"Beautiful" and Some thoughts on Incarnation
- smegburke
- Dec 23, 2019
- 3 min read
Updated: Feb 8
After a flurry of final assignments, last week afforded moments of pause, to consider the incarnation we celebrate at Christmas. I went to an exhibit - “Beautiful” - a collaboration between RZIM's Still Point Arts and Imago Arts, featuring the work of artist Craig Hawkins and photographer Elizabeth Jones. Together, they helped to honour the beauty of several women who have been treated at Agni Raksha, in Bangalore, India. The centre seeks to serve those who have been victims of bride burning, a consequence of a bride’s family failing to comply with the groom’s family’s expectations for a dowry.
The portraits, and the women they capture are indeed beautiful, though there are aspects that are hard to look at. The marks of devastation in these women’s lives persist - the show was punctuated by stark and striking images of surgical implements, a reminder of the numerous surgeries most women will undergo. Yet without sentimentality, there was also an uncanny joy in the paintings. The vivid colours, patterns and details were carefully crafted, bold and tender. I kept coming back to Vennila, with her radiant composure. The women’s expressions seemed to bear quiet witness to the fact they were seen and valued.
Each woman had a delicate gold halo, brilliant in the soft ambient light. In his artist's statement, Craig Hawkins elaborates: “Beneath layers of paint and storied markings, each portrait carries gold leaf that is often unseen. Other times it appears in cracks and bares the story of a life inherently valuable and worthy of honor and love.”
I spent some time this semester reading Athanasius, an early church father. He wrote a moving illustration of God coming to live among us. Humanity is like a portrait of the image of God, that has become caked with dirt, mired with sin. In love, God comes down to us, His likenesses, so that we may be reinscribed after His image, through the death and resurrection of the Son.
In these women, I saw a stirring and challenging testimony of joy in suffering, perhaps part of what it means to be made in God’s image. I was also reminded that our God does not look away, but has come among us. He has begun to free us from shame and pain, by bearing it Himself. Dietrich Bonhoeffer writes: “God raised His love for human beings above every reproach of falsehood and doubt and uncertainty by himself entering into the life of human beings as a human being, by bodily taking upon Himself and bearing the nature, essence, guilt and suffering of human beings.”
It was a privilege to spend time in the company of these portraits, and see the quiet yet staggering heroism of these women. I’m also thankful to the many hands that helped shape their story, and represent it here - from Bangalore, to Atlanta, to Toronto. It was a timely reminder of the God whose image they bear, who became an infant, to bear us and all that humanity entails.
The exhibit is on display in Toronto until Jan 31, 2020. The original exhibit was a collaboration between RZIM’s Still Point Arts, with Jill Carattini, (Director of Apologetics, Theology, and the Arts) and Wellspring International with Naomi Zacharias.
Images:
Sources:
Athanasius, On the Incarnation, (St Vladimir's Seminary Press, 2011)
Dietrich Bonhoeffer, God is in the Manger, (Westminster John Knox Press, 2010)
Beauty tells a story doesn’t it? In these portraits it certainly does. And the absolutely most beautiful SHOULD be those with the longest, toughest, grittiest stories. But instead our culture portends that beauty has something to do with eye colour, silky skin, or long legs. Somehow culture has reinvented the definition of beauty,-hijacked it possibly.
So I’m glad to see this artist grabbing us by the shoulders, directing us to these portraits and saying, “Hey, think about this a little bit deeper and longe.”