Sacred Seeing

A service titled ‘Sacred Seeing’, led by Rev. Dr. Jane Blackall and Roy Clark, with readings from Antony Bunsee, Brian Ellis, and Hannah King, and music from Georgia Morgan Turner.

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SPEAKER_04 3:10

We gather in community to rest from our labours, to greet our neighbours, and to open our being to insight and intuition of that greater reality of which we are all part. May we find in our time together inspiration and renewal. May we touch the holy in each other and be touched by the very graciousness of life. And may we find here a calm peacefulness that will carry us through the days ahead. Welcome to everyone who's joining us from far and wide, including our friends at Godoming Unitarians. Very glad to have you with us this morning. And indeed, welcome to everyone who's tuning in at a later date on the podcast or via YouTube. For anyone who doesn't know me, my name is Jane Blackhall, and I am a minister with Kensington Unitarians. Our service this morning is titled Sacred Seeing. It's inspired somewhat by the contemplative practice known as Visio Divina, looking with the eyes of the heart, receiving God's presence through what we see. Historically, many people of faith were not literate, so their primary way into religious understanding was through icons and frescoes, sculptures and stained glass windows. They couldn't read scripture. So they had these more direct, more contemplative and imaginative encounters with art, with visual imagery instead. Our very own Roy Clark chose today's theme, and he'll be offering his own personal reflections later in the service. And we'll also have a chance to have a go at this practice of Visio Divina ourselves during our time of meditation. But before we go any further, let's do what we always do. Let's light our chalice flame. This is a moment for us to arrive and to focus to set aside any preoccupations we came in carrying. And it's a ritual that connects us with Unitarians and Unitarian Universalists the world over, which reminds us of the proudly progressive religious tradition of which this gathering is part. By its light may our vision be illumined. By its warmth, may our fellowship be encouraged. And by its flame, may our yearnings for peace, justice, and the life of the Spirit be enkindled. Time to sing. Our first hymn today is number one seven two in the Green Book. All are welcome here. And the words will also be up on screen if you're joining at home. Feel free to stand or sit as you prefer and sing up as best you can hymn 172. Now you might want to adjust your position to get more comfortable. You might want to close your eyes. Perhaps there's a posture that helps you to feel more settled and centred. Whatever helps you to get into the right state of body and mind for us to pray together now, to be fully present to ourselves, to each other, and to that which lies within us and beyond us. Spirit of life, God of all love, in whom we live and move and have our being. We turn our full attention to you, the light within and without as we tune into the depths of this life and the greater wisdom to which and through which we are all intimately connected. Be with us now as we allow ourselves to drop into the silence and the stillness at the very centre of our being. We give thanks for beauty and grace unnoticed which lies like unopened love letters strewn throughout our days, awaiting a response. May we be mindful of the manifold gifts that come our way. Grant us the insight to see with fresh vision beneath the surface of things. Awake to the miracle of the lit bush and the gentle cadence of healing which whispers beneath all the chatter of our lives. Help us to remember that despite the pain, the grief, the suffering that haunts our world amidst the fractured busyness and distraction of our days, the beauty and goodness and humankindness are always unfolding around us and within us. Scattered like seeds, growing silently and without fanfare, waiting to be discovered as we still our minds and open our hearts. And in a few moments of shared silence and stillness now, may we each speak inwardly some of the deepest prayers of our own hearts. The joys and the sorrows that we came in carrying in our own lives and in the life of the wider world. Let us each lift up whatever is on our heart this day. Let us give thanks for all the blessings that we have been given. And let us ask for whatever it is that we most need. As this time of prayer draws to a close, we offer up our joys and our concerns, our hopes and our fears, our beauty and our brokenness, and we call on you for insight, healing, and renewal. As we look forward now to the coming week, help us to live well each day and be our best selves using our unique gifts in the service of love, justice, and peace. Amen.

SPEAKER_05 16:45

When we look at a work of art, we are not just seeing a relic from the past, we are participating in a conversation that spans centuries. The artist saw something, felt a vibration in the world, and attempted to tether it to a surface so that we might feel it too. This is the true interconnected web. When I stand before a painting created 400 years ago, I am meeting the gaze of another human being who wondered about the same stars, felt the same grief, and marveled at the same light. Art is the proof that we are not alone. It is the bridge between the I and the Thou. In our modern world, we are often told that we are separate individuals, competing and isolated. But art tells a different story. It tells us that our vision is shared. It tells us that the suffering of a stranger is as real as our own, and that the beauty seen by a child in another land is part of our own heritage. To look at art is to acknowledge our independence. It is to say, your vision matters to my soul. In the gallery, borders disappear, the labels of politics and religion fall away, and we are left with the fundamental human gesture, the hand reaching out to mark the wall saying, I was here. I saw this, and it was beautiful.

