Each of us is constituted of the answers we seek. When we scratch away at the seemingly settled and inevitable, we invite the sacred and its promise of peace into our life.
View the study sheet here. View recording here.
Seeing and hearing. Basic senses that we rely on to inform us of what is real. Through both its narrative and the very design of its language Torah hints that perception involves more than passive reception. It requires a level of human initiative and creativity.
Enslaved to the power of empire, the Israelites cannot hear. Because they cannot hear, Moses is unable to speak. Language itself seems to be in exile. Words may have been exchanged among the Israelites, but they carried no meaning…only the weight of endless no change.
And then there is a moaning: “No more! Let us be free! Help us to return.” Those rasps of desire tear at the façade of inevitability. They cause an irruption of divine force into their lives: “I have heard the moaning of the Israelites. I recall with revival the covenant. I will free you and deliver you. I will redeem you. And I will take you as Mine.”
Giovanni Guida is an Italian artist born in 1992. He is the artistic heir to Surrealist artist Max Ernst’s technique of grattage. Ernst would place common everyday objects under a canvass primed with layers of wet paint. He would scrape away individual layers of paint revealing new forms. “Seeing usually means you open your eyes to the outside world,” Ernst wrote. “But it’s possible to see another way…to liberate the mind from deceptive fixed memories and to investigate new areas of experience, in which the boundaries between the so-called inner world and the outer world become increasingly blurred and probably one day disappear entirely.”
Pictured here is Guida’s painting Apotheosis. Using a rich lapis lazuli, a color which for him represents the union of heaven and earth, Guida has scratched away at the surface paint to reveal an orb of light. He describes his work as hierophanic, revealing the sacred. It is “the moment in which the veil of the skin of the painting is torn in order to make visible the genesis of things,” he said. “We arrive at a spiritual transcendence of perception. There is the desire to free oneself from matter, to strive for and achieve the impossible.” It is when “the Absolute opens up to the human.”
Guida is inspired by the philosophy of Augustine of Hippo, who wrote: “Do not wander far and wide but return to yourself. Deep within there dwells the truth.” Each person is constituted of the answers they seek. Accessing those that will provide completion, fulfillment, peace requires scratching away at surface layers. A parting of the veil.
To open the Torah is to initially see a story of a journey, from Egypt to Canaan. As we scratch away at a tale of ancients, we invite an irruption of the Source of all life into ours. It is our journey. And we don’t have far to go to arrive at the promise that has always been ours.
Join us here at 7:00 p.m. (PT) on Thursday January 23 as we explore removing the veil.
Oil on canvass Apotheosis by Giovanni Guida
