Earth from the Air exhibition @ Oxford Castle

We went out for breakfast at Carluccios's at Oxford Castle yesterday morning as part of our wedding anniversary celebrations. Great food - certainly a whole lot better than the meal I had the night before at Loch Fyne which was very ropey and disappointing.

Anyway - when we came out of Carluccio's we found ourselves drawn in to the spectacular free exhibition of very large photographs by Yann Arthus-Bertrand that are all around the exterior of the castle complex. His work is marketed as 'The Earth from the Air' and is now rather ubiquitous having been made into books, T-Shirts etc. (you will probably recognise the middle bottom image from the montage above).

BUT - it's really worth seeing. I found it to be quite a spiritual experience - wonder, awe, a recognition of how small we are and how beautiful the earth is. The photography is amazing - brilliant to see very large, original prints which the images above and others you may have seen on the web don't do justice to.

The exhibition runs to January 11th and if you're local to Oxford I highly recommend you see it (especially as it's free!!)

The Oxford Open

Very pleased that I managed to finally get along to Modern Art Oxford yesterday, after a meeting in town, to see The Oxford Open.

It's a free exhibition featuring the work of any local people who wanted to contribute something. In many ways it felt like a reclamation of space - an art gallery that has been temporarily taken over by 'ordinary people' rather than the artistic elite. I say 'ordinary people' but the level of creativity was quite something to behold and the overriding feeling I had whilst wandering round was about how extraordinary it is that people have expressed themselves in such a diversity of ways. Only a few of them are doing it to make a living (like my friend Clay Sinclair who had a great piece there). The rest are just pouring this stuff out from the depths of their being in their spare time.

It's only on till tomorrow so if you're local and you haven't been yet hurry along down.

Sister Corita

When we were in St Ives a few weeks ago we went to the Tate - like you do. There was a great exhibition on at the time (it's still on) called 'If Everybody had an Ocean' based on the life and music of Brian Wilson from the Beach Boys.
Anyway, one of the artists whose work was featured in the exhibition was a new one on me - Sister Corita Kent. She was a Catholic nun and quite an extraordinary graphic artist who was quite prominent in the 60's counter-culture. Someone said that she did for bread and wine what Andy Warhol did for Campbell's tinned soup. I was quite taken with the pieces of hers that were in the exhibition and particularly with the way that her faith, art, and the counterculture blended to produce some striking results. For example, how's this for an altar piece:

or this....and here are some of the nun's from Sister Corita's community in production...


Anyway, if this flips your widget you can find out more about Sister Corita here or purchase an art book with lots of her stuff in on Amazon.

panentheism in action

So - without wanting to sound like an obsessed super-fan - I have been completely blown away by the Van Morrison DVD that Pip bought me for Valentine's Day...particularly by the first couple of minutes!
As the gig starts, and even before Van takes the stage, the band start playing and it builds and it builds, into the most intense, mystical, beautiful, soundscape. And that's before the first song has even started. It's so intense the first time I watched it I started giggling.
A couple of days later I sat down to pray and all I could hear in my head was this amazing music. And I found myself saying to myself, "stop thinking about Van Morrison and start thinking about God", and as quick as flash I heard the Spirit say to me something like - 'what you are responding to in that music, the thing that makes your heart and spirit soar, is God. what you are encountering is God - that is why it has the effect on you that it has'.

Now of course I am not saying that Van Morrison is God, but neither am I merely saying that beautiful, creative music is a reflection of the creativity of God (though that is undoubtedly true - and I have said it/preached it a thousand times).

I am trying to say something much deeper than that - something about actually encountering God in things - which the religious philosophers call panentheism. This is not to be confused with pantheism - which says that everything IS God. Panentheism says that God is IN all things but not synonymous with all things. Wikipedia's definition is here if you're interested.

So what I'm saying is that sometimes when we encounter beauty we are somehow encountering God himself not just a reflection of the beauty or creativity of God. I know some of you reading this will be saying "um, yeah, of course" - but for me, even though I thought I knew this - and maybe I did on a conceptual level - I think this was the first time it really hit home.