Scripture – a privileged place of meeting: Spirit made visible

There lives the dearest freshness, deep down things.

Gerard Manley Hopkins

We are not given our eyes just to stop us from bumping into things.
Stanley Spencer

Word is what is said, Spirit is the saying.
Michael Downey

Image: Filippo Rossi, Hidden Streets 12, 2021

Think about Spirit as wind, air, breath. Pay attention to your breathing…and reflect on God breathing in and through you.

“Prayer…is God’s breath in man returning to its birth”
George Herbert

Filippo Rossi (Italian, 1970–), “*Holy Spirit*” (triptych), 2011. Mixed media, acrylic, gold leaf, bitumen, and brown wax on extruded polystyrene, left and right panels 120 × 120 cm, central panel 190 × 120 cm. Collection of Mount Tabor Ecumenical Centre for Art and Spirituality, Barga (LU), Italy.

When we talk about Spirit, we are not speaking of the immaterial as opposed to the material. We are not putting the interior and invisible over the exterior and visible. Eugene Peterson laments that Spirit has “eroded into an abstraction”. Think about Spirit as the aliveness and energy of God. Spirit properly conveys life and living, as opposed to death.

Poetry creates a new possible world, a reality in which my human reality can also find itself: and inviting me into its world, the [poem] breaks open and extends my own possibilities.

Rowan Williams

Imagination is the creative task of making symbols, joining things together in such a way that they throw new light on each other and on everything around them. The imagination is a discovering faculty, a faculty for seeing relationships, for seeing meanings that are special; and even quite new.

Thomas Merton

Poetry, like art, is symbolic –

providing us the place for genuine encounter, revelation and transformation.

Think of the disposition necessary for any real engagement with art.

Time,

patience,

openness,

generosity of spirit.

The Scriptures asks of us nothing less.

Nothing is needed more today than a renewed, contemplative and imaginative way of being with the text of the Scriptures. Too easily they are used to divide or to prove, when their intent is to open us up, challenge and change us. We spend a lot of time asking whether the Scriptures are true and fail to hear Jesus’ question: “But are you true”? The Scriptures invites us into a love which is nothing less than the community-of-love we call God.

Filippo Rossi (1970) has been exhibiting his works since 1992. After having trained in the School of Life Drawing at the Academy of Fine Arts in Florence, he graduated in Art History at the University of Florence. Since 1997 he has been teaching Studio Art at Stanford University. He collaborates with the art historian Timothy Verdon. He has been exploring themes of Christian art for over 20 years. For more information visit Magnifice.