SPEAKER_03 18:33

I am looking out of my window in an anxious and resentful state of mind. Oblivious of my surroundings, brooding perhaps on some damage done to my prestige. And suddenly I observe a castrel hovering. In a moment, everything is altered. The brooding self with its hurt vanity has disappeared. There is nothing now which is real except the kestrel. And when I return to thinking of the other matter, it seems less important. This is an exercise in unselfish. Art is the most educational thing we have, and it is also the most easily available. It enables us to see and take pleasure in what is not ourselves. We are so often blinded by our own anxieties, our own personal histories, and our own needs. We look at the world, but we only see how it can serve us or how it has hurt us. A great heart stirs us to the effort of true vision. It is a form of prayer, even if we do not use that word. It is a quietness that allows the world to exist on its own turn. When we stand before a great painting, we are invited to set down our burdens, our prestige, and our certainties. We are asked to be quiet and to attend. In that moment of attention we find a freedom that we cannot find anywhere else. We find that the world is large and we are part of it. But we are not the masters of it. And in that realization, there is a profound and lasting peace.

SPEAKER_04 21:04

So we're moving into a time of meditation now, and we're doing something slightly different this week. As I said at the start of the service, this is an opportunity for us to practice physio divina together. Sacred seeing. Formally this practice is supposed to unfold in four stages as you encounter an image or a work of art. First, there's physio or gaze. Second, meditatio, meditation. Third, oratio, prayer. And fourth, contemplatio, silent contemplation. Everybody present in the church today has been given a different image which is on the back of your little hymn sheet. You'll all have something different. I think you might have left yours behind, Anthony. You'll be invited to use this image for your practice as your sacred image to focus on. If you're at home, in the email I sent out on Friday, there were links to twelve different images. You can pick one of those randomly. Maybe you Got an artwork in your house or indeed in the church and god or me. Find an image of some sort to work with. A few of them are classic religious art, but most of them are not. You can choose to see any image through a spiritual lens. You may or may not like the image that you've been given randomly. Try not to get hung up on that. It's an experiment. Even if it's not to your taste, there is a fruitful encounter to be had. So try not to worry about doing it right. Just spend a few minutes reflecting on the image. I'm going to lead you through these four stages of Visual Divina, and I'm going to leave maybe a minute of silence between each stage. Ideally, I think you take longer than this. And then we'll take the final stage into our usual three minutes of silence, which I'll end with the sound of a bell. And then we're going to hear some more music from Georgia. And of course, if this practice is not for you, you can use the time to meditate in your own way. So get as comfortable as you can, put down anything you don't need to be holding, perhaps just remain with your image if you'd like. And we're going to proceed through the four movements of visio taken from the contemplative society. So stage one is visio, gazing. Simply look at the image. Let your eyes wander. Notice what draws your attention. A colour, a figure, a gesture, a shadow. Don't force anything. Just observe what shimmers? Take in the whole image and let it speak to you. What does this image evoke in you? What are the feelings that arise? If this is a scene, where are you situated in the scene? The third stage is Horatio, prayer. Silently, inwardly, speak to God about what it is you're noticing. Share what you're feeling. Perhaps ask questions. If the image is unsettling to you, then say so. And if it comforts you, give thanks for that. Contemplation, a time to let go of analysis and words, rest in the silence, listen for the still small voice. Allow the image to continue working on you beyond thought. And we'll move into three minutes of silence for our contemplation now, which will be ended with the sound of our belly.

SPEAKER_00 35:48

But the soul is actually fed by the common things of the world. The grain of a piece of wood, the way the light hits a bowl of fruit, the deep red of an old brick wall. Art is the practice of arresting life so that we can finally see it. Most of our life is spent in a rush. We consume images and experiences like we are starving, but we never stop to taste them. To care for the soul is to find the eternal in the everyday. A painter like Vermeer or Rembrandt doesn't need a miracle to show us the holy. They only need a window, a loaf of bread, or the face of an old woman. They show us that the divine is not elsewhere. It is hidden in the textures of our lives. When we look at art, we are practicing the preservation of the soul. We are saying that this moment, this color, this light is worth keeping. We are learning to see the sacredness of the material world. This is the great gift of the visual artist. They provide the containers for our wonder. They allow us to slow down enough to realize that the burning bush is everywhere if only we have the eyes to see it. We don't need to go to the mountaintop to find the infinite. We only need to look at the world with the same love that an artist gives to their canvas.

SPEAKER_04 37:39

Time to sing it again now. An old favorite.

