naked man seated on a toilet

Complementing the colour blue.

Community of communities

“God saw all that he had made, and it was very good. And there was evening, and there was morning—the sixth day.” Genesis 1:31

I picture a man (likely not Moses) holding a quill and writing Hebrew words onto a papyrus scroll some 2700 years ago, words that would forever be preserved as sacred writing, translated and transliterated until I, today, experience the writer’s thoughts transferred from his brain to mine through the reading of it. I picture other men choosing among volumes and volumes of writing those that are worthy of preservation, and discarding those that are not until a package of writings we now know as The Bible is declared the completed word.

That both the writers and the preservers were inspired goes without saying; a person picking up a quill and setting out on the laborious task of interpreting our world never does so without inspiration. It’s not unlike the sculptor who visualizes an object of beauty and then spends hours and hours of strenuous labour to create a representation of this inspiration that can be shared, preserved for all time. All that is beautiful, all that lifts humankind onto a higher plane, all that illuminates begins with an artist’s inspiration.

And yet, the most graceful, most balanced, most eloquent piece of art or the most insightful, poetically spoken/written metaphor leaves many cold, un-understanding, disinterested. Inspired work is created, realized and preserved through a language, and if the language of the sculptor’s art is not taught and understood, then Rodin’s The Thinker may never be more to the observing eye than a naked man seated on a toilet, or worse yet, a big block of brass.

It’s been said often: all art is a collaboration between the artist and the beholder. But this collaboration breaks down where no common language exists. I began this short essay with reference to the Genesis analogy of origins, an amazingly beautiful and inspired work of art that for some remains forever stuck at the level of “a naked man seated on a toilet” because insufficient attention has been paid to the language of verbal/written art employed by the artist, an artist equipped those many years ago with nothing but a quill, some ink, some papyrus . . . but a bountiful supply of inspiration.

It would help all of us to get at the minds of the inspired writers of The Bible to see their work through the eyes of story, of parable, of allegory because these were their language, the language through which inspiration was recorded and collected for us. Like an extended parable, it has a theme and this may be it: there exists a place of sublime beauty that humankind is capable of appreciating and enhancing . . . or destroying. In Genesis, this place is visualized as a garden of earthly delights but as the parable winds on, every absurdity mankind can devise to destroy it and every impulse he is capable of that might retrieve it is modeled in story.

Rodin’s sculpture comes alive as we walk around it, view it from new angles. It’s time we learned and taught the language of both Rodin and the inspired Genesis penman. Time we took a walk around The Bible, let it speak to us in new ways.