What is an Image Pilgrimage?
When was the last time a piece of art deeply moved you? It was just two weeks ago for me....
When was the last time a piece of art deeply moved you?
It was just two weeks ago for me.
Day 7, our last full day in Iceland, was spent with me and my friend Kurt, driving around the Snæfellnes Peninsula, just 90 minutes north of Reykjavik.
This summer was Kurt’s much needed Sabbatical, and he had three trips planned - one with his family, one with his boys, and now this trip, one with his friends. Four of us met up a week ago in Rek and began exploring the northern and southern regions of Iceland. We had so many adventures in those days together that I’m sure I’ll write about them sometime, but eventually our two friends had to return stateside and that left Kurt and I with a couple days together.
Iceland is wild. On our second day there I asked the group, “How would you even describe this place to friends back home?” Kurt had the best answer:
“It feels like a landscape that shouldn’t have people here yet.”
With its exaggerated mountains, endless waterfalls, multiple glaciers, and geothermal wonders, it really does feel like a land before time.
Day seven of international travel is an interesting day because in the typical cycle of a week it can be considered the sabbath day, a day of rest. And you feel it too. After the initial adrenaline of trying to fit as much in as you can in the first half of the week, by this day our only goals were to do whatever sparked our curiosity and to talk about the questions we had been pondering.
The questions we were carrying with us.
Before the trip I read a book called The Art of Pilgrimage by Phil Cousineau which framed travel as a way of partaking in pilgrimage. He proposes that two sets of people can be at the same tourist attraction having completely different experiences there, and what makes the difference is the intentionality of why you are making this journey. What are your questions? What questions are you carrying with you to whatever place you are journeying to? This is what you must get in touch with and use the medium of travel to excavate that conversation in you. The summary of the book is this: that the travel destination does not hold the treasure but the key that you bring home to open the treasure awaiting you in your normal life.
Fresh eyes to see what has always been there.
I had been holding my questions throughout the trip and by this seventh day I felt invigorated by the work that lay ahead of me as I returned home. The work of being an artist.
For me, the last year has been kind of a sabbatical I needed but not the one I would have chosen. We moved from Austin, TX back to Vancouver, WA to be back by friends, family, and my wife’s business partners. Our oldest son has gone through a series of eye surgeries to restore vision in his right eye that experienced a retina detachment last year. It’s taken me almost a full year to find a studio space that I can do the next season of work in, but not without a lot of moving boxes and painting walls. I’ve moved so many boxes in the last year. Seriously, I feel PTSD every time anyone asks me to carry something heavy. In some ways those endless heavy boxes of my stuff symbolize the heavy questions I’ve been carrying over this last year.
What does it mean to be an artist at this age?
Not necessarily what do I want to do, but HOW do I want to do that work?
Can I work from a place of radical honesty with the pressures of social media critique?
Did I pass the zenith of cultural interest in my work? What does that do to me moving forward?
Am I just good? Can I ever be great? Have I pushed myself in the possibilities of undiscovered potential?
Can a public pilgrim have this much melancholic doubt?
Is the creative life always this lonely?
Admittingly, I didn’t really have one perfectly articulated question when I came to Iceland. In fact my first day there I would silently whisper to the Giver in between activities, “What are my questions?” It was in a statue park next the big cathedral in Reykjavik that exhumed the conversation in me. It’s a long story for another post, but I was blown away by the deeply layered work in this statue park. So much so that in my stirring I heard a voice rising in me stating “You’re an artist. This is what you do. You’re in this community of creative pilgrims.”
This wasn’t a revelation as much as an intimate and kind divine remembrance. For over a decade now I’ve been trying to create a visual vocabulary for the spiritual journey. An image library for the words and experiences we’ve corporately gone through as human pilgrims. Ancient sacred texts are alive today because they are not just about a story that happened back then but they point to a similar story unfolding right now.
