Innocent Eyes
A nun looks for spiritual wisdom through the eyes of artists
Friends,
Sister Wendy Beckett spent most of her days living as a hermit in a trailer at a small convent in Norwich. In her spare time, she wrote and taught herself art history by flipping through a massive collection of postcards sent by friends and family. Nun and art lover, she still managed to avoid the traps of over-theologizing art or hunting for Christ in every painting. She loved whatever humans made, and she approached painting and sculpture with openness and deep curiosity.
When she talks about artworks in her BBC show, it starts to feel like she’s talking about a friend more than an object. There’s hospitality in her approach, a generous love of people that drives her interests, and you don’t have to believe in God to be inspired by her approach to the arts. Recovering “innocent” eyes, learning how to navigate suffering, cultivating an inner life…these are things we all need. That’s the work of soulmaking, of growing a deep humanism in a fractured world.
I've transcribed a portion of her interview with Bill Moyers below. While she's usually talking about specific paintings, this interview gives us a window into why she likes art in the first place and how art and prayer weave together in the same path.
Take care,
Michael
Bill Moyers: So it is in this wondrous sense of innocence that you look at this painting without a previous fixation?
Sister Wendy: Yeah. It's very difficult to do, because our eyes are not innocent. But we must hope to make them so. We must refuse labels and prejudices, just try to see, as a child sees.
Bill Moyers: And a child sees how?
Sister Wendy: A child sees innocently, a child sees what's there. It doesn't see with labels and prejudices, because it doesn't know about them. It just knows there's a thing. But, of course, the child hasn't got the capacity to respond at great depth to the thing, which we have. So, we try to get the look of the child that sees what's really there, and the response of the adult that sees from a depth of experience and has, if they're fortunate, words in which to make that experience audible for other people.
Bill Moyers: I'm willing to surrender, but how do I train my eye to look?
Sister Wendy: You train it by doing it. It's like prayer: how do you learn to pray? By praying. How do you learn to look? By looking.
Bill Moyers: Well, and seeing what?
Sister Wendy: Looking and waiting, and going away, and coming back and looking, and waiting. And if you've done that with sufficient earnestness, and nothing happens, no flowering within you, no sudden understanding that this is something magical and mysterious that you are now in contact with, then that picture isn't meant for you. Try again in a few years' time. Go to another one.
I was just thinking the other day, looking at postcards of Vermeer, a woman standing at the window. There is nothing happening. There is nothing there. Yet these are the most beautiful images imaginable. And you can see it. I think everybody, actually, sees immediately with Vermeer. But he is a perfect example of what art is meant to be, something that completely satisfies you the more you look at it.
Bill Moyers: What does, has art done for you, other than make you an international celebrity, which you didn’t want to be? What has art done for you? What has art done for you?
Sister Wendy: Well, I suppose it has given me enormous joy. It’s also increased my capacity to accept darkness and pain, and not be too bewildered by them. It has, I hope, made me a more sensitive and alert person. The one fatal thing is to be a zombie. I think we’re all in danger of living part of our lives on the zombie level. But I think art help ones to be perpetually there, as it were.
Bill Moyers: “There” is?
Sister Wendy: There, alert, constant.
Bill Moyers: In the moment?
Sister Wendy: Yes, in the moment, because God is coming every moment, but we’re not receiving Him every moment; of course, we’re not even noticing that He’s coming, we are drifting through. But you see in art you can't just drift, art is demanding of you, attention, and I would hope that it helps me to be a more attentive person all the way.
Bill Moyers: You said it has helped you see into darkness and sorrow. Does art sometimes tell us things we don't want to know?
Sister Wendy: Yes, I think that's very true. And that's why I don't like saying, “Art gives one great pleasure.” Of course, it does, but it gives one great pain, too...
Bill Moyers: You said in the book and on the air that all art that really draws us to look deeply at it is spiritual.
Sister Wendy: Yes.
Bill Moyers: In what sense?
