Guernica

Saturday 9 May 2009


Gestapo Officer [gesturing toward Guernica]:
Did you do this?

Picasso:
No, you did.

When we finally allow life to take us through the Paschal Mystery of passion, death, and resurrection, we will be transformed. At this stage we’ll have found the capacity to hold the pain, to enter into solidarity with it, not to fear it or hate it or project it onto other people.

Actually, it’s really God holding the pain in us, because the little self can’t do it. But the Big Self, God in us, can absorb it, can forgive it, can resolve it. We know it’s grace when we no longer need to hate or punish others, even in our mind. We know someone else is working through us, in us, in spite of us, and for us.

Our life is not our own henceforward. Now we draw from the Christ mystery, the Christ nature, the Christ source. Oh, we’ll regress; but when we’ve experienced our true self, who we are in Christ, we’ll know what’s really real.

Richard Rohr, from The Cosmic Christ



I am developing a fondness for colder weather, Picasso, and a willingness to hold my own evil. It sits alongside all of my good. I can admit to both.

I am maturing. It's miricoil :)

4 comments

  1. For some time, Guernica resided at MOMA in NYC and I used to visit it regularly. It is a huge and powerful piece.
    Yes, it is all a mystery within -- holding the evil and the good. Often is it difficult to discern which is which, I find. Wheat and weeds growing alongside one another.

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  2. I am maturing. It's miricoil :)

    cool beans Sue

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  3. One thing I have come to believe is this: God's not going to rescue us from everything bad...but the things he does not rescue us from, he grants us the strength to endure.

    And you know how I feel about winter. It's a mixed bag, but look for the light in the melancholy. There is art there.

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  4. Barbara - yeah, I totally am with you on it being unable to discern sometimes the wheat from the weeds. I have heard people talking about the whole tree of the knowledge of good and evil thing, and that this is the fruit of that, that we believe we can see what is good and what is bad very well, but in fact we are not as well-seeing as we would like to believe in that area. That is actually a comfort to me, once you get past the discomfort of it :)

    Kent - it is cool beans, isn't it :) Cool cocoa beans.

    Erin - damn right, sis. In fact, I think that whole "God is gonna rescue us from everything" type of thinking is a real big component of why everything is so fucked up in Christianity. We don't seem to be very good at co-existing alongside God in terms of believing that that means that we get to be much MORE human and ourselves than we would have been without God. We seem to sort of have this propensity withing Christendom to think it's either all God and none us, and it seems to be something entirely better and different than that.

    Yeah, winter. I am feeling inspired by it all, preparing myself for it. I have you partly to thank for that :)

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