St. Cecilia’s story combines chastity and martyrdom in the 4th century A.D. Rome. A young woman of a prosperous Roman family was promised to a young man. During the wedding she had refused to accept, she sang to God. But her groom honored her virginal vows and asked to see the angels to whom she was singing. They were both martyred for refusing to consummate the marriage. Great compositions have been written in her honor, such as Benjamin Britten’s Hymn to St. Cecilia. This is my hymn to St. Cecilia.
 
My hymn to St. Cecelia.
 
I.
 
Of all the arts, music is said to be closest to the gods. Odysseus had to be tied to the mast, as his ship passed the island of the Sirens. Orpheus was able to rescue his wife Euridice from the underworld with his music. And Cecilia staved off her young suitor with heavenly song. Could she be the earliest illustration of “he (she) who sings, prays twice”--?
 
Music has transformative powers. Music surely is the auditory equivalent of the Transfiguration that is recorded in the Hebrew and Christian Bible. Moses came down from the mountain visually transformed and radiating from his interaction with God. Jesus on his own mountain became so luminous to be mistaken for the prophets. In the presence of Moses and Jesus, the presence of God was felt. They shone. In each case a community of faith formed itself around the experience.
 
If there is anything like that outside of the Bible, it lies in certain instances of performed music.
 
For instance, as a college graduation present, my brother took me to a performance of Puccini’s Madama Butterfly at the old Met in New York City (that’s how old I am!), featuring Leontyne Price in the role of Cio-Cio-San. What a knock-out musical treat for me, the greater for sitting in box seats at stage left where we practically could have reached out and touched the actors. But you didn’t need to have front row seats to be made captive of that soprano who was possessed by the transcendent music. She shines. And the audience reflected that in the final ovations.
 
In graduate school, a roommate and I went to a song recital in the great Auditorium Theater in Chicago’s loop and heard Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau perform accompanied by Daniel Barenboim. There were ten standing ovations with ten encores, until Barenboim just had to close the keyboard cover and beat a needed retreat. They shined.
 
On a Reformation Sunday afternoon, years later when I was teaching at Chicago, I attended a choral concert at Orchestra Hall on Michigan Ave. performing Lutheran hymns, sung with such vocal resonance as to make us well up to the brim with tears. They shone.
 
When I was the minister of Central Congregational Church in Jamaica Plain, we were host to the Rolling Requiem on the first anniversary of 9/11. Across the country and the whole world, cities were enlisted to perform Mozart’s Requiem starting at 8:15 in the morning. We were one of them. The singers were the Avenue of the Arts Chorale and their instrumentalists. It ended without applause, only a benediction, and the silence was inspiring–we all shone.
 
The effects of music are irresistible–but, just what is happening to us when people sing?
 
Music helps us find our joy–Woodstock, the Beatles, Earth Wind and Fire. It helps us express our grief–like the Rolling Requiem and Obama’s Amazing Grace at the Mother Church in Charleston. It helps us find hope and faith–as in the hymns we sing here. It brings true solace, a profound sense of well-being. And most importantly, it creates community–every religion has its music, and every musical event creates a community, however momentary. In that respect, “all musics are created equal: as Gunther Schuler, late President of the NEC often said, whether in subway stations, public parks or baseball stadiums.
 
How does this happen? The song occupies the singer. The voice in particular channels the divine. Instrumentalists also have this experience–the performer becomes the instrument. The artists are transformed in performance into an out-of-body state. That’s what was meant when your parents told you after your recital, “You really shined tonight,”
 
St. Cecilia, we know you were one with God in the singing. You were transfigured in singing no less than Moses and Jesus who themselves were, and as are we!
 
Blessed Cecilia, appear in visions
To all musicians, appear and inspire:
Translated Daughter, come down and startle
Composing mortals with immortal fire.
 
II.
 
Just look at us here this morning, in this Sanctuary, here to sing (albeit with masks) and to be transformed in the singing, here to receive the ministry of these singers and instrumentalists. Here to rejoice, to exult, to grieve and weep and be transported.
 
