Yesterday’s collage got me thinking about my friend Daniel Nevins. Daniel is an artist in Asheville, North Carolina, and his work in this world is to create amazing paintings. Ranging from small, icon-like artwork to nearly daunting expanses, his work is involved and intimate, textured with folklore, myth, and poetry. One critic has observed that with their intricate layering, the surfaces of Daniel’s paintings possess a memory of their own.
Leaves are a recurring motif in Daniel’s artwork. Tiny leaves, leaf after leaf in patterns that aren’t always immediately visible to the eye. I first became familiar with Daniel’s artwork through reproductions, and I assumed that he painted the leaves as he painted everything else on the surfaces of his artwork. The first time I visited his studio, I discovered otherwise. Daniel cuts out the leaves—hundreds, thousands—by hand. He adheres them to the surface of the wood on which he works, and only then does he begin to paint them. To see the texture of the leaves, you have to get up close.
Thinking of Daniel’s leaves, I found myself wondering, what would it be like to read a text this way? To get this close, closer, close enough to see the textures, to perceive the intricacy of detail and the layers of memory that a text holds?
I pick up the lectionary readings for this week and look again. I read for the images, lift them from the text, bring them close to my mind’s eye. From Isaiah, the Psalter, Paul’s letter to the Romans, Matthew’s Gospel: my eye takes in the bark of the Jesse root, the leaves of the shoot, the lips of the judge, the fur of the wolf. Wool of lamb, spots of leopard, muzzle of cow. Arc of the mountains, blazing of sun, brightness of moon, that rain-drenched mown grass. Scrub of wilderness, clothing of camel’s hair, locusts and honey, water for baptizing. A way. Vipers. Stones. Ax. Wheat and chaff. Fire.
What do those images stir? What among them is familiar and resonant with my life and its landscape; what is foreign? What is appealing; what is fearsome? What layers of memory do the images open? What passageways do they carve between the text on the page and the text of my own life?
I look at the lectionary readings again, this time for the words that connect with what is less tangible. Spirit, wisdom, counsel, knowledge, righteousness, prosperity, deliverance. Peace, glory, encouragement, hope, welcome, truth, mercy. Power, repentance, crying out, confessing, wrath, winnowing, threshing.
What do these words stir, what connections and memories and associations? What invitations do they carry?
I can’t remain forever at this close range; closer, and closer, I eventually go cross-eyed, lose my focus, let go whatever clarity I had. But perhaps that’s the point?
I think of Annie Dillard and pull out my copy of Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. I look at its yellowed pages and wonder that I’ve reached the point where a gift from an old boyfriend could be showing such age. (It’s just too much acid in the paper, I’m sure.) Dillard has a brilliant chapter on seeing. She draws from Marius von Senden’s book Space and Sight, in which he describes the experiences of some of the first people to have cataract surgery. For those who had been blind since birth, and whose brains had not learned what to do with the images that their eyes offered them, the experience was initially (and, for some, permanently) terrifying. Others took up the work of learning how to see. One man, newly sighted but still bereft of depth perception, practiced tossing his boot and trying to gauge its distance from him. Another, a girl, “was eager to tell her blind friend that ‘men do not really look like trees at all,’ and was astounded to discover that her every visitor had an utterly different face. Finally,” Dillard writes,
a twenty-two-year-old girl was dazzled by the world’s brightness and kept her eyes shut for two weeks. When at the end of that time she opened her eyes again, she did not recognize any objects, but, ‘the more she now directed her gaze upon everything about her, the more it could be seen how an expression of gratification and astonishment overspread her features; she repeatedly exclaimed; “Oh, God! How beautiful!”‘
Dillard writes of how, under the influence of von Senden’s book, her vision is affected for weeks. She sees differently, as she looks differently: patterns of light and texture appear to her, what is hidden reveals itself under the intensity of her gaze. She discovers, too, what comes when she loses her focus, when she sees without agenda, when she allows her eyes to blur. “When I see this way,” she writes, “I see truly.”
“But,” she goes on to observe, “I can’t go out and try to see this way. I’ll fail, I’ll go mad.
All I can do is try to gag the commentator, to hush the noise of useless interior babble that keeps me from seeing just as surely as a newspaper dangled before my eyes. The effort is really a discipline requiring a lifetime of dedicated struggle; it marks the literature of saints and monks of every order East and West, under every rule and no rule, discalced and shod…
The secret of seeing is, then, the pearl of great price. If I thought he could teach me to find it and keep it forever I would stagger barefoot across a hundred deserts after any lunatic at all. But although the pearl may be found, it may not be sought. The literature of illumination reveals this above all: although it comes to those who wait for it, it is always, even to the most practiced and adept, a gift and a total surprise.
That’s the challenge, and the invitation, of lectio divina: to see at close range, to wait for what will unhide itself—in the text, in myself—when I draw near; and to allow space for surprise. And then to step back, and farther back still; to stand where I can take in the big picture once again, but differently this time, because I’ve caught a glimpse of what’s there in the artful layers. I’ve seen the textures left by the painter’s hand.
An Illuminated Joy
