Business is a religion ... secularism is a religion ...

Tim Lott makes some helpful comments about the nature of belief and faith (acknowledging that each of us, whether religious or not, are in reality 'believers') in his latest piece for The Guardian. Interestingly, he needs to refer to the New Testament and use language drawn from the Christian tradition in order to do so:

'We live in a world of unprecedented change and complexity, and this makes us more desperate than ever to cling to what we think we know. We need to believe that our purposes, those goals in which we invest meaning, are valid. On this definition, business is a religion, career is a religion, family is a religion, nation is a religion, secularism is a religion, and religion is a religion. There is no getting away from it. However, our values cannot be independently verified – other than by the reassuring support of the like-minded ...

The alternative to belief (“lief”, incidentally, comes from the root meaning “to wish”) is faith. Not religious faith, but faith that does not become brittle with its own projections of hatred against “the other”, which includes the apostates in our midst who do not share our view. Faith that we are all human souls struggling to keep our heads above water in floods of confusion. Faith in reason, faith in the idea of truth, however elusive the actuality. And faith, as any reading of the New Testament makes plain, is always hedged by doubt.

Doubt is nothing to fear – the doubt that all our ideas and precious beliefs are straws in the wind. There is meaning in meaninglessness, in the “cloud of unknowing” that we all live inside. There are real facts – there is love, there is our own consciousness, there is this day, this moment, the feeling of human connection.'

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George Michael - Faith.

Jyoti Sahi: Art as integrative process

On Friday night I went to hear the artist Jyoti Sahi speak at St Andrews Waterloo, an event organised by Christians Aware.

Jyoti set up the Indian School of Art for Peace, or INSCAPE, in 1984 with the idea of relating art to Indian spirituality. INSCAPE was a concept of an art school, modeled on the understanding of an ashram that Rabindranath Tagore created at Shantiniketan, north of Calcutta, in Birbhum district. Here the "Sadhana" or spiritual practice of the ashram is based on an understanding of the spiritual in art. Art is understood in a very broad sense, comprising not only the visual arts, but also story telling, poetry, and performance art. An attempt is made to realize a connective aesthetics in which the different arts support each other in a common search for wholeness.

Jyoti spoke about art as process, not simply as product, with that process also being a healing process needed by our contemporary society. His presentation was a journey through his artworks which saw art and creativity as a basis for spirituality.

He spoke about art as meditation and, in particular, of Ignatian imagination as a way of prayer. He spoke too of art and the imagination as process of finding integration and this most of all was what seemed modelled in his art where he integrated the stories and imagery of India's religions, tribes and castes with those of Christianity in a vision which ultimately sees life as a cosmic dance in which the yoke or yoga of Jesus is, through the cross, to unite the whole cosmos.

Jyoti's art is unitive and reconciling yet was originally based on and inspired by the angst and inner struggle of the German Expressionists (Emil Nolde, in particular) which he first saw as an art student in England. His great achievement has been to harness the force and energy of these Expressionist roots and channel them to form movements and confluences which bring opposites (pure/impure, male/female, ying/yang) together  creating a plant which can rise from the depths and bring forth blossom.

Richard Harries (Lord Harries of Pentregarth, former Bishop of Oxford) writes in his foreword to Faces of Vision: Images of Life and Faith by Jyoti Sahi & Eric Lott: "In these paintings humanity and nature come together as part of God's whole (creation). Jyoti brings before us in a way that is at once vivid and mysterious, the reality of the one God....The face of Christ opens out into the universal." 

Faces of Vision presents major themes in Jyoti's outpouring of evocative images. 'Life's Journey', 'Earth's Epiphanies', 'The Body, Broken & Whole', 'Transfiguring Vision' include pictures and reflective comment on such key images as Mother, Pilgrim, Seed, Tree, Fire, Drummer, Healer, Mystic, Bird, Dancer, and many more.



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The Innocence Mission - God Is Love.