What riches we at Eliot Church enjoy, and not only us. Last week, Seraphim performed here, the first in the post-surge reopening. Capella Clausura performs in a couple weeks. The Newton Community Chorale started rehearsing here weekly last Monday.
 
Why stop there, I want to ask this church? With this sanctuary, now that it is acoustically restored, Eliot Church could become home to more musical organizations, ensembles and individuals which are desperate for rehearsal and performance space. With a little more focused intentionality, you could perform a ministry fostering community among the artists, and between us and the wider cultural population. Maybe you could form a common cause with a local artistic non-profit. Or, imagine, you could even collaborate in the creation of a non-profit, an umbrella organization which would share the burden and cost of managing this building.
 
How exciting it would be to see the increased traffic in the building, fulfilling Eliot’s mission to serve the community. Eliot could become the patron of music way beyond our Sunday morning festival of Song, Word, and Prayer. This building would be a destination. And through the presence of God’s spirit in all its activities, would come to be Transfigured itself, a building not mutely stationed at this corner watching the traffic go by.
 
Well, it’s just a pipe dream of mine, as I sit here in this space during the week to meditate. I’ve shared these ideas with the church leadership. It might open an interesting line of questioning when candidates are interviewed by the Search Committee. In fact, I have circulated this booklet from Partners for Sacred Places in the hopes some of the examples would excite them about a way to be church in our time.
 
I say to you, Eliot Church, let music grow from more to more, that life be enriched, transformed and transfigured.
 
Blessed Cecilia, appear in visions
To all musicians, appear and inspire:
Translated Daughter, come down and startle
Composing mortals with immortal fire.
 
Rev. Richard Chrisman, February 27, 2022
​

We continue the theme of religion and art and how much they have to do with each other. We travel from painting two Sundays ago and performance last Sunday to poetry now, and this third Sunday in Black History Month, my examples come from African-American poetry. I am not wishing to make you all into English majors, but to prepare you to come to church every Sunday morning, ready to listen, as it were, with the inside of the palm of your hand.
 
Let us pray. . . O God, may the words of my mouth and the meditations of our hearts give wings to the faith in you which lies so deep within each one of us here this morning, my Strength and my Redeemer.
 
I.
 
Love is a wild wonder
And stars that sing,
Rocks that burst asunder
And mountains that take wing.
 
Tambourines!
Tambourines!
Tambourines
To the glory of God!
Tambourines
To glory!
 
A gospel shout
And a gospel song:
Life is short
But God is long!
[Langston Hughes]
 
Where are we? How did we get here? Where are we going? What’s behind the stars? Can I stand this pain? Is there a God? What is so rare as a day in June?
 
These questions circulate every day in the privacy of our minds, yours and mine. These same questions never leave poets alone. They drive the poets crazy. Poets write furiously, they scribble, they get up at night, they may drink, because they are reaching, always reaching, to express what can’t be said, what there are not ordinary words for, what society bars from being said. They attempt to capture what is fleeting, what is ephemeral and yet–universal. They attempt to describe a deeper dimension of existence.
 
They may start with sensory objects ready to hand (e.g., “a red wheelbarrow glazed with rain water”), but poets ultimately proceed to levels that require a sixth sense on our part, to describe a deeper dimension of existence. In so doing, artistic creations sometimes baffle, confound, annoy, even defeat the viewer. This is true of all the arts, of course, but maybe most of all–of poetry.
 
In the beginning, in the West, there was only one poet, represented by a collective of bards who recited from memory the epic saga of the ten year Trojan War and of one general’s ten year journey home. Fast forward, today the number of published poets probably equals the U.S. national debt, and the number of UN-published poets exceeds the number of stars in the sky. The fact is, there are possibly more writers of poetry now than there are readers.
 