SPEAKER_06 40:44

We move from the noise of doing into the quiet of observing. In traditional religious language, we might say we're stepping into a sanctuary. But in a Unitarian tradition where we look for the sacred not just in ancient texts or grand creeds, but in the living experience of the world around us, the gallery wall becomes an altar of a different kind. It's a place where human beings have attempted to tether their deepest longings, their grief, and their wonder into a few square feet of canvas. Today we're talking about Visio Divino or Sacred Seeing. But we're not here to act as art critics or historians. We're not checking off a checklist of famous masterpieces. We're here to ask a simpler, deeper question. What happens when we slow down enough to let the work of art look back at us? Whether you're drawn to Renaissance paintings, contemporary sculpture, or immersive audiovisual installations, looking at art offers us a way to engage with the sacred. Actually, I was reading in The Guardian a couple of months ago what I'm about to tell you. It's extraordinary. Recent museum studies reveal a startling statistic. On average, gallery visitors spend just 28 seconds looking at a single work of art in an exhibition. And as I regularly witness, they spend a fair chunk of those seconds taking photographs with their phone. Psychologists tell us that our brains need three or four seconds just to register a basic emotional response. And then about 10 seconds to decide cognitively what we think about an artwork. But if we're hoping for an encounter that is truly meaningful, one that shifts something inside us, seconds are not enough. A real encounter takes minutes. We must look, think, emotionally respond, and then look again. If we try and take in an entire museum in an afternoon, which we've all tried to do, I guess, when we've been overseas, rush around. But if you do that, we end up seeing nothing at all. The spiritual discipline of art is not about volume. It's about depth. It's far better to meaningfully engage with just two or three pieces of art on an art expedition to stand before them until they begin to speak than to rush past a hundred masterpieces with a camera in hand. This practice of slow deep attention is nothing new. In the summer of eighteen seventy three, a young, lonely, nineteen year old man was living in lodgings in South London in Stockwell. His name was Vincent van Gogh. Long before he ever picked up a paintbrush, long before he painted starry nights or vibrant sunflowers, he was just a young man walking the streets of London. And he was an avid walker. He would cross the river and spend hours wandering slowly through the rooms of the National Gallery. At the time, he thought his calling was the church. He was preparing to become a preacher, desperate to bring comfort to the poor and suffering. Yet ultimately the church rejected him. His zeal was too strong, his theology too unorthodox, his manner too unpolished for formal ministry, and the institution closed its doors to him. But Vincent did not lose his faith. He simply moved his altar. He realized that the sermons he wanted to preach couldn't be spoken in words, they had to be painted in colour. He took the devotion he had for the divine and poured it directly onto canvas. As he would later write to his brother Theo When I have a terrible need of shall I say the word? Of religion. The filmmaker Agnes Varda once captured the heart of this open eye practice when she said, I'm curious. Period. I find everything interesting. Real life, fake life, objects, flowers, cats, but mostly people. If you keep your eyes open and your mind open, everything can be interesting. Yet keeping our eyes truly open, it seems, is uh harder than it sounds. The artist David Hogney, who spent a lifetime teaching people how to see, uh frequently lamented how rare uh look real looking actually is. I agree. I if you if we walk through our lives glancing just enough to navigate, just enough to get by, we are missing the extraordinary visual symphony playing out all around us. This radical curiosity, choosing to lift our eyes from the pavement and look at things with intensity is the beginning of what the writer and philosopher Iris Murdoch, who we heard from a little earlier, called unselfing. Most of our days are spent trapped in our own heads. We look at the world, but we rarely see it. We judge, we organise, we worry about it, we calculate how it can serve us. It's been very hot recently, isn't it? So you see a tree and you think shade. Or we see a stranger and we think obstacle. Great art interrupts that cycle. It demands that we set down our prestige, our certainties, and our anxieties at the door. When you stand before a painting like Van Gogh's Sunflowers at the National Gallery or Hockney's A Year in Normandy, currently on view a short distance from here in Kensington Gardens in the Serpentine Gallery, you are invited into an act of radical attention. You are asked to look at something not because it's useful, but simply because it is. And in that quiet three-minute or five-minute stretch of stillness at the boundaries of the self are philosophy, we realize that the world is vast and beautiful and terrifying, and that we belong to it. Not as masters, but as witnesses. Vincent once wrote about how we use colour to express human emotion. To express the love of two lovers by a wedding of two complementary colours, to express hope by some star, to express someone's passion by the radiance of the setting sun. There is certainly no optical illusion in that. Isn't it something that really exists? Isn't it a thing that expresses the soul? When we look deeply at a painting, we are participating in it. In his 1995 lecture, My National Gallery, the playwright Alan Bennett, described this exact moment of recognition, what he called the evidence of humanity, that looking at a painting can give us. He succinctly summarized this using his special gift with words that sadly I don't possess, to describe what happens when a picture truly touches you. It is if a hand has come out and taken yours. That encapsulates so beautiful the true miracle of art. An artist who lived centuries ago or who'd walk these very streets in London 150 years ago, felt a vibration in the universe. They felt the ache of solitude or the explosion of gratitude, and they found a way to mark it down. When we give ourselves time, when we push past that initial 28 seconds and allow the hand to reach out from the canvas or to take ours, the distance of time and space evaporates. If it's a great art, the artist has managed to put their entire their entire truth there in that image. And your truth can encounter it to the extent to which you let it. And so you return to yourself enriched by the artist's vision. As we move on from our own visual meditations in the service today, remember that Visio Divina does not end when we leave this church, or indeed when we walk out from the gallery doors after paying a visit. The gallery is simply a training ground for our eyes. The ultimate goal of looking at art is not to admire the frame on the wall, but to learn how to frame the rest of our lives. So don't try to take in everything. Pick one image, pick one face, one corner of light, and give it your time. May we leave this place with sharper eyes and softer hearts. May we look at the stranger on the tube, the evening light breaking through the trees in a London park, or the simple leaf on the pavement, with the same lofty and serious intimate sympathy that Vincent brought to his canvas. For the sacred is not confined to holy mountains or ancient stories, it is to be found everywhere, in every room, on every canvas and in every human face. If only we have the patience, the curiosity and the love to slow down and see it.