In this unforeseen sabbatical year, the way I came to describe what I’m doing is I’m making an Image Pilgrimage. First, I love that image is in pilgrimage. It feels like the artist way, because as I’ve been going through life, I’m finding and creating images as markers along the way. The question I always ask myself when trying to understand some deep philosophical and theological idea is “What would be the image for this idea? How would I image this concept?” I’m not saying I’m not smart, but I’ve come to believe that my most helpful contribution can be in the offering of a visual translation to the endless ocean of words found in the categories of philosophy, psychology, theology, eschatology. I mean, a picture is worth a thousand words, right?
This next season of work for me is to be very intentional about that visual vocabulary. What are the words that we need updated and more helpful imagery for? What symbols and pictures help us move into a more sacred and faithful wholeness? What are the contextual images that we need to illuminate us to the same story that happened back then that is happening right now?
All of this was swirling around my head and heart on that seventh day drive in Iceland.
Our last stop in the Snæfellnes Peninsula was a little port town called Stykkisshólmur. For the life of me, I still don’t know how to pronounce any of these Icelandic words. This town appeared in a scene in the movie The Secret Life of Walter Mitty and it is also host to one of the wildest church buildings I’ve ever seen.
The Stykkishólmskirkja Church took almost twenty years to complete. They began work in the mid seventies and is wasn’t completed until 1990. Its spaceship of a church, with its wild Klingon like bell tower and Yosemite Half Dome sanctuary in the back. It should be a main tourist attraction in Barcelona, not some hidden away gem on the storm battered coast of an Atlantic island.
We arrived at the church just before 5pm in the pelting wind and rain. The parking lot was empty and the sign on the church door revealed why: it closed at 4pm. We peaked into the windows to try to see what was inside and to our dismay it looked awesome. Ugh, I wish we would have gotten there earlier! Before I walked back to the car, I tried pulling on the front doors and low and behold, the church was open!
We walked into the silent sanctuary with the nervous apprehension you only experience when you feel like you shouldn’t be where you are at presently, like being in a part of your friends house that’s just for the parents, or being in a VIP section when you know you don’t have the correct credentials. But when would we ever be here again in our lives?! We must see what’s here.
The sanctuary was exquisitely simple in true Scandinavian form. Wood beams lined the ceiling connecting to point in the center of the room. There was a grand array of organ pipes to one side, and the ceiling was littered with Edison style light bulbs, which I can only imagine makes the room feel like a bed of starlight when they are illuminated in all their subtle ambience. But there, at the focal point, floating above the communion table, glowed a painting that made me have to sit down while I reflected on it’s offering.
Incarnation. The mystery of paradox. The infinite amidst the finite.
In this painting, Mary shows us the Christ that has been freely given to the world. A Grace given to us - loving presence not withheld. The presence of the Divine vulnerably in our midst. It’s a painting that has been done thousands of times and throughout time.
But what blew me away is how Icelandic painter Kristin Gunnlaugsdóttir contextualizes this offering into her own culture:
Mary’s gown is the Northern Lights!
….hovering over the Icelandic lava landscape.
Just a few days earlier we had witnessed the Northern Lights in the north of Iceland out of sheer luck of being in the right place at the right time. The Aurora Borealis are a phenomenon caused by solar winds from our Sun interacting with the gases in our atmosphere. The dissipation of the Suns energy into light creates a sky cathedral of colors that has drawn pilgrims from all over the world. It truly is one of the natural wonders of the world, and yet it is very fickle and happenstance.
Talking with one local, he mused that we had seen a particular wonderful display. Sometimes they only last a few minutes. Sometimes they happen when there is cloud cover. It’s always worth stopping what you’re doing and pay attention to when they come because you never know when they’re going to happen. It’s always an unforeseen gift.
Just like mystical moments.
Or sacred happenings.
Or Love, really. Being in the presence of Love is a gift.
I’ve never seen a better Icon of Incarnation than this random painting in a small port town on an island in the middle of the north Atlantic ocean that has spoken to the unforeseen gift of Love in our midst. I’m so grateful this artist contextualized this old story into a story that was happening right now, in her land, in her culture, in her life.
It pointed me to the same invitation I have on this Image Pilgrimage.
I hope to tell those stories and share those images here.
I hope you’ll join.