Why do people find poetry so hard to read? I’m talking about poetry that isn’t purely decoration or confection, or what we call verse, doggerel. The answer may surprise you. It is because poets strive for economy, for maximum economy. So much economy that often words are left out and transitions are not provided. The intent is for the biggest punch with the least motion.
 
And it’s hard because poetry is written in private for private consumption–written in the study, read in the living room. Often poetry is written in a prescribed, formal way (sonnet, ode, elegy, etc). So it helps to have some prior familiarity to find the groove. Then one day, strict forms went out the window and were replaced by the language of conversation.
 
At about the same time, poetry went public. There have always been poets for special public occasions, famously, like at Presidential Inaugurations. Maya Angelou and Amanda Gorman are recent examples. Then came something called poetry slams, where poets declaim their truth in pubs and church basements.

Another example is rap, the new freedom song of Black America, that is written exclusively for public performance. These are easier on the ear now, never being meant for the printed page. Such poetry can be incantatory and hieratic, dreamlike or an altered state of consciousness. Poetry lets us visit the entire world at once.
 
II.
 
Since it is Black History Month, if you took just ten Black poets from the 250-year history of African-American poetry, only the first two were traditional poets.
 
Phyllis Wheatley, brought from Africa at the age of 8 and enslaved in Boston to the Wheatley family, learned to read and write in English so well she wrote excellent poetry modeled on classical forms of the time. When her poetry was published in book form, the Wheatley family manumitted her to freedom.
 
James Weldon Johnson, born and educated in Atlanta, and his composer brother (Rosamond) lived in NYC. You heard his lyrics from “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” written in 1900 and known as the Black national anthem, in the Call to Worship.
 
The others wrote for the human ear and for the street, for conversation and for controversy. Three have been three U.S. Poets Laureate and one is our present Boston Poet Laureate.
 
   Langston Hughes, born in Ohio and lived in Paris and New York.
Well, son, I’ll tell you:
Life for me ain’t been no crystal stair.
 
  Gwendolyn Brooks of Chicago, the first Black to be named U.S. Poet Laureate, wrote poems about women in labor and men in trouble, about Paul Robeson and Malcolm X. This one about Malcolm X ends,
He opened us–
Who was a key,
Who was a man.
 
   Audre Lord, Amiri Baraka/Newark, Alice Walker are other great names,
 
   Rita Dove was the next Black woman to be name Poet Laureate, gave us,
“If you can’t be free, be a mystery.”
 
   Finally, Tracy K. Smith, our latest Poet Laureate who is Black, wrote,
After dark, stars glisten like ice, and the distance they span
Hides something elemental. Not God. Exactly.
 
In Boston we have our own Poet Laureate, who is Porsha Olayiwola, from Jamaica Plain. You have to see her and hear her perform her poems on the internet.
 
All poetry draws directly from the lives of the poets, and so, life in America for Blacks being what it is, the burden of African-American poetry is to convey the height, width and depth of their pain, and its taste. As one commentator put it, “All those with the audacity to breathe while black. . .offer up a daily epic of struggle and song” [Kevin Young].
 
African-American poets, too, write furiously, they scribble, they get up at night, they may drink, because they are reaching, always reaching, to express what can’t be said, what there are not ordinary words for, what society bars from being said. They attempt to capture what is fleeting, what is ephemeral and yet–universally true.

III.
 
But these poets also know the famous dictum of Emily Dickinson from 1850–
 
Tell all the truth but tell it slant — . . .
  The Truth must dazzle gradually
Or every man be blind --
 
To say the naked truth, Emily Dickinson argues, would leave people dazzled, as Moses was dazzled going up the mountain. Like Wisdom of the Bible which dazzles with truth not understood by simpletons. Like Revelation which dazzles, truth coming to us slant, in the form of an ecstatic vision that we would be sorely tempted to alter in order to understand it better. St. Paul wrote, we see but through a glass darkly.
 
