Camel Through the Eye of a Needle Bible Art
Poem: "Advent" past Suzanne Underwood Rhodes
Through the needle's eye
the rich man came
squeezing through stars of razor light
that pared his torso down to thread.
Gravity crushed his heart's chime
and his jiff that breathed out worlds
now flattened as burn down between walls,
the impossible slit stripped him
admitting him
to stitch the human breach.
This poem was outset published in What a Light Thing, This Rock (Sow's Ear Press, 1999) and is used here by permission of the author.
My inquiry interests have to do mainly with art'southward theological potential and its power to, equally Walter Brueggemann puts it, "disclose" truths that are "closed" by prose. I love how it often surprises, and how information technology tin brand connections I would accept never thought to make myself.
Suzanne Underwood Rhodes's verse form "Appearance" demonstrates these values magnificently. Its topic is the Incarnation. Merely her mooring point is not John 1 or Luke ane–2 or Philippians 2 or any other scripture text traditionally associated with the doctrine. Instead she draws on the famous aphorism of Jesus that'due south recorded in Matthew 19:24: "Information technology is easier for a camel to get through the middle of a needle than for a rich person to enter the kingdom of God."
In this Gospel interaction, Jesus is explaining how terribly hard information technology is for wealthy people to enter sky because they tend to cling tightly to their earthly wealth rather than to God; they let it make claims on them, and they trust in its promises, to the neglect of the claims and promises of God. While the needle saying, in context, pertains to homo passing from earth to heaven, Rhodes turns it on its head to advise the movement of God from sky to earth. A seeming impossibility—infinity becoming finite, God becoming man. But "with God, all things are possible" (Matt. nineteen:26). To salve us, he would give upwards all the riches of heaven, assuming the function of a servant and ultimately giving upward his very life.
Rhodes uses harsh, uncomfortable words—"squeezing," "razor," "pared," "crushed," "flattened," "stripped"—to convey a sense of compression into human being flesh. God's jiff, once so powerful and expansive that it brought the universe into existence, is now, in the person of the Son, walled in past a rib cage and dependent on oxygen. His heart pumps actual blood. Thus pared downwardly to thread, he slips through the needle "to stitch the human alienation," to repair what we have torn through our disobedience. Severed from God no longer, nosotros are held together with him past Christ himself.
Musical composition: "Every bit by Burn between Walls" by Joshua Stamper
The evocative imagery of this poem has inspired artists in other media to reply in kind. One of them is composer Joshua Stamper, who, commissioned in 2014 by City Church Philadelphia, wrote a four-and-a-half-minute experimental jazz piece for chamber orchestra titled "As by Burn down between Walls."
It starts with small-scale chords on the pianoforte, floating around ethereally. So a violin tremolo kicks in (suggestive of the "razor light"), and other sharp bowing techniques ("par[ing] his body down"). Then soulful, wordless vocals. And then a staccato rhythm played on the mellotron, and percussion. Brass too. Information technology's a wonderfully wrought piece of music, a soundscape of the Incarnation, inclining the ear dorsum toward Rhodes's words and the heart to the grand story of scripture.
Painting: Through the Needle's Center the Rich Man Came past Grace Carol Bomer
Suzanne Rhodes is a friend of visual artist Grace Carol Bomer'due south, who has a studio practice in Asheville, North Carolina. In 1993, Bomer was invited past the Asheville Art Museum to showroom eight of her paintings for a Christmas show. Through the Needle's Eye the Rich Homo Came, inspired by Rhodes's "Appearance," is one of those eight.
About it, Bomer says,
The Christ of Christmas is God incarnate, the focal point or fulcrum of history. To evidence this glorious Incarnation, I chose to paint a piercing 5 (fulcrum) of light rending textile (canvas on wood). The torn sheet symbolizes the veil of the temple. . . .
It was my personal challenge to evidence in painting that Christ is God, Spirit and mankind, in a style that would non be trite and sentimental. The Renaissance nativities are infected with beautiful Platonic realism, suited for Christmas card sentimentality. I feel they exercise not adequately exalt the "mystery hidden for ages," the Christ of power and glory. Jesus Christ is Spirit and mankind, Son of God and Son of Man. Reality is both "abstract" and "realistic." So besides, art must seek to find this mysterious balance in social club to proclaim the gospel. Fine art totally divested of realism, like Abstruse Expressionism, becomes meaningless. Fine art must proclaim cosmos, fall, and redemption. I would like the poetic nuances in my work to stimulate the imagination to "see" in the abstract painting the spiritual truths that cannot be painted realistically.
In this piece there are suggestions of blood on doorways, symbolizing a Passover fulfilled, as Christ pushes open the door separating God and man.
So this painting integrates the coming downward with the at-i-ing that happens at the cross, the physical tear of the sail alluding simultaneously to the "human alienation" of Rhodes'due south verse form and the tearing of the temple veil, which symbolizes humanity'south reconciliation to God. Birth and decease are wrapped up in a single epitome, equally both are key to Christ'due south conservancy project.
Through the Needle'south Center is ane of Bomer's early works, just she has a whole series she calls Incarnation, which can be viewed on her website at https://gracecarolbomer.com/department/300298-Abstract-Incarnation.html.
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See how a poet'south imagination and arts and crafts can unfold the beauty and wonder of a heady doctrine with such concision? In Literature: Construction, Sound, and Sense, Laurence Perrine defines verse as "a kind of language that says more and says information technology more intensely than does ordinary linguistic communication" (509). That's just what Suzanne Underwood Rhodes does in "Advent." And that intense language of hers has inspired works of musical and visual art that explore fifty-fifty further what it means that the Son of God, the "Rich Man" from heaven, constricted himself for our sakes, becoming impossibly modest, taking up residence in a virgin's dark womb, in humanity's dark world, and then that he could stitch back together our ruptured relationships with the Begetter and with 1 some other.
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Source: https://artandtheology.org/2018/12/08/the-rich-man-who-passed-through-the-eye-of-a-needle/
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