Georgia O'Keeffe, a Glimpse of the Gospel

I visited Georgia O’Keeffe’s museum at Santa Fe during my recent road trip. Some of Georgia O'Keeffe works seems to pull in contrasts and conflicts into some form of unity. For example, there is one painting of clouds that look amorphous, bulbous and translucent, yet, even in this cloudy painting there is are two clear geometric shapes - a square and a rectangle. They both look rather artificial and alien to the amorphous clouds around, but that is the vision that O'Keeffe presents - a sense of structure and order in spite of what seems sheer formlessness. 

The sense of juxtaposition of such incongruities that really stood out to me was the ones between the antelope skull and flowers. O'Keeffe spent lots of time in a place called Ghost Ranch, a wilderness with beautiful red rocks and skulls of dead animals. Inspired, she started painting pictures that were skulls of antelopes and flowers, side by side. Like the one below (sorry the pic I took just of the painting did not come out well, so you got to put up with my face beside it lol).

What strikes me about these is that there is a  paradoxical mingling of sorrow and beauty, which is how life so often flows. In every happiness there is a tinge of sadness, no happiness will be completed without a pang of foreboding that the happiness will not last for ever. Perpetual happiness cannot last for ever, for if it did it would cease to be happiness anymore. Standing at the edge of a cliff, I was looking at the sunset over the painted desert in Arizona, I was drawn into a timeless experience of transcendence, seeing the red glow of the sun bathe over the wide plain below me. I wanted that scene to last forever, but deep within I knew with a tinge of sadness that it wouldn't last forever. Paradoxically, I was glad that it wouldn't go on forever, that it would end, so that I can return back to the mundane existence. The knowledge that I would return back to the quotidian reality of life gave me a deeper appreciation for the transfixing beauty laid out in front of me. There has to be a taste of the sourness of things for us to be able to enjoy the taste of sweetness, a co-mingling of sourness with sweetness makes the sweetness stand out stronger.

O'Keeffe did others painting in which a flower grows out of the skull, as the one below... 

It reminded me of a line from the poet Christian Wiman, "joy is a plant that grows out of the soil of our sorrows." Experiences of sorrow endured with fortitude flower into a deeper form of joy. In a sense this is what Jesus was alluding to in the paradoxical saying that he who loses his life will gain it (Matt 16:25, Matt 10:39, Mark 8:35). Jesus coaches his disciples to be comfortable embracing the sorrows of life, and not take on a philosophy of suffering avoidance. It is because Jesus embraced the cross, we have new life. Our suffering is not pointless, there is a new blessing that emerges our of our suffering helping us stand strong.

Sometimes we are tempted to chase after 'positive feelings' to feel good about ourselves, as in wanting to eat comfort food, or watch comfort tv, or drink comfort drinks, or even travel the world, to engender positive emotions in oneself. It is in giving up the compulsion to chase after superficial positive feelings, and embracing life in all it suffering and joy, welcoming it as God's gift to us in the present moment that we find the deeper grounding for enduring joy in the grace of God, and then we stand stronger.

The Gospel does not take away our pain in this life at least, rather it transmutes our pain to a new paradoxical blessing. In O'Keeffe's vision we encounter life with all its incongruities, giving us a glimpse of the paradoxical call of the Gospel to embrace the suffering, the sharp and even hurtful edges of life and find in the midst of it the delight of God's grace flowering forth.