Mark Rothko, an American artist who died in 1970, has a special room to house his paintings at Tate Modern. His canvases are large and abstract, and seemingly very simple. The patterns are plain, the colours all rather similar and muted. If you saw one elsewhere in the gallery, hanging between the work of other ‘shoutier’ artists, you might not give them a second look. But in the Tate’s low-ceilinged Rothko Room, nine paintings hanging together in dim light, these works command your attention. The room is hushed, almost chapel-like, with benches to sit on while you contemplate these works. In such a setting, with no other distractions, the paintings come to life. As I discovered last time I visited, when you attend to them fully, they start to hum and pulse with a mystical energy. They almost become three-dimensional.
Sister Wendy Beckett, who was an art historian as well as a nun, said that the beauty of some paintings, as with so much in life, is only revealed in time. “Silence is making-friends-with-time,” she wrote. “Silence floats free with time, letting the patterns of the moments unfold at its own pace. It is a way of becoming free, not only for the practical advantage of being able to ‘see’ the beauty in what is grey, for example, but at a far deeper level. In silence we break the hold time has on us, and accept our true home is in eternity.”
Lent is a season for stillness and for discovering God in the ordinary. When we give our attention to God, freed from other distractions, then we will encounter the pulse of life in our relationship with God. As the psalmist wrote, “Let awe restrain you from sin; while you rest, meditate in silence.” (Psalm 4:4 REB)
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