From the book reviews on the road series:
Re-reading a tender toned but transformational little book by an old friend and mentor called, “Mystery of The Night Cafe” (Hidden key to the spirituality of Vincent Van Gogh):
Having finished this one again, and been changed by it, as all great books request of us. Here are some of my many heart’s “take aways”!
Great art let’s us suffer while having hope-that is, increases our empathy for one another. In short, it invites us to step into another’s shoes for a moment to know what it’s like from their perspective, and as we do, try on another’s shoes, we somehow become more comfortable in our own! That is one of the points, great art makes, and is part of how it changes us each into an image more like how we really are. The truer images, we really are!
We begin to slip off from our own skin, as we behold another’s. We know ourselves, through loving others. We start to know the own contours of our own clothing as we try on the suits of another! Empathy teaches us to be. Even St Paul said, we must be clothed with Christ, before we know ourselves. We lose our names to find them. That saint didn’t know his name, until He saw Another! We know ourselves, by the degree to which we are willing to see another in that Light of Love, as Paul might put it.
When we engage with the artist’s imagination, our own is invited into a transformational encounter with what that artist saw well-ie through love’s lens. How we see, determines how we know, as they say. How deeply we see, determines how well.
At the back of “The Night Cafe” is the well lit room past all the drunken derelict’s long nightcap.
And in the painting which this book keyholes Vincent’s spiritual journey through, there is that slanted hope room illuminated in the background, implied as a passage way out, in this one of Vincent’s seemingly bleakest works. One in which, he said, i tried to put all of human suffering in one cafe, and then paint it with “Japanese gaiety” or joy. Again, Vincent’s favorite verse was from St Paul…”rejoicing in suffering always!” I tried to put all our suffering in one room but with a way out that was present in the room!
Van Gogh, the failed minister and preacher’s son, tells his gospel by foregrounding places of suffering, where humanity is depraved. But the invitation to empathize is always there is all his art. As Dr Edward’s points out, increasing our empathy for one another and creation is one of the primary functions of art. As great art, contextualizes our shared suffering, we enter together, through our imaginations, into an enlightening hope for healing.
This one reads like a detective novel as well, and has such a caring tender tone, that you want to see what you are being invited to see, even as you start to see it.
As, Martin Buber, philosopher and aesthetician, would say- great art, activates your thou as you encounter the thou of the other. And to the degree that you encounter the other, you become more yourself! Beauty is always in the “I” of the beholder-that is, if my deeper self engages with yours, we will have a transformative encounter which should and will change us both.
Compassion occurs as we engage our imaginations in loving, and therefore knowing one another. And, to the degree we engage, even with art, we are changed by that risking Loving encounter!
And, this is one of the roles of art. Or, as Thomas Merton, put it, everything rest on how we imagine God. If we image Him as a brutal dictator, an abusive father or system, or as a loving kind patient father who tenderly calls us by name as kids. It’s also true with one another.
Are the people in this painting hopeless losers, or kings and queens being readied to come into the right light?! Regardless, in Vincent’s vision, they have already become poetry!
Of course, i was blessed to go to Arles, and several other significant places in Van Gogh’s life (including the Art Academy in Antwerp which my wife and I lived near for many years, and where Vincent attended art school) years back, and have deeply encountered many of the works by this now very famous artist, who was of course, penniless in his life. A king without a crown, that fellow, not unlike the fellows he painted in this famous piece! I always felt his paintings were little sermons of beholding.
Like Marc Chagall, my best art friend and guide into what can be seen of the unseen in the seen, Vincent illuminated the imagination towards the act of encountering what was true and real around us, without dualizing life. That in Christ, the Kingdom had come into our common suffering, and found us in our beer joints and stupors, as Vincent put it in an early sermon the miners in Belgium; before he was a painter. And both did so in their own authentic styles.
And that they pulled back a veil around their subjects to illuminate a more luminous backdrop for daily common life. That a beer joint is also always a holy temple, when seen in the right light!
Finding the luminous in the ordinary was one of Vincent’s great gifts, which he shared open heartedly through his art. And invited us to also see the water, not just the fish, in this enormous aquarium we all live in. He invited us into the well lit back room of our cafes at night.
And this little meditative book, does something similar-opens our hearts to more of what is real, that is, really there and here (that Kingdom in our midst! where we move and have our breath!)-if we have eyes to see.
How we see, matters, and this little book teaches us to see better. Helpful when a book, or any other art, can do that much. Illuminating. Thanks to Cliff Edwards for being our guide through Vincent’s “I” and eyes into a deeper, ever more spiritual or truer way of seeing.
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