The Sacrament of the Ordinary

One of my favourite painters is Caravaggio; whenever I am in Dublin, I always try and find time to sit for a few minutes in the National Gallery of Ireland and contemplate The Taking of Christ - an experience made all the more moving by seeing Caravaggio's self-portrait on the far right of the crowd; his face illuminated by a lantern, desperately straining to try and see Christ in the gathering darkness. He was a man so tortured and restless in real life and I am sure this is no artistic coincidence; his way of saying how he sincerely longed for God and yet felt so distant; a prisoner of his anger, pride and dissolute lifestyle. He was a man who painted with heavenly talent during the day, but squandered it at night in drunken brawls and vendettas that led to him murdering a man and going down to an early grave himself.

The Taking of Christ

I have spent an enjoyable time on holiday in recent years examining paintings like his Bacchus in the Uffizi in Florence. Is Caravaggio’s Sicilian friend Mario Minniti just modelling the god of wine or does the painting hint at something much deeper – the Eucharist; as a goblet of rich red wine is held out towards the viewer above the over-ripe fruit; symbol of the transience of life?

Bacchus

In June 2014 whilst on holiday in Rome, I bemused my children by visiting as many of his paintings as I could manage! Astonishing paintings like those in the Cerasi Chapel in Santa Maria del Popolo; The Crucifixion of St. Peter, where the weight of Peter’s cross is felt as his executioners hoist him aloft or The Conversion of St. Paul where the almost tangible solidity of the horse is contrasted by the heavenly light that has fallen on the spead-eagled St. Paul as his moment of conversion is internalised and he is caught up in ecstasy to the eternal sphere.

Crucifixion of St. Peter

What is it I like so much about Caravaggio's paintings? One reason is their almost photographic realism - the art critic and TV presenter, Andrew Graham Dixon in his excellent book, Caravaggio - A Life Sacred and Profane has pointed out that if Caravaggio was alive today, he would probably be a film director because of the radical use of light in his paintings, which are like freeze frame moments - his paintings are always full of latent action.

Conversion of St. Paul

But the other reason I am attracted to Caravaggio's paintings is their realism. As Graham - Dixon points out, you only have to compare the fanciful paintings of Caravaggio's rival Annibale Carracci - paintings like his Assumption of the Virgin in the same Cerasi Chapel, with it's contrived postures, characters who not placed in space and time, and who are adorned with lurid colours to see how radical Caravaggio was in the way he grounded his paintings in normal life. The sheet covering Bacchus' couch is grimy and revealing the ticking underneath; the feet of the executioner lifting St. Peter's cross are dirty; the imperfections in the flank of St. Paul's horse are lovingly recorded so that you feel you can almost feel it twitching beneath your hand.

Caravaggio did not dress up the characters in his paintings with a holy aura; with halos and rich clothes; he made them into ordinary people from the everyday Rome of the 16th Century that he lived in. He made the biblical stories take place in taverns among the poor and the working class. This scandalised the Church of his day who didnt want to see Jesus portrayed as a humble peasant mixing with the dubious dregs of society, but as a but a glorious and triumphant God suitable for Princes and Cardinals! But I am with Caravaggio, for the Kingdom of God is open to all and blessed are the poor, the hungry the persecuted and those who mourn.



Caracci's Assumption of the Virgin

 Which brings me to my favourite of Caravaggio's paintings; The Supper at Emmaus, painted in 1601, which hangs in the National Gallery in London. I have been thinking a lot recently about what we might call the Sacrament of the Ordinary. A sacrament is an outward sign of an invisible grace as I have said previously in this blog. For example, the seemingly ordinary bread and the wine that believers take at Communion is an outward symbol of the salvation and new life that was won for us on the cross by Christ. As the Christian writer Richard Foster points out "to speak of life as sacramental means that everything visible in some way points to the invisible - the constant upholding reality of eternal grace. The wind, a bird in flight or glass of water - the Spirit. A good meal - God's provision. The embrace of a loved one - God's love to us." And Foster goes on to say that “the fact that God became a man affirms every aspect of human experience as potentially holy ground".

