Sunday: Week 3 in Lent Year B

Lent for Everyone
Mark Year B
WEEK 3: SUNDAY...

...A couple of years ago I found myself in New York at the time when the Museum of Modern Art was hosting an exhibition of Claude Monet’s ‘Waterlily’ paintings. I hadn’t realized how enormous they were, or just how abstract the shapes and the colours would seem. And I had forgotten – it was a long time since I’d been to an Impressionist exhibition – the extent to which the extraordinarily fine detail of Monet’s painting, the individual brushstrokes and tiny little gobbets of paint here and there, were almost incomprehensible when seen close up (you could walk right up to within a few inches of the paintings), but then, when seen from eight or ten feet back, would make the whole thing spring to life, a life you couldn’t see when you were too near. The fascinating thing to me, as a writer, was the way in which the painter could not possibly have seen the whole effect while painting the tiny, almost microscopic, sections. Yet he must have had the whole thing in mind all the time. He must have been fully aware of the larger shape, the balance of the whole thing. He must have known (instinctively? Or from painstaking study and practice? Or both?) what effect the tiny details would have when he stepped back again. Perhaps great art is always like that: the power and sweep of the larger imaginative vision, well served by the fastidious attention to detail.

I have that same sense as I stand back and admire this Psalm, which no less a critic than C. S. Lewis described as the finest poem in the world. You can see why. Read it quickly through, and, instead of just thinking about the meaning of the individual words, look at the shape of the whole thing...

Taken from Lent for Everyone Mark Year B by Tom Wright