So the echoes of the wordless Word reach us only at our solar plexus, they reach us in our fitful dreams before dawn, in the water that slakes our mortal thirst, in poetry, and also–in church. Because the questions poets ask: “Where are we? How did we get here? Where are we going? What’s behind the stars? Can I stand this pain? Is there a God? What is so rare as a day in June?” aren’t these exactly our questions on a Sunday morning!
 
However, on Sunday morning we are greeted with the opposite problem–seemingly too many words. Religion is the opposite of poetry in that respect. Whereas poetry is concise and concentrated to a fault, religion is prolix.
Consider the Bible–nothing compact or condensed about that! Yet like poetry, religion reaches to express what there are not ordinary words for, what society bars, what is fleeting, ephemeral, but universal.
 
Religion is a kind of poetry, you see. Yes, and poetry is a kind of religion.
 
Maybe they are the inside and the outside of the same glove. But which is which? It requires a kind of extra-sensory perception to pick up the signals from beyond the stars.
 
I want you to come to church every Sunday morning, ready to listen, as it were, with the inside of the palm of your hand.
 
Rev. Richard Chrisman, February 20, 2022

Before there was Malcolm X, before there was Martin Luther King, there was Paul Robeson. Before there was Sidney Poitier, before there was Nina Simone and Oprah Winfrey, there was Paul Robeson. Before there was Jesse Jackson and John Lewis, there was Paul Robeson. And there was only Paul Robeson, a single Everest among the foothills of the early civil rights movement in the first half of the 20th century.
 
Co-existing intimately with hostility of Whites against Blacks, poverty was a stalking horse in the Black communities, and hunger. Whites can only barely discern the desperation of survival behind chapter after chapter of the history books. Along with the growing industries of the 20th century, the suburbs, the leisure class, the creature comforts, the educational palaces, the owner classes built, in effect, a lavish movie set behind which Black people fought gracefully for their survival out of sight. That was Paul’s life, too, even in rural, northern New Jersey.
 
Paul’s life started right in the shadow of slavery. Robeson’s father Drew Robeson, born on a North Carolina plantation, bore the name of his owner. At the age of 15, he escaped with his brother with the help of the Underground Railroad to Philadelphia, in 1860. He migrated slightly north to the northernmost of southern towns of genteel Princeton N.J. where in 1880 he became the minister of a large Black community servant class to the white establishment there. Paul was born (1898) along with six other siblings to Drew and his young wife, Maria Louisa, who died when Paul was 6. Paul’s father lost his pastorate in a controversy over the proper role to their white employers who didn’t approve of his racial justice preaching. He worked odd jobs at the edge of poverty till he found pastorates in Westfield and Somerville N.J. This background is important because the churches he served belonged to the AME Zion denomination (see this image). Paul’s father died when he was 20.
 
The early years taught Paul bitter lessons about surviving in a racist society–absolute deference. But his minister father required of his family that one should maintain one’s dignity with no show of servility. The biblical demand for righteousness and New Testament virtues (as Jesus instructed his listeners in this morning’s lesson) could be honored without either challenging white superiority, which could be literally fatal, or descending to the subhuman, which could be spiritually fatal. Paul added his own survival strength with his charismatic smile and his genuine empathy for people including Whites. But it was a tightrope walk everywhere, as when trying out for the football team at Rutgers he was viciously attacked by his teammates on the field. By the end of the first week, he had a dislocated shoulder, deep bruises, and a mangled hand with fingernails ripped off (Paul Robeson, Jr.). He was enraged at the treatment, but he channeled his anger into running the plays successfully, and it made him a star which whites had reluctantly to concede. This channeling would serve him well his whole life long. It was observed of him that, whereas he would pass over all the little slights to himself that he experienced, privately he would explode in anger over the systemic brutalization of his people he observed every day. This translated into a fearless posture toward the U.S. government and Whites in general as waves of controversies arose while his fame as an actor and singer grew. Robeson never shrank from pointing out America’s treatment of Blacks in interviews or speeches that he gave over 40 years.
 