SPEAKER_04 52:55

Thank you, Roy. Lovely stuff. Time for one last hymn now, then it's number fourteen in your green books for the beauty of the earth. Hymn fourteen. Thanks to Roy for offering our reflection today and finding all those great readings too. Thanks to Ramona for hosting in the face of endless technical problems, much sympathy. And thanks to Charlotte for co-hosting online. If you're online, do stay for a chat if you can. And thanks to Georgia for lovely music today, Andrew for accompanying our hymns, and Bench for supporting our singing. Thanks to Anthony, Bryan, and Hannah for doing our readings. And also Hannah for greeting and Juliet for standing in to make the tea at the last minute. We've got some Victoria sponge cake today if you want to stay. I wasn't anticipating quite so many people turning up in high summer, so you might only get a small slice. You might want to be at the front of the queue. After the service today, we've got yoga with Hannah back in here. Have a word with her if you haven't done that before. I'm in two minds about the craft noon. I think a lot of our regulars are away. If you are planning to stay for craft afternoon, come and have a word with me straight after the service and we'll work out what we're going to do. Tonight on Friday at 7, we've got Heart and Soul online when our theme is growing up. That's our contemplative spiritual gathering. Everyone is welcome. Just drop me a line if you want to join us for that. John and Pat will be leading that on Friday. And I accidentally left this off the printed order of service, but we'll have an in-person Heart and Soul on Wednesday. I don't think there'll be many of us, but let me know if you want to come to that as well. More of the merrier. Promising. By Dan Heath. I've got one less one last copy to lend out, and we'll be discussing that on the 30th of August online. The next two weeks are going to be a bit out of the ordinary. Next week is an in-person only service because me and Ramona are away and there's no one to run the tech. Jasmine will be leading that on circles and spirals. Do come along to support Jasmine. The week after will be online only because of carnival and be difficult for people to get it, and that will be led by me. We didn't want to leave the online congregation without a service for two weeks in a row. Further ahead, we've got Gather in the Waters on the 13th of September. So if you're travelling anywhere, perhaps bring back some water for that. And there'll be a pot luck lunch after our harvest festival on the 27th of September. All this is on the back of your order of service in the Friday email. We've got a life beyond Sunday morning, so do what you can to nurture those supportive connections. Just time for our closing words and close- Oh, Heidi's suddenly got something for us. Please come to the mic. Come right here so that people can hear you.

SPEAKER_01 57:57

Well, uh Roy and I, we are going to have an exhibition uh in uh Birkhouse, Hampstead, and the private view is on the 8th of September, and I've got a flyer here that has all the information. Uh may I give one copy to it? Also, it has this flyer something on the back, uh, a text by Roy and an image by myself. And it's uh well, it's lens-based work by Roy and uh paintings and also a few sculptures by myself. Uh so I will put a few copies of the flyers uh out and uh I'll put something in the email, but yeah. Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 58:40

All right, thanks, Heidi. Very on topic. And now our closing words. May the love that gives to life its beauty, the reverence that gives to life its sacredness, and the purposes that give to life its deep significance be strong within each of us and lead us into ever deepening relationships with all of life. Maybe so for the greater good of all the time.