After offering quite an extended reflection on the cross of Jesus in yesterday’s DM, I would like to invite you today into an artistic meditative experience, more right-brain than left-brain.
I have found on YouTube a quite remarkable work of art, a video watched already by almost two and a half million people in the last seven years. It was put together by Simone Gomes, who masterfully joined the music of Bach — a famous aria from the St. Matthew’s Passion sung by the unrivaled Magdalena Kozená — and images about humanity from the equally unrivaled filmmaker Andrei Tarkovski.
The lyrics of Bach’s aria begin with these words: “Have pity on me, O God, for the sake of my tears.” The first image, which sets the tone for the following ones, is taken from Tarkovski’s film Andrej Rublev. We see the monk iconographer Rublev gazing into the eyes of a Christ that he himself has just finished painting.
The whole video, music and words and images, can be conceived indeed as a meditation beyond thoughts and concepts about who humanity is. This mix of depth of wisdom obtained through suffering and the infliction of indescribable pain on one’s fellows.
Watching this video was both terrifying and consoling to me. I hope it is of value to you, too.
Banner Image: “Grieving Mother.” Photo by Сергей Черный on Wikimedia Commons.
Queries for Contemplation
What is your response to this video?
Related Readings by Matthew Fox
Original Blessing: A Primer in Creation Spirituality
The Coming of the Cosmic Christ: The Healing of Mother Earth and the Birth of a Global Renaissance
A Spirituality Named Compassion: Uniting Mystical Awareness with Social Justice
Julian of Norwich: Wisdom in a Time of Pandemic–and Beyond
The Tao of Thomas Aquinas: Fierce Wisdom for Hard Times
6 thoughts on “Humanity Naked”
Feelings of Beauty Sadness Compassion… for Humanity’s suffering around the world…
Thank you GG. I found it touched deeply on our human experience.
Beauty, however presented is the constant pull of my faith.
Music of Bach sublime.
Sublime indeed. Thank you!
“Have mercy on us, Lord, have mercy on us, for we have endured no end of contempt.” Psalm 123:3
For the past 5 years, I have experienced different types of loss, especially the loss of long-standing, very close friends. I often think about the purpose of the endless suffering that is broad and deep for people and for myself. I am comforted by the thought of a passage in Psalm 30:5, “For his anger endureth but a moment; in his favour is life: weeping may endure for a night, but joy cometh in the morning.”
I go at sunrise to the ‘Good Friday’ Interfaith Witness at the Livermore Nuclear Laboratory gate held every year since 1983. I will read “Enemigo del estado/Enemy of the State.” The Summer Solstice 1983, the International Day of Nuclear Disarmament, I and 1,000 others were arrested for blocking the gates of the laboratory in protest against nuclear weapons. Today, our protest is ever more important in light of the illegal disastrous war on Iran waged by the criminal fool that governs the nation bringing the world closer to a nuclear holocaust made even more likely when the button of nuclear arsenal is in the “hands” of Artificial Intelligence devoid of emotion, compassion, human judgement. No Nikolai Ignatiev. It is a war cheered on by the Christian Nationalists who violate every teaching of the holy prophet that they claim to worship whose crucifixion by the Roman Empire we commemorate today. They long for the “rapture,” Apocalypse, the end of the world envisioned by the hallucinated prophet of Patmos. On this day, we contemplate the death of Yeshua of Nazareth and his teachings that he died for, the teachings that would save us, that make our Beloved Community and our revolution.
The sad prayer of Bach’s aria is for mercy, and God will show mercy to all who suffer. As the visuals progress, the hooded man, a monk perhaps, first contemplates the icon of the mother, who appears to be absorbing the truth, but not responding to it. A man the stands alone outside a massive building, likely a church; he’s alone, head down and his feet seem lost in a large space of pillow-like snow drifts. A man, wearing a sack-like garment suggesting soul poverty, inside a space with icons in the background, looks with wonder or desperation away from the icons. A man collapses as if dead onto a nearly flooded ground, as a dog walks forward away from him. Then he half rises to a sitting, leaning position, the dog having returned to his side. Finally, as the man sits on the ground, warm, orange-gold light falls from the upper left onto a house with two storeys that appears to be in the early stages of building. Could the plaintive aria in the background with this series of images suggest a passage from prayerful grief and need for mercy to a slow movement by the suffering one to openness to receive a sign of hope, fulfilment and peace? This entire moving tableau may show a desire to be healed.