For our 20th Anniversary my wife and I went to
New York City and indulged in a few of our favorite things. We ate good food, spent an evening at the
Metropolitan Opera, and immersed ourselves in art museums. My wife and I have the same approach to art
museums. Our pace is lugubrious; we
spend up to 10 or 15 minutes with a single painting, relating to it from
different distances and angles. Our
attitude is reverent and our experience is a quiet form of ecstasy, a communion
with God mediated by beauty. Just try to
pry me away from a Rothko.
What was new for us on this pilgrimage to MOMA was the
inability of our peers to also be present in the moment with the art. We were shocked by the number of people
recording the art with cameras and phones. There in front of Van Gogh’s “Starry Night” patron after patron stopped
only long enough to take a ‘selfie’* with the masterpiece. Others stalked the gallery and only observed
the painting through their view finders.
The new cultural practice on display seemed profoundly sad
to me. Why record your presence with
this great artistry if you were never present to it in the first place? The cultural practices of consumerism and
individualism had decidedly invaded the place. The point of viewing art had been transformed from a perspective of revelation from beyond ourselves that
draws us into a new space of thought, feeling, and spirit to a perspective of
documenting the fact that “I was present here,” and “I saw this” and
“I have this to take home.”
The goal was to take and to have. The significance came from showing I was
present to an absent audience.
Maybe I am a premature curmudgeon, but I found this behavior
appalling and deeply concerning. When a
man took video of Monet’s “Water Lilies” by panning across the room-sized
panels, I said to myself, “Do you know what you are missing?” Others in the room were slowed down and
almost forced to sit in awe of Monet’s rendering of time and eternity, heavens
and earth comingled on the radiant surface of his pond at Giverney.
The room with the “Water Lilies” was a thin place of
transcendent possibility. There is no
taking or having or inserting self, there is no capturing, not even in words or
music. There is experiencing, being present, being captured by the art and taken
away by it, beyond ourselves.
This is adoration. Adoration is a form of prayer where we are pulled from our
pre-occupation with self and occupied with love and awe for what gestures
toward God. In the Church of the Middle
Ages the consecrated bread and wine of communion were often reserved for
adoration and most regular folk only adored the host and did not consume it
all. Being in relationship with the gift
Christ gave – the gift of his life – was enough inspiration and nurture for the
adoring soul.
Now, this path of adoration was fairly alien to me until I
had my experience at MOMA, where taking and consuming had become the dominant
patterns of relating. It made me think;
what if adoration is good medicine for our consumption-sick souls and society? We certainly need alternative ways of
behaving that are not so fiercely desirous of satisfaction by possession and
which almost always cause us to feel emptier in the end.
There is that brief moment where taking and having give us a
great rush of pleasure. Our will to
power is effective and builds up our ego. Almost always the feeling wears off as one more form of false
transcendence. Indeed, the possessing
often becomes a burden or only is reactivated as a pleasure when another person
notices what we own and gives us a flash of pride.
Don’t take, don’t eat. Jesus says the opposite when he offers himself to us in the meal that
remembers his sacrifice for us. He says,
“Take, Eat, this is given for you.” We are blessed to take and eat every Sunday
and to be fed by Christ, reminded that our life is a gift given and not our possession. However, just as I am suspicious of middle
class/bourgeois folks claiming, “God is with me” in an easy way, I am
suspicious of folks addicted to consumption adding Christ to the list of things
we consume. What if the path and prayer
of adoration – not taking, not eating – could be a corrective spiritual path
for what ails us?
- The Rev. Jarrett Kerbel
