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LentArt: Black, Black on Wine

I'll keep this short, because there are some times when there are no suitable words. 

I love the sermons by Dr. S.M Lockridge and Tony Campolo that assert that "It's Friday, but Sunday's coming!" But this is Saturday... And we do well not to leap over this dark day, especially in this lockdown season. The daily government briefings inevitably include someone asking "How long will this lockdown last?" We need to learn to sit in the moment.

As I write this the sun is shining outside and normally people would be streaming to beautiful locations to enjoy the weather this holiday weekend, but for the sake of everyone we need to stay, if not indoors, certainly within the limits assigned for us. As Christ was confined within the tomb. So in some ways the sunshine is at odds with the spiritual mood of this day. 


Much mosre in keeping is my #LentArt Post this Holy Saturday, and essentially the final #LentArt post for this year: Mark Rothko's "Black, Black on Wine." I can't begin to say that I always "get" Rothko. I sat in front of a couple last year in Seattle willing myself to understand them, but I couldn't. They didn't leave me feeling so dismissive as some of the other pieces on display, where I could feel my inner father looming up... especially one with a few pieces of badly welded metal against a painted backdrop, but I still went away feeling that I was missing something. Or maybe I'm simply very shallow.

That's also the way I feel when it comes to John O'Donohue at times. The Irish scholar, poet and mystic has been an inspiration to a number of my friends, both through his writings and, before his death, in person. I was late to the party, and frankly his writing doesn't do it for me. Again, I'm perhaps just too shallow...

But in this lockdown period many of those same friends have again been recommending the insights of O'Donohue and quoting him widely. And certainly his repeated refrain about slowing down has something to say to us in this time. So I thought I would give him another go, taking off my shelf the only O'Donohue I own, "Anam Cara" which I bought in Portland, Oregon, on the same trip that took me to Seattle last year. And early in that book he reminds us that
"we are children of the darkness. Your body and your face are formed first in the darkness of your mother's womb."

Which brings me to Rothko's "Black, Black on Wine" and Holy Saturday. 

Holy Saturday. 
A day of darkness. 
The light of the world snuffed out.

Some of the last light 
that penetrated Jesus' eyes 
carried the image of his mother.

The last thing he tasted was sour wine... 
wine, which we take 
in remembrance of his death.

Now he is dead. 
The light has gone. 
Imprisoned within a tomb. 

As it once was within the womb.
With his mother's wine-red blood 
coursing around him
the only colour penetrating 
the darkness of his forming eyes.

But there is hope within a womb.
Hope, not certainty, but hope.

What hope is there with a tomb?
The sure and certain hope of resurrection?
But he who raised others from the dead
is now dead himself.
"I am the resurrection and the life!"
He is dead.


It's a reflection with no prayer today. What's the point of prayer when God is dead?
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