Day 3 of Lent {...plain old ordinary supernatural things...}
All manner of things can start fires. The spark of inspiration is all around - so why do we sometimes not feel inspired at all?
There are pictures and there are paintings, and then there is that ineffable thing that we human beings call "inspiration". For me, the simplest most ordinary thing can hit me fresh and in the best way - this is when laundry leads to letter writing, or dirty coffee tables become a poem.
When a work of art is God-breathed, it somehow speaks to us. A little song can carry you through an otherwise monotonous day. A picture can tell a story that gives you a new thought, and the new thought enables you to lay down a tired old way of thinking. That is the least that image can do. It can also change something so deep down inside as to be fundamental.
It’s not just the seeing of a picture that is more than a picture…the act of painting a picture can unlock a fresh way of being in the world that the artist herself needed to discover. In fact, you can't have one without the other. We are not changed by a picture, unless the painter was changed by what she saw first. A painter is a seer of sorts, and a saint of sorts - a painter must be one who has inner vision. That vision - that inspiration - that ineffable thing that is more than what it seems to be...
...it was down there, in the artist’s heart all along, waiting to surprise even her. And here comes the challenge of Lent, 2021. Ordinary living can disguise or discover that inner vision. The details of the every day can conceal or reveal. The painter has to find the courage and discipline to see past it all, pick up her paintbrush, and completely inhabit another space.
While others buy and sell and succeed and go to Hawaii or Italy (for inspiration) and wear busy like a badge of significance.
Let this year’s Lenten season be like good poetry. Poetry takes something as ordinary as a walk around the block, and yet the poet sees a deeper vision. She uses the power of her words to inhabit another space. The poet, with her eye for the extraordinary hidden inside the ordinary, can turn that fleeting moment into permanent beauty. The painter can do the same thing with that same walk around the block, or a flower or an apple or a child sleeping, or the season of Lent.
It’s both a delight and a discipline. It’s the discipline of delight.
Poets and painters and artful practitioners of Lent must all add to their faith the virtue of action, and have eyes to see the beauty of the commonplace, and an unquenchable ache to make it last.
Below you will find an audio/visual version of this post. I hope you enjoy.
