Visions of Waiting

Back in November, parishioners from St James’s Piccadilly and St. Bart’s came together on Zoom for Art for Advent. The Reverend Dr Ayla Lepine and I spent a wonderful hour with our two congregations for conversation and meditations on Advent themes using four objects from museums in London and New York. One of the wonderful things about events like this is the opportunity to bring our two communities together as we continue to grow into this fruitful partnership. This is the second year we have done this and it is so much fun that I hope we can make it an annual event! You can watch the full video of the session here.

The works we looked at focused on four Advent themes: the patriarchs and matriarchs, the prophets, John the Baptist, and Mary. They reflect the sense of mystery and unexpected grace that permeates the season of Advent. We find these qualities in the stories and characters we encounter in our scripture readings over the course of these four Sundays. We walk in the footsteps of our ancestors in faith, the matriarchs and patriarchs. We hear the ancient call of the Hebrew prophets as they foretell the coming of the Lord. The strange figure of John the Baptist emerges from the wilderness to proclaim repentance. An angel announces to Mary the miraculous coming birth of a son. Advent is a holy time of watching and waiting and preparing as we look expectantly for the coming of God among us. It is an in-between space between the “already” and the “not yet.”

When we first look at these artworks, we tend to want to figure out what is going on in them, what is the story being told? Our eye naturally focuses on the actions of the characters and the details of the scene. Some of these subjects, like John the Baptist and Mary and Elizabeth, may be very familiar to you. Others are a bit more obscure, like Abraham and Melchizedek and Elijah in the wilderness. Looking again at the artworks Ayla and I selected for our session together, I am struck by the “in between” spaces in each of these compositions. The artists are telling us a story, but once you figure out what’s going on, you aren’t done looking! It’s time to go deeper, to spend more time looking, perhaps contemplating those empty spaces in between the figures that are, in fact, not empty at all. Like Advent itself, these spaces are pregnant with expectation.

Consider, for instance, the sculpture of John the Baptist holding a lamb. The gentleness of the image is not something that comes immediately to mind for me when I think of John the Baptist. We see his hair, the textures of the lamb’s fur, and this amazing exchange of gazes between the lamb – symbolizing Christ – and John. What is being communicated in that empty space between their eyes? What does their gaze tell us about the present and the future for both of them?

Or consider the exquisite painting of The Salutation / The Visitation by Evelyn De Morgan as Mary and Elizabeth, both of them pregnant, greet each other with news that must have been as bewildering as it was joyful. What is being suggested by the unequal stance of the two women as they reach out to each other and come to grips with these unexpected circumstances?

Finally, consider the extraordinary painting of Elijah in the Wilderness by Guercino. The prophet is seated awkwardly, twisting his body to gather up crumbs, his gaze firmly fixed on a raven delivering a clump of bread, a sign of God’s abundant provision.

In each of these works, we see artists trying to capture that ineffable sense of God’s presence through absence, using the space in between God (or God’s messenger) and the recipients of God’s grace as the inflection point.

If you weren’t able to join us in November, I hope you’ll take a look at the video online and see how it might inform your Advent practice this year. If you were there, I invite you to go back and look at the works again. What do you see differently this time? What do you make of the empty spaces? What do you discern in the gazes exchanged? Are these expressions of surprise? Astonishment? Excitement? Awe? Love? Something else? For me, the most profound revelation of these images is the way that they express the expectation and unseen grace of Advent, made manifest in the space in between.