I am a Christian. My editor thinks it matters what sort, and I guess it does. The reason it might matter is that the sort of Christian I am is evangelical, and these days evangelicals are mostly known for voting for Trump (I didn’t), preaching prosperity (I haven’t), and taking mission trips to Mexico (I might’ve). They aren’t known for mysticism.
So I guess it matters because the type of Christian I am doesn’t explain why I would decide to spend an entire day sitting in front of a 32-by-20 inch, 400-year-old painting of The Crucifixion in a very public art museum.
This is why: I don’t like who I am. I don’t like that I hurt people, and that I’ve kissed too many girls, and that I have this nasty habit of getting close with people and then shoving them away. I don’t like that I am cocky, and bitter, and anxious, and selfish, and lonely, and biting, and horrible. Sin, in the Christian mind, is a failure, and it is also disease.
In the submission of Christ to cross, I see failure forgiven, disease destroyed. There is hope: not the sunset-colored feeling, but the cool, quiet knowledge, like a river pebble you keep in your pocket, that your darkness will not always stand.
I sat on a grey padded bench for almost seven hours to remember hope, and speak with God, and listen to a painting of a dying man speak. To worship.
I sat on a bench in a public room because we do not have to be hermits to meditate, and because we amplify each other’s spirits (have you ever been to a rock concert?). It is better to worship together.
I sat in front of this particular painting, El Greco’s Christ on the Cross in gallery N205 in the North Pavilion at the Getty Museum in Los Angeles, because I’d passed it once on a visit and had been transfixed. Crucifixion images don’t usually look like this (though, come to find out, El Greco has painted similar images).
There is a word: numinous, and it means that something suggests the presence of the divine. You might believe in specific divinity, or a vague one, or only the ability of art to suggest a thing-past-the-edge-of-senses, but if you plan on speaking with art, it helps to admit that it is numinous.
10:51 a.m. His body is bloodless, and his face is upturned. He is awake, and not dead. And he is looking at someone up there. A raft of dark clouds echoes the twist of his body; the light breaks in toward his hip.
He is on the cross, but he is not pinned to it. He floats over it, while the black clouds suck the light from around him.
Most of the picture frames in this room are gold-gilt, elaborate and sculpted. El Greco’s Christ hangs next to an entryway. On the other side of the entryway is a massive painting of Fortune and Chance. They are giants, with crimson and gold fabrics to enshroud their nudity. El Greco’s Christ is dwarfed by comparison. In the center of the room is my bench, and a small marble statue of a woman bathing on a pedestal. Across the room, a massive Italian noble poses in front of a fake pillar, and Penitent Mary Magdalene’s shoulders tremble under a striped shawl. Magdalene is in the corner too, peeking out from under a brown shawl that looks gold in the light of resurrected Jesus on Easter morning.
El Greco’s Christ is hardly even a body. He’s so bright, he’s like a flame. If you squint, you lose the detail, and he becomes a dancer, arms cast wide in worship. His body doesn’t bend in agony, it sways to a beat.
11:15 a.m. A group of small ones walks in, and the girl at the front sees the bathing nude, in marble.
“Ewwww!,” she cries.
Her teacher is calm and annoyed: “There are going to be people with no clothes and that’s okay, because it’s art.”
The tour guide is British and patient, and gathers the children ‘round. “At the time,” she says, “they believed in lots of gods. Ten, twenty gods. How are they going to show the difference between gods and humans? The code is that the people without clothes are gods. They’re so proud of how beautiful they are, and they certainly don’t need clothes.”
A boy named Jesse points at a painting of a saint’s vision of Christ dead. Christ has strawberry jam on his hands and grey lips and a loincloth and no genitals. His mother and the one he loved mourn at the foot of the cross. “I know who that is,” says Jesse.
The tour guide is British: “That’s one of the gods that people believe in.”
They walk past me to a painting of Venus trying to keep virile Adonis from dying. I don’t think Adonis knows he is dying. But Jesse sees Christ on the Cross.
The Man has a tasseled rag covering his genitals, made of rough white paint strokes. He is proud of how beautiful he is. His body wrenches to the left.
The tour guide smells a teaching opportunity. “What’s the difference between these two paintings?”
That one has a lot of color. This one doesn’t. That one has a lot of people in it. This one doesn’t. This one has bones in it. That one doesn’t. A little girl recognizes The Man. “He has blood on his foot and on his hands because they hurt him. They put nails inside him.”
The tour guide is calm. “Yes. It’s a really hard painting.”
In the background of the painting, as small as brushstrokes, three horsemen ride away from the hill. His mother and the one he loved are not at the foot of the cross.
