God's Unlikely Beauty

Angels, dragons, twigs, flowers, and dogs. These are a few of the subjects you’ll find in the fantastic Pre-Raphaelite drawings and watercolours exhibition at the Ashmolean. It was with this in mind that I wanted to share a little Pre-Raphaelite drawing by Edward Burne-Jones. He made it for a friend’s daughter, Katie Lewis, and posted it to her in 1883. She was 5, and Burne-Jones’ many grandfatherly letters to her are joyful and witty. Lewis was both joyful and infamous. Oscar Wilde was a friend of the Lewis family too. He wrote to Katie’s mother Elizabeth about this unique girl: if ‘she has ceased to be the modern Nero and is now angelic…I no longer adore her: her fascinating villainy touched my artistic soul.’

Burne-Jones’ letters to Katie are playful yet profound. He longs for art to be a utopian portal. It’s not so much that he urgently wishes to escape the world, but to enter more deeply into its beauty. In attempting to join the world of art, the artwork itself is destroyed, and the painter is disorientated, perhaps even ashamed of his presumption. And yet Burne-Jones is right about both things: that the artwork is chemicals, colours, and canvas, and that beauty does provide a portal to a better world, not only aesthetically but sacramentally. And, whether he was really confident in this or not, Burne-Jones had already joined the world of art, and already lived within the sacred heart of God’s own beauty.

In Burne-Jones’ struggle we may see something of the mystical union between all things, earthly and divine, that the writer and theologian Evelyn Underhill knew we all had access to, and that we all could find in everyday life. This year is the centenary of her lectures in theology at Harris Manchester College, which made her the first outside woman to lecture in religion at Oxford. She says that beauty brings ‘an almost agonising sense of revelation…as if a hidden directive power, personal, living, free, were working through circumstances and often against our intention or desire; pressing us in a certain direction, and moulding us to a certain design.’

In our Eucharist, we offer what we can – bread and wine, the work of human hands - to God’s glory in a cycle of mutual love beyond language. Beauty is part of this. And it can confront us with truths we need to learn. The black, gay American artist Kehinde Wiley’s stained glass celebrating black people bodies forth the radiant possibilities of anti-racism, giving us glimpses of a more just world in light of Black Lives Matter. Ric Stott’s image of the Blessed Virgin Mary and the infant Christ in which the Madonna wears the Pride Flag as her mantle. The heartfelt tenderness of Benedict Romaine’s black Madonna and Child in the chapel at Westcott House. We can live artfully, too. It is not a quest for perfection, but for authentic love. Duchess Milan, a trans woman, put it like this: ‘Faults, flaws, wishes, all of it…What we do have, we can polish. We can polish it, honey, till it blinds them.’

Surely a shrub cannot give us an ‘agonsing sense of revelation’, can it? Jesus’ exaggerated imagery of birds nesting in the shade, supported by capacious branches, is an appealing fantasy, but it doesn’t really happen, at least not for mere mustard seeds, and the crowd around Jesus knew this too. Jesus and his listeners also knew something our passage from the Hebrew Bible tells us: God’s promise to Israel in the book of Ezekiel. The prophet’s imagery is a promise of pure vitality emerging from raw and brutal destruction. The people of God are compared to a flourishing tree, huge and glorious. It is no mustard seed. It is vast. Its branches will provide shelter for ‘every kind of bird’, and ‘All the trees of the field shall know that I am the Lord.’ The green tree may die, the dead tree may flourish. All is within God’s power. And it is not something that any of us can do ourselves. This is not an exploitative power to which God’s children are subjected. It is the way, the truth, and the life because its foundation is love alone. It is the power with which Jesus says that he is the true vine, and the light of the world. Jesus takes that tree, and makes the metaphor strange, giving it life again in an unpredictable and provocative way.

Imagine that you’re awake early. It’s 4.30am. It’s still dark. You got dressed around 3.30, ate what could plausibly be breakfast, and went out into central London, heading for Trafalgar Square. Entering the building, all those rooms of refulgent paintings, from Botticelli’s saints to Turner’s clouds, have yet to be illuminated. They won’t greet today’s flow of visitors for a few hours yet. You are in a room with one painting. It’s small, hinged, and glowing with uncanny radiance. There are blue-winged angels – lots of them – alongside saints and kings. There is a white hart with a golden crown, its legs gently tucked underneath its soft belly. Docile and gentle, it is a symbol of King Richard II, for whom this luminous altarpiece was made.

It is simultaneously dazzling and serene. You are so close to it. It is overwhelmingly intimate. It is 4.30am. It is dark. Everything is ready. Equipment is tested, sound levels checked, and something begins. The Wilton Diptych, full of life, yet wildly still, is the epicentre of a new composition. It inspires new music that flows through the air, shifting molecules, enfolding you and the few beating hearts gathered in this room. The piece, with its long, slow, meditative phrases, creates attentive tensions with immersive verve. After a few minutes, though you could have been there for days or years, this golden experience draws to a close. You walk out of the gallery, into Trafalgar Square. It’s 5.30. The sun begins to rise, touching every surface. The air shimmers.

This really happened. The National Gallery commissioned a new piece from composer Nico Muhly, recorded in the hush of the gallery’s dark quiet. You can listen to it online – it’s called Long Phrases for the Wilton Diptych. The experience was, and is, an ineffable encounter not just with the Wilton Diptych, or the music, but the intangible beauty of God.

Is that mustard seed like an alluring canvas, an altarpiece, or a musical phrase? The mustard seed in Jesus’ parable is an unlikely candidate for a metaphor that brings us into God’s kingdom, as if we were frail birds with our anxiously preened plumage nesting in the embrace of its majestic branches. When Jesus chooses this tiny, ugly thing as his opening gambit, we can dare to hope that in this sacred image there is the promise of light. The true light that touches every surface. God’s unlikely beauty is here. With us. The air shimmers. Amen.