every common bush afire with God: Genesis 1-8

For thirty-one weeks our church will be reading together The Story of the Bible. We'll be soaking in the major narrative that weaves all the smaller stories together from Genesis to Revelation in all of its beautiful, grand, surprising, mysterious, conflicting, sometimes-romantic, often-bizarre, prosaic and poetic splendor. As part of my job as Worship & Arts Director at Union Center, I've been researching the way the deep truths (or magic, if you're C.S. Lewis) of the written Word of God informs art. In other words, how do humans try to make sense of the truths stitched into the seams of the universe through their art, literature, music, poems, architecture, exploration, operas, dance, plays and so on?

There is no way to collect all these works into one place; most certainly not in the brief seventy-five minutes we spend together each week as a corporate assembly. Consider the posts here each Sunday a cutting room floor of sorts. A tiny sampling of the age-old journey of artists influenced by the biblical narrative.

p.s., I hope you'll be watching for these lower-case i incarnations of truth in the art you encounter in your own journey. Feel free to share them in the comment section!

Week One: Genesis 1-8

Garden of Earthly Delights

Heironymus Bosch (Madrid, 1503-1504)

oil-on-wood triptych

Themes: human origins and purpose, collective longing for Utopian-ideals, inability to achieve those ideals, shattering of relationship, jealousy, murderous rage, cosmic disaster

[I]n his hand

He took the golden compasses, prepared

In God's eternal store, to circumscribe

This universe, and all created things...

This God the Heav'n created, thus the earth,

Matter unformed and void. Darkness profound

Covered th'abyss; but on the wat'ry calm

His brooding wings the Spirit of God outspread...

(John Milton, Paradise Lost)

Literature:

Canterbury Tales, Geoffrey Chaucer (14th century)
Paradise Lost, John Milton (1667)
East of Eden, John Steinbeck (1952)
The Similarion, J.R.R. Tolkien
The Magician's Nephew, C.S. Lewis
Many Waters, Madeleine L'Engle

The Expulsion from the Garden
Massacio
fresco, 1425

Because the Holy Ghost over the bent

World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright

wings.

(Gerard Manley Hopkins, God's Grandeur)

Poetry:

The Epic of Gilgamesh, (ancient Babylonian poem)
Divine Comedy, Dante Alighieri (1308 - 1321)
The Pulley, George Herbert
Kubla Khan, Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1797)
God's Grandeur, Gerard Manley Hopkins (1877)

The Deluge
Gustave Dore'
illustration, 1866

It hath the primal eldest curse upon't

A brother's murder.

(Shakespeare, Hamlet, act 3, scene iii, lines 40-1)

Theatre:

The Tempest, The Merry Wives of Windsor, Hamlet, King Lear, Othello, The Merchant of Venice (William Shakespeare, 1564-1616)
Noye's Fluddle, Benjamin Britten, 1957, opera

Babel Revisited
Julee Holcombe
digital photographic composition of modern-day skyscrapers, 2004

Oh, Oh Deep water
Black, and cold like the night
I stand with arms wide open
I've run a twisted mile
I'm a stranger
in the eyes of the maker.
(Daniel Lanois, The Maker)

Music: