Easter Perspective

Busy business leaders can benefit by taking time to step aside and rewire. One way of rewiring is to gain more perspective about who we are and our overall purpose. Faith guides purpose in life - helps bring meaning to our overall existence in relation to others, our earth, and God.

One benefit is that faith and spirituality are linked to positive physical and mental health. Faith helps us answer the meaning life has for us: Who are we? Where do we come from? Why do we exist? What is the meaning of life, of love, of tragic losses of death?

In light of purpose in life, many business leaders take a few moments to center themselves. For those readers and friends who celebrate Easter, here's a meditation - a poem by Luci Shaw...

Onlookers

"Sickness is a place. . .where there's no company, where nobody can follow." -- Flannery O'Connor

Behind our shield of health, each
of us must sense another's anguish
second-hand; we are agnostic in the face of dying. So Joseph
felt, observer of the push
and splash of birth, and even Mary,
mourner, under the cross's arm.

Only their son, and God's,
in bearing all our griefs
felt them first-hand, climbing
himself our rugged hill of pain.
His nerves, enfleshed, carried
the messages of nails, the tomb's
chill. His ever-open wounds
still blazon back to us the penalty
we never bore, and heaven
gleams for us more real,
crossed with that human blood.

From Postcard from the Shore, 1985

Art Illumines Advent

When an artist’s mind holds faith as central, that faith finds itself reflected in the heart of art. For Luci Shaw and Fra Angelico, art ferments in the imagination as a sacramental wine.

In keeping with Advent, consider The Annunciation of Christ in Shaw’s poetry and Angelico’s painting.

Angelico, a Dominican friar in Florence, used art in service of his faith. Interestingly, this painter-monk, earned the nickname, “Angelic,” which endured through posterity.

Though Angelico reflects Gothic tradition, he played with Maccaccio’s revolutionary ideas about space and perspective and took new risks as he painted magnificent frescoes. And today, his work is catalogued with early Renaissance art well ahead of most artists of his period.

See Angelico’s The Annunciation (1420) below.

“It has been said that faith is ‘a certain widening of the imagination,’” Shaw mused in her Introduction of, Polishing the Petoskey Stone, a book of poetry. She added, “When Mary asked the Angel, ‘How shall these things be?’ she was asking God to widen her imagination.” Interestingly this is what Shaw does in her carefully selected words.

And, the quiet, calm of Shaw’s words leads us to consider the unexpected visit of the angel to Mary in “Announcement.”

Announcement

Yes, we have seen the studies, sepia strokes
across yellowed parchment, the fine detail
of hand and breast and the fall of cloth –
Michelangelo, Caravaggio, Titian, El Greco,
Roualt — each complex madonna positioned,
sketched, enlarged, each likeness plotted at last
on canvas, layered with pigment, like the final
draft of a poem ofter thirty-nine roughs.

But Mary, virgin, had no sittings, no chance
to pose her piety, no novitiate for body or
for heart. The moment was on her unaware:
The Angel in the room, the impossible demand,
the response without reflection. Only one
word of curiosity, echoing Zechariah’s How?
yet innocently voiced, without request for proof.
The teen head tilted in light, the hand
trembling a little at the throat, the candid
eyes, wide with acquiescence to shame and glory –
“Be it unto me as you have said.”

Luci Shaw, Polishing the Petoskey Stone, 1990.

For Shaw and Angelico, celebration of faith finds expression in well-crafted icons which illumine the Holy.