At first I found myself turning to regular spiritual disciplines to escape the emotional pain I experienced in the leadership roles I had inhabited for most of my adult life and to relieve the depression and anxiety I had experienced since youth. But, in time, I realized that spiritual practices are not intended to relieve our stresses so that we can simply return (unchanged) to the behaviors and habits that deplete us. Spiritual practices are ends in themselves; properly speaking, the spiritual life constitutes the living of life.

Meditation, prayer, and contemplation, the practices of solitude and silence, opened my eyes to a peace (what our Heidelberg Catechism refers to as “comfort,” and what the Christian Desert Fathers and the Stoics before them referred to as “equanimity”) that I had never before experienced. I found a ready audience for teaching various practices of spirituality some years ago. But, more recently, as we entered the pandemic the demand for writing and teaching about contemplation and meditation only increased, especially as people found themselves in a forced isolation (which is only externally similar to solitude).

In recent years, and particularly as the pandemic deepened, I also found myself wondering if perhaps my work as a visual artist might reflect what I had discovered in meditation and contemplation, if perhaps viewers might find in my paintings a place to rest their eyes and their minds. Painting had become for me a spiritual exercise, a sort of participation with the God who is Love in the mystery of creation, what the medieval theologian Duns Scotus referred to as becoming “co-lovers with God” (“condiligentes Deo”). It has not always been so, however.

My work as a painter stands in the broad tradition of American Abstract Expressionism (influenced by artists such as Robert Rauschenberg, Jackson Pollock, Hans Hofmann, Jasper Johns and Mark Rothko), and I confess that many of my paintings over the years were intended to provoke reactions more than to evoke responses.

I think that abstract expressionism “works” best when it first resists the viewer, and only then encourages the viewer to draw closer; my work, however, sometimes only pushed the viewer away without giving thought to a longer deeper engagement. I remember, for example, an artist friend in Austin, Texas, a muralist who produced large canvases for corporate clients, who came by to view one of my paintings one day. This was over fifteen years ago. I had just finished the painting, and was eager to get his critique. Standing before the stark grays, blacks and blood reds of the painting, which included an equally stark stenciled message, I said to my friend, “I’m trying to strip away any vestige of sentiment.” To which my friend responded, “You nailed that, baby.” A colleague in ministry upon viewing that same painting was so shocked he said, “You don’t believe what your painting says, do you?”

One of my paintings from this same period even sent a gallery owner dashing to her desk to retrieve her inhaler. While I was pleased that the painting was un-ignorable, I had mixed feelings about provoking my friend’s asthmatic attack.

Again, these things happened before my life and imagination began to shift. In fact, I’m not sure I was aware for some time just how much the practices of meditation and contemplation were affecting my painting (or probably my life itself). As Zen Master Suzuki Roshe once said of spiritual practices, they work best slowly over a long period of time, when they soak into us, drenching us thoroughly, like the affect of a constant mist in a long walk.

I suspect that a visit to the Rothko Chapel in Houston, Texas, did as much as anything to influence the direction of my work, that and, of course, what I now believe was the gradual improvement in my emotional and spiritual health. I began to explore how my paintings might reflect the deep beauty of the world in a manner that invites us to see through this natural encounter the being in which or in whom we can find rest.

In both Western and Eastern traditions of spiritual wisdom there is a sense that beyond all the variety of created things there lies the Eternal.

This is expressed, of course, in the Western philosophical traditions through the various forms of Platonism and Neo-Platonism which have influenced so much Christian thought and mysticism over the centuries, although I would argue that certain Eastern approaches, for example, as in classical Taoism, of knowing “the One” (i.e., the unutterable Tao) through “the Ten Thousand Things” (i.e., all that exists in time and space) represent even more helpful ways to conceive this experience. The idea is that everything we can see and touch and experience through our senses arises only to pass away. But there is that which does not pass away, that “being within being” in which we may find rest.

In the next blog (“Spirituality in Pursuit of the Sublime”) I will explore one way in which the arts have thought of this human yearning for the eternal in the midst of the created world. But today I simply want to demonstrate how, in my own approach to painting, I have attempted to allow visual art to provide a physical space for contemplation.

Figure 1. 1. “From a Distance”
Oil and cold wax on framed canvas
48”x60”