the rays of sunset
And floods for rain
The twinkle of moon and stars
"The Word became flesh and lived among us,"
Like how the poet is expressed in the poem
And the sculptor who lives in prints in the sculpture
Becomes the clay,
While the painter, the painting.
The pianist pours herself out
In performance
And composer in the composition--
Who is the veiled deity
Defining humanity
Through self-expression?
"I am poured out like water,
and all my bones are out of joint;
my heart is like wax;
it is melted within my breast;"
Prayer becomes pained poem
And poem, pained prayer
Promise becomes pained waiting
And waiting, waiting still
"Peace I leave with you; my peace I give to you. I do not give to you as the world gives." (John 14:27a)
What is this kind of peace?
