Mercy, not Sacrifice
“For I desire steadfast love and not sacrifice, the knowledge of God rather than burnt offerings.”
This is a self-portrait of the 20th C French Surrealist painter, Rene Magritte, titled “The Son of Man” (1946), and one of his most iconic paintings. There is, overall, an air of realism to the image. A man in a bowler hat and well-styled but slightly oversized suit stands on a bridge, in front of a grey and somewhat boring background. There’s really nothing remarkable about the image at all … except that his face is almost entirely obscured by an apple, floating in midair.
The image can’t help but bring to mind the temptation in the garden, and how sin obscures us from seeing one another truly and fully. But we are also struck by the Biblical resonances of the title: “Son of Man” is, of course, a Christological designation, charting first to Daniel (7:13), and frequently taken by Jesus as a self-designation. Does Magritte mean to imply that our vision of the Son of Man is obscured by sin? Or emphasize the immanence of the Son of Man within our humanity? Or does he mean to subvert the title altogether, and return it to its humanistic origins? The image, in its frustrating simplicity, raises all of these questions, but it does not answer any of them.
Magritte’s surrealism is consistently marked with this kind of simple but playful paradoxical character. Here, for instance, is his depiction of “The Human Condition” (1933). It looks, at first glance, like a painting concealing of a landscape, concealing the landscape behind the painting. But upon further consideration, the viewer realizes that, in fact, the whole image is a painting. The recursion invites us to reflect on the nature of reality, representation, and truth: indeed, it opens a “window” on a different way of seeing and inhabiting the world.
He achieves something very similar with his 1929 painting, appropriately titled “The Treachery of Images.” “This is not a pipe,” reads the inscription … on a painting of a pipe. It’s not a pipe, because it is an image of a pipe, a representation, and not the thing itself — a basic reality we easily brush aside in everyday thinking and speaking.
Our Scriptures for this week call us to a similar shift in our way of thinking. We hear in Hosea a very carefully crafted scheme of repentance, which sounds quite plausible as actual repentance, if you ignore the larger flow of thought. But these little scheming sacrifices are not enough, nor can they ever be. We are invited to something deeper: to faith, to a full-being cast of ourselves upon the mercies of God, that shifts our entire interior landscape, and opens before us new possibilities — new ways of perception, and new ways of being in the world.
Whoever offers me a sacrifice of thanksgiving honors me, and to him who orders his way aright will I show the salvation of God.
— Psalm 50:24
Second Sunday after Pentecost
Texts for This Week
Prayer
Grant, O Lord, that the course of this world may be so peaceably ordered by your providence, that your Church may joyfully serve you in quiet confidence and godly peace; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever.
Into the Night
I’ve become quite taken lately with the songs of the indie-folk Catholic singer-songwriter Aly Aleigha, whose Visitation Song you may remember from it’s feature for last week’s Feast. Besides giving us pleasant sounds to listen to, there’s a depth to the spiritual affections that she explores. She has a sensibility surrounding the heart, the nature of desire, and the great deep mystery of the Divine that speaks to the rich interior motions of human experience. “You call me on again / And draw me out from private quarters of my soul / Where even I dare not go.”
Regardless of the attendant circumstances and the emotions that are stirred up when we find something tugging on that deepest and most hidden place within us, God indeed invites us to engage with him in these places…and it is in meeting him there that there we find an extraordinary lifecreating power and renewal.
If you’re enjoying Aly’s sound and mood as much as I am, I’d recommend also her songs, Desert Soil and Jealous Love.
The Reconciling Heart - A Meditation for Ordinary Time
What is the reconciling heart? The reconciling heart is aflame with faith. It burns with faith, not because it embraces counterfactuals or believes in spite of evidence, nor because it commits to a fantasy narrative or froths itself up with wishful thinking, but because it experiences, in its uttermost depths and essence, how deeply it is seen, known, loved, and forgiven. Transparent to such deep and such absolute love, it cannot help but become love itself. Every barrier, every boundary; every marker, every tribal distinction is erased to it. It loves all people — indeed, every created thing! — because it beats in time with the rhythms of the resistless and uncreated Love that is the source and summit of all Being. It remains small in itself, but boundless in its scope. It is circumscribed in its presence, but unlimited in its benevolence. It navigates this world like every other creature, subject to all the ambiguities and ambivalences, all the terrible and tragic limitations of our sad mortal estate. But it blooms with hope irrepressible, because it knows so fully, beyond all doubt or discussion, that God in Christ Jesus is reconciling all things to himself, not counting our sins against us: and its own presence to and participation in this beautiful ultimacy, is for to delight in this ever-unfolding divine work, and not accomplish it.