Paul Robeson’s effectiveness as a lightning rod for racial justice between 1920 and 1960 was due entirely to the interaction of his art and his person and his outspokenness on racial equity. His art compelled admiration, attention, adulation, and transformation. He was irresistible in three different venues–concert hall, theater stage, and film–he cycled back and forth among these as opportunities arose. His voice emanated from a powerful physique (so beautiful sculptors produced nude likeness of him that he posed for), its timbre, range, gravity and intensity were thrilling. But, being Black, the power of his performance was compounded by where, societally, racially, he was coming from. Especially in his film career. At first, he was being used by White producers, and he learned to guard against it. He consciously worked his way from “tragic black hero who is victorious” to “an epic black hero who triumphs over odds” (Paul Robeson, Jr.). His artistry was a vector of the national emotions. Imagine!–whites and Blacks hearing and seeing the same phenomenon differently, and all of them standing on their seats cheering after any performance of his. It’s hard to say what white people thought they were seeing when that Black man appeared on the Broadway stage of “Show Boat” (or film) to sing Ol’ Man River.
We should be wondering–did he make whites identify with the plight of all humanity, caught in the coils of social determinism; did he make whites feel powerless before fate and did that perhaps comfort them; or did they see in that man any reflection at all of white responsibility for the enslaved and their descendants in their midst?
 
Likewise, when Robeson played Othello, the interracial love scenes prompted different reactions in London (where the play’s run in the West End broke records that still stand) than they did in the United States (where the Broadway run broke records for longest playing Shakespeare play that still stands). I think, America experienced, in the transcendent presence of the man, his personally held truth–that Blacks and Whites share the same humanity and the same country. However, although America couldn’t deny it, America couldn’t own it.
 
At the same time, over the same decades, Robeson was also singing for larger audiences for more money as he gravitated toward national and ethnic folk songs projecting a sympathy for workers of all races in their combat against exploitation by their employers. He lived in London for 12 years, from 1928 to 1940, traveling in 1934 to Russia where he was embraced without reserve. He returned frequently because as he said, they don’t know what a Negro is.
 
It certainly didn’t hurt that he was a master of languages and learned to speak and sing in Russian. None of this ingratiated him back home once the U.S. government started battling the Soviet Union in the Cold War and sponsoring the House Un-American Activities Committee of Joseph McCarthy. Everything made him a suspect of being a communist, which he was not and he frequently denied, although he found in communists a kindred spirit and formed common cause with them on multiple issues–his support of labor unions and workers, his outrage at the murder of Emmett Till, his vocal support of the African decolonization efforts. He condemned asking Black men to fight for a country they couldn’t even vote in. He was hounded by J. Edgar Hoover, had his passport taken away several times for long periods, and he was second-guessed by his own community who couldn’t afford to come down on the wrong side of Uncle Sam. But, admittedly, Robeson underestimated his political usefulness to the Soviet who sent Kruschev to the UN to bang on the table with his shoe and shout, “We will bury you!” 
 
All this led ultimately to destitution and broken health, just as the Black community were breaking out of the Jim Crow handcuffs, just as Robeson was in decline. All of them took positions he had been outspoken about during the immediately preceding decades.
 
Speaking truth to power is not so easy even when you are the same race and status as the king. Look at Mike Pence’s dilemma and the dozens of others in the Trump Administration who said “No.” But what if you are of another race and status? What are your chances of speaking truth to power and surviving? We’ll never know the number of the enslaved in America who dared raise their voice or fist against the slave owner. Frederick Douglas did and survived, but what a chance he took! Nat Turner had a different fate. James Meredith stood up to George Wallace; so did Medgar Evers and he didn’t survive.
 
And what about Paul Robeson? This magisterial actor/singer earned enormous accolades and sums of money with his performances, he enthralled entire countries including this one, and died in poverty. Curiously, it was the people who made him the equivalent of a Pharaoh against whom no one shall lift up hand or foot–like Joseph, who was prince in a foreign country where nothing was denied to him, Paul was showered with love around the globe. Pharaoh said to his servants, “Can we find anyone else like this—one in whom is the spirit of God?”
 
