Christ of St. John of the Cross

 
The previous entry about surrealism was written to introduce this one.  
Salvador Dali saw an original sketch that Saint John of the Cross drew sometime between 1775 and 1777. He said that he saw in a vision an unusual perspective of the crucifixion of Jesus . . . from above. I was a perspective one could associate with God the Father looking down on the Son He had just crucified. It looks as if it were ready to fall were it not held fast to the cross by oversized nails.  
Dali saw the sketch in 1945, and then again in 1950. In the 1940’s the artist was swerving back into the faith of his youth. He’d even met the Pope in 1947. When he saw this sketch, his surrealistic eye could now appreciate the spiritual value rendered in the sketch. And his encounter with this sketch resulted in his own version of Christ on the Cross.  
While Dali used the same perspective that he saw in the antique sketch, the concept of his painting was new and attuned to his surrealistic touch. “In 1950 I had a cosmic dream,” the artist wrote, “in which I saw this image in color and which in my dream represented the nucleus of the atom. This nucleus later took on a metaphysical sense. I considerate it the very unity of the universe, the Christ. I worked out geometrically a triangle and a circle, which summarized all my previous experiments. And I inscribed my Christ in this triangle.”  
While St. John’s sketch is an impressionistic recording of a vision in time, Dali’s painting is a rendering of an eternal Christ. Dali’s Christ, you’ll notice, has no nails holding Him to the cross. His artistic statement is of Christ of the Resurrection. Jesus here is the center and very focus of the universe itself. Hebrews 1 expresses it this way: Who being the brightness of His glory and the express image of His person, and upholding all things by the word of His power. His own Word holds him to the cross.
It took four months to finish the painting, and it was immediately panned by critics around the world for being too religious and too realistic. Even the gallery who purchased it, Kelvingrove, in Glasgow, was criticized over the $16,000 spent for it. In 1961 a deranged student entered the gallery and attacked the painting with a brick, shredding the canvas. It took four months to repair.  
Dali’s masterpiece resided in a room all by itself in Saint Mungo’s Museum of Religious Life and Art. The Spanish government offered to buy it from Scotland for $80 million, but the Scottish authorities refused.  

Surrealism and The Kingdom of God

You can see on the side of my blog that I have a Salvador Dali “picture of the day” display. Surrealism is one of my favorite art forms. I guess that’s because I believe that, above and beyond my five senses, there is a reality that is something I must pay attention to. John Wesley said (an I am convinced) that “The things that are invisible are more real than the things that are visible.” Surrealism is tribute to that higher reality. The prefix sur literally means “above”(a surtax or surcharge is a charge or tax on top of the regular charges) and, when added to realism denotes a realism or reality above what our five senses indicate. 
  Surrealism has seems to have come to describe a state of perception that people have when they experience an event that seems so bizarre and they are tempted to misapprehend it because of the way things appear at the time. It’s not that it seems too real; it seems that it can’t really be what their senses are telling them. It’s come to mean a false sense of reality. Surrealism is trying to point to a reality that is more real than what we can’t account for by ‘normal’, sensical and rational means of apperception.
One of the best cinematic demonstrations of this is when Neo was initiated out of the Matrix. In the film he discovered that he had never experienced reality, but, with the help of Morpheus and the crew of the Nebuchadnezzar, he discovered his true reality was the impersonal and slave-like confines of the real world. He awoke to find himself tethered to feeding machines and that his body’s energy was being harvested by machines, which controlled the Matrix. In a scene analogous to the new birth, he was detached from his artificial womb and ‘flushed’ into the cold harsh reality of the real world(click here to see the 'birth of Neo clip). 
  The Kingdom of God is everywhere, yet it can easily escape the attention of most people – even Christians. Everything Jesus taught about life and reality all stemmed from the reality of the Kingdom of God. Jesus said in John 3, “Most assuredly, I say to you, unless one is born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God.” What Jesus is saying that unless you have a spiritual awakening of such magnitude that it can be compared to a birthing process into a new world that you’ve only heretofore guessed at, then you’ll never come to apprehend the reality or enter into the dynamic operational reality that is the Kingdom of God. 
  The writer of Hebrews tells that God is shaking the world and will continue to shake it until there is nothing left shake loose of real reality. Hebrews 12:25-27 says See that you do not refuse Him who speaks. For if they did not escape who refused Him who spoke on earth, much more shall we not escape if we turn away from Him who speaks from heaven, whose voice then shook the earth; but now He has promised, saying, “Yet once more I shake not only the earth, but also heaven.” Now this, “Yet once more,” indicates the removal of those things that are being shaken, as of things that are made, that the things which cannot be shaken may remain.
  Another way to say this is: God is, today, shaking everything that doesn’t look like or facilitate the further implementation of the Kingdom. Plain and simple.