Only me and Jesse and the girl, gazing up at Christ, and Christ into the heavens.
12:30 p.m. I go to pick up a free audio guide: one of those museum iPods you wear around your neck on a lanyard, where you can type in a number code and a pre-recorded voice will tell you two minute’s worth of everything about the thing you’re looking at. The girl at the desk is tired and having trouble explaining to a tourist that he needs to leave a photo ID. She points to a placard with instructions in four or five different languages. I smile when I get to the front of the line. She raises the corners of her mouth and keeps her lips sealed; her eyes don’t move.
My audio guide is very impressed with the black velvet pantaloons that the large Italian noble wears, and reveals that Titian moved Penitent Magdalene’s left hand from her bible to her heart.
El Greco, the guide says, meant Christ on the Cross as a devotional piece. Christ gazes up to the heavens, entirely in peace, to remind the viewer to trust God in the turbulence. (I think that Rest In Peace should be wished to the living as well as the dead).
This wasn’t El Greco’s Vision of Saint John or Burial of Count Orgaz, massive and public and crowded with figures. Hell, no one even knew that this Christ on the Cross (1600-1610) existed until a Spanish family found it in a flea market in 1950, and it’s not even the only crucified Christ that El Greco painted. The Getty enshrined this one in 2000: another table scrap of the old masters. El Greco is famous for inspiring Picasso.
1:15 p.m. I return the audio guide to the woman behind the Getty Visitor’s Desk. As much as knowledge can contribute to the heart, it seems wrong to research a devotional painting.
And I return to El Greco and my bench.
Two skulls and four femurs rest at the foot of the cross. A muddy forest opposite the fleeing horsemen has curved trunks like a rib cage. The horsemen ride toward a ghostly town in the distance. This is full of death. It is a hard painting. Christ is resigned, surrendered, abandoned.
O, can I be this serene while the world rages?
Can I dance through thunderstorms, my feet in the trees?
Can I look to God (god, gods, divinity, fate)
Can I be this calmly abandoned?
A middle-aged woman is transfixed by the painting. To the shock of a woman next to her, she inches closer and closer, and starts to reach out as if to caress the canvas. A beat passes, and she pulls her hand back.
Behind Christ, in from the right, the clouds rip apart like a curtain.
2:30 p.m. In a room down the hall, Christ is being crowned with thorns (my back hurts, so I’m taking a walk). A man uses a thick branch to force the twisted crown lower over his brow. He is not calm like El Greco’s Christ; he is expressionless. Christ is not allowed to show pain. He’s got to be humble and take it, with two open hands.
How cruel we are! If Christ lived or never did, we have invented deaths like this: by thorn and nail and theft of breath. If this death did not redeem us it is only proof of our horror.
3:10 p.m. Teach me, Lord. Let my soul calm. Let me find you. To be with you, near you is what I know that I need.
This painting is all substance; there is nothing to touch. El Greco sets Christ off with a layer of black so that he hovers, an elemental body over the chaos. The cup which the father has given him, shall he not drink it?”
I open my bible and read. Christ dies in five Gospels: Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. And El Greco.
For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor any created thing will separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ our Lord.
4:15 p.m. This moment, Jesus’ death, came at the end of the darkness. It was nine hours of darkness, then God forsook him and The Man declared it finished.
So this storm is not arriving, it is splitting, departing.
The clouds rend like curtains and the light tumbles in through this moment of humble anguish. The dark is about to swallow him whole, and from here, he is not crucified. He dances out of the darkness, a flame, mutating torment into joy. The fire swallows the darkness.
Still, he gazes up. Is it dark, where he looks? Or light? In his wake, the darkness tears like curtains.
5:12 p.m. The gallery is just me and the attendant, who has seen too much of me. A man thumps into the room, leaning on a stout cane. “What time is it?” “5:17”
This is true: I hurt people, and I’ve kissed too many girls, and I have this nasty habit of getting close with people and then shoving them away. I’ve been cocky, and bitter, and anxious, and selfish, and lonely, and biting, and horrible. I have failed, and I am diseased.
And this is what I hear: God Incarnate — in meat, in bone prone to human horror but not consumed by it — chose death like this, with his arms stretched into worship by iron spikes. And when he did, a temple curtain split like a breaking storm, and the Light tumbled in like joy saying: My beloved, I am here.
Jesus’ face. I have spent so much time gazing on his body, and so little on his face. It doesn’t make sense; it is calm. The rest of the painting — the clouds, the body, the horsemen, the town, the ribcage forest — is anguish.
He is so jarringly serene, I don’t want to look.