The Gaze of Love: Meditations on Art and Spiritual Transformation

by Wendy Beckett

Book Overview

This volume offers images of 20th-century paintings paired with simple reflections designed to evoke and celebrate the spirituality of contemporary art. Avoiding the familiar imagery of religious... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0060608285
• ISBN13: 9780060608286
• Release Date: January 1994
• Publisher: HarperOne
• Length: 111 Pages
• Weight: 0.80 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.4" x 7.5" x 9.7"

Customer Reviews

The eyes are the window of the soul.

Sister Wendy helps us to use our eyes to find our way to God by looking at art - mostly modern. Her responses are always original and perceptive. For instance, she looks at a painting done in 1983 by Shanti Panchal. It is of a dark-skinned man, brooding in a sombre way, wrapped up defensively in a huge blanket, sitting on a sofa. She sees it as a statement about human dignity and privacy. She says:" (This man) is a dark enigma. He is exposed to our view externally full in the front of the painting, darkly brooding in his purple shawl, ... No-one can take his privacy from him, no swathing can impair the interior freedom that makes him a man. ... Panchal shows us something of human dignity, its independence of anything but God. ... We may always feel straitjacketed by our personality ... hemmmed in by our environment or heredity, imprisoned by our past weaknesses and sins. How we feel is unimportant. God is a God of soaring freedom but He can only lift into His peace a heart that allows itself to be still before Him, and trust, to be afraid and helpless and yet at peace, because what is deepest within us knows that His Presence is Salvation."That is essential Sister Wendy. Every word is chosen with crystal precision to glance the light at us in just the right way. And she always points through the painting and past her own perceptions to God who is waiting to meet us in prayer. Dip into Sister Wendy's book so that you can dip into the well of Living Water within yourself. You will never be sorry that you did.