However, that didn’t change being Black in America for Paul Robeson. He died in 1976, his funeral was held at his brother’s former church in Harlem, mourned by common people all around the world. He showed that integrity is not only its own reward, it has positive results. The righteous are like trees by the river, whose leaves are for the healing of the nations.
 
Rev. Richard Chrisman, February 13, 2022

-Luke 4:21-30
They got up, drove him out of the town, and led him to the brow of the hill
on which their town was built, so that they might hurl him off the cliff.
 
The truth shall set you free, says Christ.
What is truth, says Pilate.
You can’t handle the truth, says Jack Nicholson’s character in A Few Good Men.
What is so elusive about truth?
I.
 
The “Van Gogh Immersion” proved to be more than worth it–have you seen it? I went there feeling very dubious about another high-tech exploitation of one of the most popular of our greatest painters. Touted as a blockbuster event, it was not likely to match the hype. But they got me in there, they got my money. And I wasn’t sorry, because it turned out to be better than advertised. I’ll just say, you should go.
 
You’ll find light and sound and space serving a reverent purpose. Technology afforded the creators power over your senses, in the service of an homage to another creator and to creativity itself. The agon (the mortal struggle) of van Gogh’s creative process subliminally came through, even had you not known the biography of Van Gogh.
 
But everybody knows the conclusion of Van Gogh’s famous story too well. (6 movies, a song, etc.) which has overflooded him with pathos. It colors our experience of his painting. Best known are the two turbulent years in Arles in the south of France when he roomed with Paul Gaughin; his failed effort to sell any of the florid, vivid painting which surpassed the imaginations of his impressionist predecessors; and the tragic ending of his life.
 
But do people know enough of his story to get under or around the tragic ending to realize what he was doing, and what artists do? I find a certain similarity between Van Gogh’s public reception and Christ’s, when Jesus went back home and could not get a hearing there for his message. They would have thrown him off a cliff if they could. They couldn’t handle the truth.

Of course, the gospel is one thing, and Van Gogh, just a painter, is another. I’m not trying to establish any equivalencies here. But I do see a meaningful correlation between the two stories when it comes to truth revealed. Jesus revealed the unlikely power of forgiveness to transform reality–those were the miracles. Doesn’t every artist, too, with skills much beyond our own, open windows for us beyond the limits of our present horizons? Because, the universal human experience is that what we see is not what there is, not nearly all there is. Our vision is limited, although the intensity of eyesight deceives us into believing things are clear. We often contrast truth and falsehood, as in the present politics of the U.S. But an additional kind of problem resides with the contrast between truth and illusion. There we are truly challenged.
 
II.
And how do we react to illusions threatened by truth? Truth at the personal level is painful. We don’t like our illusions exposed. We don’t like exposure to another point of view. We can’t stand to think about what we’ve missed. Basically, we can’t handle the truth. They wanted to stone Jesus. And they scoffed at Van Gogh. Jesus was ultimately murdered. Van Gogh nearly starved to death, before he succumbed to mental illness.
 
Fortunately, Vincent had his brother, Theo. And even more fortunately, we have Vincent’s entire correspondence with Theo which comes to 1,896 pages in a boxed three volume set, not Theo’s, just Vincent’s part. My paperback copy runs to 500 pages. The letters to Theo run to 3 and 4 and 5 pages in length, handwritten of course, accompanied by sketches that van Gogh regularly included.
 
The letters convey the spiritual course of his life in great detail. They also chronicle his peripatetic nature, six months in Paris employed by an art dealer, two years in London, some months in Amsterdam first, then Brussels, preparing to take the theological school entrance exam, a six-month tour of missionary duty in Belgium. All the while, he reads voluminously–Shakespeare, George Eliot, Dickens, French authors, historians. He is attracted to an artistic career and returns home temporarily to recoup before taking a room in The Hague while he studies draftsmanship–he’s almost 30 now and still in his artistic infancy. All the while, he is writing to Theo and sharing his aspirations, and Theo is sending him money, books, advice and encouragement. Theo had been working for the original art dealer and gets assigned to the Paris office, at which point Vincent proposes they room together. March 1, 1886.
 