The Supper at Emmaus

Caravaggio deliberately grounded his paintings in the everyday life of the world around him because he understood the sanctity of the ordinary; that whispers of God's glory, love and presence could be found in everyday life. 

The incident portrayed in The Supper at Emmaus comes from Luke’s Gospel Chapter 24, verses 13 – 35. In these verses we are told that two of Jesus’ followers were walking about seven miles from Jerusalem to the village of Emmaus on the Sunday morning after Jesus’ crucifixion. They were downcast and were talking about Jesus’ death two days before and a rumour that Jesus had risen from the dead, when suddenly the resurrected Jesus appears and walks alongside them, but they are kept from recognising him due to some change in his appearance or because of their depressed state. Jesus asks them what they are talking about and then goes on to explain from Scripture “beginning with Moses and all the prophets” how his coming death and resurrection was foretold.

When they reached Emmaus, Jesus makes to continue on, but the disciples urge him to stay with them as it is nearly evening. They have a meal together and then Luke tells us that Jesus

“took bread, gave thanks, broke it and began to give it to them. Then their eyes were opened and they recognised him and he disappeared from their sight. They asked each other “Were not our hearts burning within while he talked with us on the road and opened the Scriptures to us”. (Luke 24:30-32).

In his painting Caravaggio has captured in freeze-frame that split-second moment as Jesus breaks the bread and the disciples have their eyes opened. One disciple is just in the process of pushing himself out of his chair in shock, the other disciple has his arms stretched out in utter amazement; his left hand seems to reach out of the membrane of the canvas to touch us.

But what is really interesting about the painting is the seeming ordinariness of the scene – even the muted colours are “ordinary” – muted greens and reds; none of Annibale Carracci’s gaudiness here! Caravaggio places the Supper at Emmaus in an ordinary 16^th Century tavern of the type he drank in frequently in Rome. Apparently to the viewer it’s just a pub scene; the Innkeeper who has just brought the food to the table doesn’t seem to see anything special about Jesus (who is unusually portrayed as beardless to symbolise his resurrected body). The disciples just seem poor down-at-heel working folk wearing worn old clothes (one with a hole in his jacket’s elbow).

But he who has eyes let him see, for look more closely and in the seeming ordinariness, those who are prepared to believe will find God’s glory. For what do we see on the table but bread and a jug of wine, whispers of the Eucharist as in the Bacchus painting? There again is the basket of over ripe fruit, this time teetering on the edge of the table, a device often used in the period to hint at mortality. But look at the shadow cast by the fruit and we see a fish’s tail. The fish was an early Christian symbol. To emphasise mortality further the dead scrawny chicken lies with it’s shrivelled feet. However, these feet are echoed by the hand of Christ raised in a life-giving benediction and the shadow on the wall behind him makes a halo above Christ’s head. In the midst of the ordinariness of everyday life, Christ is still very much present if we choose to see him

One of the things that fascinates me about the Camino is that there are often long sections of just trudging along where nothing seems to happen and which seem very mundane and ordinary; a long straight section beside a noisy motorway maybe, or a walk through an ugly industrial or urban landscape. But I have come to realise that life itself is the same; very often there are long ordinary stretches of going to work day after day or taking the kids to school or cutting the grass and doing housework. There are no mountain top experiences or special revelations, though they come too eventually to refresh us just as a beautiful section or event on the Camino eventually occurs. And yet in the midst of seeming "ordinariness" God can still speak. In fact, that is precisely where he often speaks if we are listening. He comes and meets us as we just pod along.

Foster comments that in the bible “God showed up in the most ordinary and common way possible, from the ground up, in an out of the way place, with only a few common folk summoned to witness his arrival". The discovery of God he says "lies in the daily and the ordinary, not in the spectacular and the heroic. If we cannot find God in the routines of home and shop, then we will not find him at all". I pray that you and I will have eyes to see Jesus when he meets us in the guise of the ordinary, whether walking the Camino on one of the boring stretches or just on the everyday pilgrimage of life.

By the way, did you notice that the disciple on the right is a pilgrim? Look more closely; he is proudly wearing a scallop shell on his breast – he must have been to Santiago!