Carmelite Altar/The Altar of Attachment

About this work

The far sides of the altarpiece show two great mystics and reformers of the Order of Carmelites, St John of the Cross and St Teresa of Avila. They flank the depictions of two pillars of Carmel: the Virgin Mary who typifies total availability to God and the prophet Elijah who typifies a burning zeal for God. In the centre is the Song of Songs, Bride and Bridegroom, Jesus Christ and the soul. Above them is a sombre reminder of the reality of evil and the price of love, the Crucifixion.

 

Another name for this work is ‘The Altar of Attachment’. My purpose was to convey the attachments which hold the whole of creation together: first of all, God's attachment to us; our response (and attachment) to Him; people's attachments to each other which does not differ from an attachment to God (God and humans are persons; the perfect expression of that fact is found in the Person of Christ, both human and divine).

I called it “Carmelite” because this is how I learned about the reality and intimacy of the relationship between God and the soul. It surprised me that Carmelite writings and practice can be easily translated into the language of human psychology, especially that of attachment theory, the concepts of true and fake self, and so on.

 

When St John of the Cross writes:

 

“Oh spring like crystal! If only, in our silvered-over faces,

you would suddenly form the eyes I have desired,

that I bear sketched deep within my heart.”

 

He speaks of the attachment of a soul to Christ. One can easily find this theme, of the intimacy between a human being and God, spun throughout the whole Bible. Anyone who has ever loved and been loved can grasp it. And so, using the terms of human psychology, the Carmelite way is simply the attachment of a human person to the Person of Christ and living the reality of that attachment here and now.

 

This vector of a healthy attachment to the person, human and divine, is the antithesis to the diabolical vector of abandonment which tends towards hell and tears creation apart. As it happens, abandonment is a typical state of a severely abused person, especially one abused as a child, even more so abused again within the Church. My conviction is that the remedy for the vector of abandonment is the vector of an attachment to Christ. The altarpiece is about this.

I dedicate this work to those abused as children and to those who were re-traumatized within the Church. My dream is to create ‘The Chapel of Attachment’ with this altarpiece where anyone who suffered an attachment trauma can come and pray. Until then, it is virtual.

The images and commentary below are organized in a deliberate way of walking from one to another. They are icons and require time to sink in. Please take time to ponder each of them.

The text on the scroll says:

“O guiding night!
O night, more lovely than the dawn!

O night that has united the Lover with his beloved
transforming the beloved in her Lover!”

 

The letters are gilded, so as (on other icons) the letters on St Teresa's scroll, the lines from ‘Song of Songs’, the Name of Jesus and also the rays of light falling on the edge of the Prophet Elijah's cave and his cloak.

Above the lush vegetation of Granada is the crystal-like Mount Carmel, the path to God.

 

Granada was a happy place for St John, a respite after he has been abducted and kept a prisoner by the monks in Toledo, Castilla for months. Not only was he put into a cell of a size of a tomb, was lashed regularly almost to death.

Paradoxically, he wrote his finest verses about a sublime love of God and a soul while being there. The sense of that love saved him. Eventually he managed to escape.

 

The background of the icon and the bluish shadows in the thicket suggests the evening mood, the coming night.

 

St John was a sensitive and kind but reserved person, a proponent of total trust in Christ. “Nada (nothing) but Christ” Who is todo (everything) meaning His Person, His Love.

Being with Him, guided by Him determined her whole life. Her famous reform of the Order was simply an expression of her desire to help others to obtain an intimate relationship with Him (an attachment to Him).

 

The feather pen in St Teresa’s hand is a reference to the arrow or a dart of divine love, her mystical experience of her heart being pierced with love. The dove is the symbol of the Holy Spirit.

“She was a pure, transparent pool      reflecting God, only God.

She held His burnished day; she held His night of planet-glow or shade inscrutable.

God was her sky and she who mirrored Him

became His firmament.”

 

I somehow wanted to express these lines written by Jessica Powers, a Carmelite nun, and treated the blue tunic of the Virgin as something cosmic. Her cloak is rendered in a very different way, its folds around the Baby Jesus forming a womb-like space.

 

In this Eastern Orthodox iconographic scheme of the Annunciation the Incarnation happens in the moment that Mary said her fiat. When I was painting it, I thought about the extreme abandonment created in an act of abortion, which forsakes both the mother and child, and the possibility of their attachment to each other. I also thought about an even grosser evil, when the bodies of the unborn are used for the production of medical goods – a pinnacle of the dehumanisation/depersonalization of people. People like us.

And so, I painted the Virgin Mary with the Baby Jesus in Her womb but I also painted the normal attachment of a mother to her unborn child. This is why I treated the thread of the red wool in the Virgin Mary’s hand (indicating her weaving the cloth for the veil of the Temple) as an umbilical cord, a symbol of a mother’s and child’s attachment and also of the child’s life which is in her hands.

 

There could be no Salvation if the Virgin Mary did not trust in God. There could be also no salvation if Jesus was not born to a loving mother and a loving step-father. The Son of God could not become the Son of Man, the Messiah, in such a case. The fact that our Salvation hung on normal human relationships of attachment is quite stunning.

 

The photos cannot adequately convey the complexity of the play of light on natural pigments (crystals), but the background on the original has the quality of very warm, gentle light, there is something of a skin undertone there as well.

The Prophet Elijah is depicted in the moment when, after he flew into the desert in despair, he encounters God:

 

“Suddenly a voice came to him, and said, “What are you doing here, Elijah?” And he said, “I have been very zealous for the Lord God of hosts; because the children of Israel have forsaken Your covenant, torn down Your altars, and killed Your prophets with the sword. I alone am left; and they seek to take my life.” Then the Lord said to him: “Go, return on your way to the Wilderness of Damascus; and when you arrive, anoint Hazael as king over Syria. Also you shall anoint Jehu the son of Nimshi as king over Israel.”

 

I imagine Elijah here as somehow suspended in the presence of God. This is why on the icon he is running and yet has fully stopped; his arm is “glued” to the cliff he is leaning upon (or bumped into), almost became one with it.

 Everything is still; there is no time any more, only the voice of God is coming from the empty space. There is also a sense of relief, he hears Him again.

 

The raven with bread in its beak brings up another episode of the prophet’s life, when, during the drought, he was sent by God to hide himself at the brook of Cherith; his only sustenance would be the food daily brought to him by ravens.