Finding our Center
“Jesus took a child and put him in the midst of them.”
Missionary-artist Scott Rayl specializes in imaging Biblical scenes contextualized to the traditional artistic idiom of cultures from around the world. Here, his depiction of Jesus and the children takes on a Thai aesthetic.
The juxtaposition of the English words with the oriental vibe is immediately arresting, and undoubtedly, one could stir up a whole host of critical questions — and associated passionate opinions — about “authenticity” and “appropriation.” But let us consider these to be a reflection of arguments that the disciples were indulging before the scene depicted, where in Jesus took that little child, and put him in the center of focus. Rayl’s work is rooted in a double or even triple devotional attention: first to the scene and the subject he depicts, second, to the iconographic tradition he is trying to indwell, and third, to the material reality and physical process involved in his craft.
It is not wholly wrong, in interpreting Rayl’s project, to wonder about the power relations between cultures and traditions reflected and concealed in this artifact. Jesus himself seems to be concerned with such dynamics. At the same time, however, he wholly subverts them. In directing our attention to the child, he points us towards the powerless, inviting us to seek and to find him in the periphery and among the outsiders. Rayl points to the possibility of this project: even if, at the same time, he indulges in a contextual method that might be rendered problematic.
His manner of life is unlike that of others, and his ways are strange.
— Protest of the Reprobate (Wisdom 2:15)
Seventeenth Sunday after Pentecost
Texts for This Week
Prayer
O Lord, you have taught us that without love, all our deeds are worth nothing: Send your Holy Spirit and pour into our hearts that most excellent gift of charity, the true bond of peace and of all virtues, without which whoever lives is counted dead before you; grant this for the sake of your Son Jesus Christ, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever.
It behoveth us to glory in the Cross of our Lord Jesus Christ …
The Men and Boys Choir of Grace Cathedral in San Francisco sing the beloved him of the emanant and learned John Bowring, “In the Cross of Christ I Glory,” to TOMTER, the unsettling tune that Bruce Neswick lately composed to accompany the text. The lyrics of the hymn are rich, and invite contemplation: that the light and mellifluous tune which usually accompanies the text (RATHBUN) fails to carry the depth and solemnity of the text is attested by the sheer number of alternative arrangements easily found among recent performances.
Neswick’s tune is subtle in its brilliance, and unfortunately neglected. The key change in the middle of the verse — an odd device, reflective of the paradox of the Cross as both instrument of death and tree of life; both “glory” and “towering o’er the wrecks of time” — make it quite difficult for congregational singing, despite the fact that it listens like the best of old English hymnody.
The hymn is all the more appropriate in that we’re within the fall season of the Cross: September 14th marking the Feast of the Exultation of the Holy Cross, which boasts — as some of its proper liturgical material — echoes of the Passion liturgies of Holy Week. These days turn, and the Church reverberates with the ancient strains of the Nos Autem, or Fortunitus’s Vexilla regis. Something stirs in the deep silence of our grey empty churches. Stat Crux, dum volvitur orbis, as the Carthusians used to say: The world goes on spinning, but the Cross stands still.
