Journal of Sacred Work

Today's meditation was written by Cathy Self, Senior Vice President for the Baptist Healing Trust.

    Vincent Van Gogh was a Dutch Post-Impressionist painter whose work has had a far reaching influence on 20th century art with its vivid colors and emotional impact.  In his paintings, Van Gogh invites us to see the light we dwell in.  Yet, over time, writes poet Marilyn McEntyre, "something in the light Van Gogh saw became unbearable." He seemd compelled in his later years to share his truth "slant," as Emily Dickison noted that with truth one must "dazzle gradually, or every man be blind."  The sorrows of Van Gogh's solitude, the episodes of derangement, and finally his suicide infuse his story with what some have called a tragic sense of life. McEntyre has shared reflections on the work of Van Gogh. In her thoughts on his painting "Entrance to the Public Gardens in Arles (Van Gogh, 1888), she writes:

We do what we can to domesticate

the rioting color, sweep the walkways

down to a uniform yellow and circle

flower and foliage with iron wrought

in their image.  We make spaces for sitting,

paths for solitude, gateways that mark what we leave,

what we enter.  We shape the wide that stirs us despite

ourselves into troubling confluent memories of

something older and darker where once we were lost

in the middle of life’s way.

McEntyre suggets something mighty and rich with spiritual vitality fell when Van Gogh died.  What he left us cost him "not less than everything."  McEntyre writes "Van Gogh's story still has a place in the linage of seers, mystics, poets, and priests who have attempted to mediate what comes to them in moments of greatest attunedness and make it available to the eyes and ears of others who are finding their way out of Plato's care. We are called by the Light into the light we can't yet bear without the shades and protections of mud, mortar, wood, canvas, and color." But isn't this true of every one of us?  Doesn't every life lived cost us "not less than everything?" Don't we each hold a mighty and rich spiritual vitatlity? 
 

Van Gogh's eyes, his heart, like those of the patients we serve and the ones we give care to, give us the opportunity to look again and see in a new light.  Each of us touches the other in ways that bend light and offer the possibility of healing, hope, Light, and Love.  May we see today the color of light, of love, of double rainbows in our every encounter.