Sister Wendy: Because it's going to deepen our awareness of the things that matter most. It's going to make us, to refer to what I said earlier, more a person of integrity, more true to my own essence, than I would have been without this encounter. It's like meeting a great genius; just talking, even being in the presence of such a person, you feel enriched, enlightened. You're more than you were before you had that encounter. Well, that's what painting is, what it appears to be offering us: encounters. Encounters with greatness.
Bill Moyers: Is religious art synonymous with spiritual?
Sister Wendy: No. Not at all.
Bill Moyers: Never?
Sister Wendy: Religious art can be spiritual. But it can be very dull. Religious art works on an iconography. And, it works to the extent that you believe in it. If you believe in this image, then the image will remind you of your faith and it will have a religious effect.
Bill Moyers: It is a vehicle to God, for the devout?
Sister Wendy: Yes. Spiritual art will take you further than you knew you believed. It will take you into unchartered realms.
Bill Moyers: Where will it take you? Can you give an example?
Sister Wendy: The realm of your own spirit, which will be different for everybody.
Bill Moyers: And this has happened to you?
Sister Wendy: It could happen to anybody who dares to look seriously at great art. Paintings, sculpture, ceramic art, photography...
Bill Moyers: ...has a spiritual power to it?
Sister Wendy: Yes.
Bill Moyers: And that spiritual power is what?
Sister Wendy: The spiritual power is this ability to lift us out of the confines of our ego, out of the traps that many people are in. Their relationships, their jobs, their worries, mortgages, health. And there they go 'round in the cage. And art opens a door and takes you into something bigger than yourself, something immensely exhilarating and refreshing, so when you come back into your cafe, you know that's not all there is to life.
You know what Kenneth Clark used to say. Whenever he got deeply depressed, he'd go and look at something, some great work of art. And there it was, sailing through the centuries. He didn't use these words. These are my words. Untouched by all our littleness and our anxieties. And we're taken into that, not as an escape, but as a way of coming back into our anxieties, able to put them into perspective. Art is a great means of getting perspective on all that's worrying, depressing, constricting in your life...
Bill Moyers: Well, what did you mean when you said that sacred art is “the most intense communication of personal truth”?
Sister Wendy: Because it's the artist's personal truth confronting your personal truth. It it's great art, if its sacred art, the artist has managed to put their entire truth there in those images. And your truth encounters them, to the extend in which you allow it to. And so you return to yourself enriched by an encounter with a master's vision.
“Questions About Angels” by Billy Collins
Of all the questions you might want to ask
about angels, the only one you ever hear
is how many can dance on the head of a pin.
No curiosity about how they pass the eternal time
besides circling the Throne chanting in Latin
or delivering a crust of bread to a hermit on earth
or guiding a boy and girl across a rickety wooden bridge.
Do they fly through God's body and come out singing?
Do they swing like children from the hinges
of the spirit world saying their names backwards and forwards?
Do they sit alone in little gardens changing colors?
What about their sleeping habits, the fabric of their robes,
their diet of unfiltered divine light?
What goes on inside their luminous heads? Is there a wall
these tall presences can look over and see hell?
If an angel fell off a cloud, would he leave a hole
in a river and would the hole float along endlessly
filled with the silent letters of every angelic word?
If an angel delivered the mail, would he arrive
in a blinding rush of wings or would he just assume
the appearance of the regular mailman and
whistle up the driveway reading the postcards?
No, the medieval theologians control the court.
The only question you ever hear is about
the little dance floor on the head of a pin
where halos are meant to converge and drift invisibly.
It is designed to make us think in millions,
billions, to make us run out of numbers and collapse
into infinity, but perhaps the answer is simply one:
one female angel dancing alone in her stocking feet,
a small jazz combo working in the background.
She sways like a branch in the wind, her beautiful
eyes closed, and the tall thin bassist leans over
to glance at his watch because she has been dancing
forever, and now it is very late, even for musicians.Should this creepy search engine exist? (no. the answer is no)
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Ah, Michael! Such good words. "It's going to make us...more a person of integrity, more true to my own essence, than I would have been without this encounter."