Ascension: An Exploded View
Preacher: Dr Deborah Lewer, Senior Lecturer in History of Art,
School of Culture & Creative Arts, Glasgow University
Readings: Acts 1:1-11; Ephesians 1:15-23; Luke 24:44-53
‘as they were watching, he was lifted up, and a cloud took him, out of their sight…’ (Acts 1:9)
In the name of the Creator, the Redeemer and the Sustainer, Amen.
I am an art historian. In my line of work I am used to seeing remarkable products of the human imagination. Looking attentively at paintings, sculptures, drawings and more is like being led, by artists, into unseen worlds. It reminds me of a thought-provoking remark the novelist Jeanette Winterson once made. She said that “artists do the looking on our behalf in the same way as religious orders used to pray on our behalf.”
This Sunday, we mark the Ascension. It’s a time to reflect on the very beginnings of that life-changing movement sparked by a man from Nazareth. Our readings this morning from Luke’s accounts in the book of Acts, and in his Gospel, together with Paul’s passionate prayer in his letter to the Ephesians all testify to the challenges of seeing as part of a life of faith: of opening eyes, mind, and heart. In different ways, our readings today all connect vision with insight and witness to what is not only seen, but known with what Paul calls “the eyes of your heart – enlightened.”
So today, let’s turn our gaze away from those rather literal images of Ascension in some of art’s long history – so, I mean away from the kind that show us bearded apostles, open-mouthed, at a pair of pierced feet disappearing into a white cloud above them. At the Ascension of Jesus, we hear that two men, in white robes suddenly, mysteriously, appeared. All we know about them is that they asked: “Men of Galilee, why do you stand looking up towards heaven?” So let’s shift our perspective from up there, and look at something a little closer to our lives today.
This Ascension week, I’ve been thinking a lot about one particular work of art. You can see an image of it on your service sheet. People at home can find it on the website of the Tate collection. It is a remarkable installation made in 1991 by the artist Cornelia Parker, which she titled ‘Cold, Dark, Matter: An Exploded View.’
It’s not a work ‘about’ ascension, but I think it’s one that can help to open some new ways of seeing this decisive moment in the relationship between God and God’s beloved humanity.
Looking at the photograph of these shattered forms in space, you might be wondering how this unusual work of art was made? Well, Cornelia Parker first collected a lot of old, everyday objects. She put them in an ordinary garden shed. Then, with the help of the British Army, she arranged to detonate a powerful explosion, blowing to smithereens the shed and its contents. I expect it was one of the Army’s more unusual missions. The dynamite blew apart everything. The charred remains from this destruction were then gathered, and raised up, on fine, clear threads in the gallery, into suspended animation. When the fragments were elevated in this way, the artist noticed that, as she put it: “they began to lose their aura of death.” Finally, to complete the work, she lit the whole thing from inside with a single light bulb. Transformed, the broken matter is no longer earthbound. But every wounded shard plays its part in the play of light and the darkness that makes this work.
I think too, of this installation’s subtitle. It’s an ‘exploded view’. The artist wasn’t only thinking about the shattering violence of the explosion. She also took her inspiration from those technical diagrams that explain how something made of many components works – like a car engine, say. I have a weakness for fountain pens, (though I won’t start on the abomination that is disposable ink cartridges…) Often my newest writing implement comes with a handy diagram showing the dismembered parts of the pen on the page – revealing that a lot more goes into a simple object like this than meets the eye. Such diagrams also help to tell us how to repair something, or diagnose a fault. When the parts of anything are ‘exploded’ visually, it gives us a new view. It’s not a senseless scattering, but more a way to a lucid new knowledge of something never seen in such a way before. The ‘exploded view’ dismembers things, yes, but it also brings new insight.
It makes me think about how the apostles – those publicans, fishermen, tax collectors, women of the world – were sent out to proclaim the good news. But how they must have struggled, really struggled, to grasp, rationally, what the ascension they were witness to meant. What the resurrection meant. How Jesus, the man from Nazareth, could also be one with God in all eternity. It must have exploded the everyday nuts-and-bolts workings of their minds.
This Ascension week, I’ve found myself wondering about that whole period in the resurrected life of Jesus – those forty days: from those shattering new meetings – with Mary Magdalene, with Thomas, at Emmaus, with a bedraggled Peter on the beach – through to this mysterious elevation of the body that is at once a withdrawal and a wholly new kind of presence: I’ve wondered if all of this gave these disciples an “exploded view” – taking apart the old image and making a new one – of who Jesus was, and is. Surely, it’s significant that Jesus explicitly offered his broken, opened body to Thomas as a way to help him see and know. And perhaps the most important detail of the ascension story is that as Jesus withdrew, he was blessing them.
So for me, this work of art, from this island, in 1991, is an explosion in both senses: It’s catastrophic, disorienting, destructive, like a curtain, torn in two. But at the same time, in breaking things open, it reveals them – a bit like those geeky little diagrams, but a lot more exciting.
I don’t know if it helps us towards the “spirit of wisdom and revelation” that Paul prays will come when the eyes of the Ephesians’ hearts, or our hearts are opened. But, at the very least, this Ascension, in 2021, when so much of what is familiar to us has been shattered, Cold Dark Matter, might just challenge us. It might prompt us to think about and beyond the things we shore up, what we hoard and cling to, the images entrenched in our minds. It might help at least to complicate those pictures we might have safely stored away in our mind’s eye: of Jesus, in flowing robes, frozen in the act of disappearing into a cloud, a long time ago.
Perhaps in changing light and dark, in the very real shocks to our common life, in everything we know blown apart, the seeming wastedness of it all, we might yet, see God undoing and re-doing creation, all the time. Perhaps, looking at this ordinary yet extraordinary shed, we might gain an “exploded view” of what Ascension can mean for us: beyond our habits of seeing – feet, clouds or anything else.
So our question, this week, might be: what else do I need to take a new view of? What things or beliefs in my life, would benefit from the shock of some conceptual dynamite? Into what crevices should a light be shone? Do I need to look up, searching heaven to perceive God? Or might the little light that is right in the middle of our mess of shadows and brokenness be what causes us to find that all things can be made new?
Something to finish with. As an art historian and as an ordinary person of faith and of doubt, I love how art can fire our imaginations to new ways of thinking and talking about God. Poetry does this too – in the scriptures and in our world. There is one short poem that I can’t now hear without seeing Cornelia Parker’s Cold, Dark Matter. It is by the American poet Christian Wiman and it’s called: Small Prayer in a Hard Wind. Here it is:
As through a long-abandoned half-standing house
only someone lost could find,
which, with its paneless windows and sagging crossbeams,
its hundred crevices in which a hundred creatures hoard
and nest,
seems both ghost of the life that happened there
and living spirit of this wasted place,
wind seeks and sings every wound in the wood
that is open enough to receive it,
shatter me God into my thousand sounds…
Amen.