Description
Imagining the Lectionary: Pentecost Mashup
Reflection accompanying images:
“Can these dry bones live”, “Creator spirit”, “Spirit 1” and “Spirit 2”
Can these dry bones live This ancient question, arising out of the harrowing history of God's people in Exile and voiced by God through the spirituality of the prophet Ezekiel, (see Ezekiel 37:1-14) is raw, edgy, uncomfortable and stark. It quite deliberately tests faith-imagination to the full and asks that trust in God is put right on the line. Taken in context it is fundamentally a question concerning expectation of what the Holy Spirit can and cannot do within the collective life of God's people. At heart it's a question about their nature rather than God's.
And time and again the answer we discover in the pages of Scripture to this question is yes. And that yes is grounded in the very nature of God as it is expressed through the creative Spirit of God.
All of the photographs in this post were taken in the Hepworth Museum in Wakefield and I use them to explore the ground for such trust as I have come to understand it through my own theological reflection. So the metaphor of the bones begs the question of the person standing in the background, looking from a distance at the arrangement of bones which forms one part of Heather and Ivan Morison's exhibit.
What is the relationship between the timeless promise of the inspirited dry bones and the life of the viewer What needs to happen for it to become real for them today How might they feel its truth within their own being and experience, given that the physical distance seen in the photograph is a pretty realistic cypher for the chasm-like metaphysical separation that currently exists between secular cognition and Christianity?
Continues...