Now he finally lands in the right milieu, finally at the age of 33, meeting many of the avant garde, absorbing the atmosphere of innovation which corresponds perfectly to his spirit.
 
III.
We learn from the letters from Vincent that, with Christ, you are never alone. He meant this. It was not a pious nostrum–Vincent was not pious. He had reason to believe this because he was always alone. He lost jobs in the workaday world because of his personal appearance. He rationalized, “You can’t tell what goes on within someone by looking at what happens without.” 

What mattered to Vincent was within the soul. He had been in and out of love, but always with unattainable women. Young Vincent did not connect easily or for very long, except with his brother Theo. “There may be a great fire in your soul, but no one ever comes to warm himself by it, all that passers-by can see is a little smoke coming out of the chimney and they walk on.” 

This is the predicament of every artist, and every human being. But a few artists reciprocated his friendship, and this benefitted Van Gogh immensely. His discovery of painting eventually released and revealed that great fire in his soul.
 
Wanting to be faithful to his emotional truth, Van Gogh had begun by trying out as a minister of the Gospel. His father, a strict Protestant minister in a Dutch village, encouraged Vincent to study theology, but after some itinerant preaching in Belgium and Holland, he struck out.

The father was furious with Vincent–he couldn’t handle the truth. Vincent was full of God without a way to express it, until he found painting. He staggered from pillar to post, one odd job after another, poverty, penury and occasional homelessness, fueled nevertheless by love of God.
 
Vincent was on a mission, but it took a while to embrace a medium that suited his truth. And his truth was at base theological. Young Vincent experienced the depth of life through love. “Love leads you to understand God better.” “The best way of knowing God is to love many things. . .  But you must love with a sublime, genuine, profound sympathy, with devotion, with intelligence, and you must try all the time to understand God more, better and yet more. That will lead to God, that will lead to an unshakeable faith.” Vincent, the emerging artist, observed his subjects and the world lovingly. With time and guidance, van Gogh established his identity as a painter. His aspiration was to manifest the fully human and the wholly divine within the frame of a single painting.
 
He believed that “Christ alone of all the philosophers, magicians etc., has affirmed eternal life as the most important certainty, the infinity of time, the futility of death. . .Christ lived serenely, as an artist greater than all other artists, scorning marble and clay and pain, working in the living flesh. This peerless artist made living men immortals.” Van Gogh’s advice was, “Try to grasp the essence of what the great artists, what the serious masters, say in their masterpieces, and you will again find God.” Vincent looked for artists who had “something of the human soul [that precious pearl] in their work, the great, immense, the infinite, Spirit.”
 
Not many artists would articulate their drive in these terms, or have. But van Gogh’s work and that of so many artists, leaves a record of self-clarification, the evidence of a search for their personal truth. As theological as Van Gogh was, there was never a doctrinal or didactic drive in his art–it was purely spiritual. The art is an active form of meditation. Van Gogh’s story uniquely reveals the close connection between religion and art.
 
IV.
Doesn’t everyone have a “gospel,” a truth, to share? Doesn’t everyone need an art to express it?  You see the evidences in those tags people put at the end of emails, and on bumper stickers, and what we tell our grandchildren. But even more is needed–a religion perhaps, an art even.
 
Churches certainly have a gospel message, and every Sunday we create and share our collective expression of it. But don’t we have to drill down a little deeper today, perhaps, and take account of our truth in 2022, mid-Covid, post-glory days of Eliot Church?
 
The truth shall set us free. What is that truth? What is so elusive about truth? Can we handle the truth?   
 
Churches have a religious practice to fulfil just as Jesus and Van Gogh both did. How shall we go about it? It is a mystery worth probing, and a risk worth taking.
 
-Rev. Richard Chrisman, February 6, 2022