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Was Matisse A Mormon?
Interesting TV documentary last night in which Waldemar Januszczak got to demonstrate that Julius II, the warrior Pope who commissioned Michelangelo to paint the Sistine chapel ceiling, was a loonie who thought he was the Messiah.
Mchelangelo was his propagandist. Decode The Sistine Chapel and it's telling us a story about how Julius is really Jesus.
Waldemar didn't push the contemporary parallels, but in some ways it's reassuring to be reminded that George Bush isn't the first world leader to base his foreign policy on a skewed interpretation of the Bible.
And Michelangelo? Did he know what he was doing? Probably. Did he believe in what he was doing? Probably not. But what the hell- it was an excuse to paint lots of fit young men in the raw. Even so, it's a bit like discovering that Picasso did his best work while in receipt of generously filled brown envelopes from the Jehovah's Witnesses.
Mchelangelo was his propagandist. Decode The Sistine Chapel and it's telling us a story about how Julius is really Jesus.
Waldemar didn't push the contemporary parallels, but in some ways it's reassuring to be reminded that George Bush isn't the first world leader to base his foreign policy on a skewed interpretation of the Bible.
And Michelangelo? Did he know what he was doing? Probably. Did he believe in what he was doing? Probably not. But what the hell- it was an excuse to paint lots of fit young men in the raw. Even so, it's a bit like discovering that Picasso did his best work while in receipt of generously filled brown envelopes from the Jehovah's Witnesses.
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I've been reading more Spong, and I am jubilant and clear-headed and occasionally want to stand up and shout "Yes!" as I read.
I'm not surprised to hear there was a loonie or two in the pope bin over time.
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There were loony popes. And there were criminal ones. The history of the papacy is not particularly edifying. John Paul II is one of the few popes who qualifies as any sort of great man.
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It isn't that I agree with his every word, but that he is surprisingly, wonderfully mystical about the Holy, yet looks straight into our dogmatic belief structure and takes it apart fearlessly and surgically. It is like unwrapping a diamond that is wrapped in newspaper.
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We all do it. I can remember the depth of the pain I felt when it was suggested to me that the doctrines I had hitherto accepted without question didn't actually make a whole lot of sense.
I guess the fear is that we'll unwrap and unwrap and there won't be a diamond in the middle- that the wadded newspaper is going to turn out to be all there is.
Did you ever play that kiddies' game of pass the parcel? Ooh, the suspense!
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But we played a game called Whisper in which one person whispered a statement very quickly into his neighbor's ear and that person interpreted as best he could and whispered quickly into the next until at the end of the line the statement had been entirely distorted and impossible to connect to the original--"Reemie is silly" could turn into "No one likes Willy."
Which brings up a point: I was reading last night a 1960s book about the Secret Sayings of Thomas, which also discussed Essene fragments found in the 1940s. Some of the fragments were confabulations: in one, Jesus sprinkled some lake water onto the shore and flowers immediately sprang up; in another, he felt no pain during the crucifixion because, being divine, he wasn't human (that from the declared heretical sect--what was it?--that said Jesus' feet didn't actually touch the ground, as he was not a corrupt human)--
All those editors, and so many years after the real First Statement.
One must, as Spong says, begin unwrapping, and finally the human Jesus who showed us a gateway to God is revealed. (And there are other gateways.)
God, says Spong, is not a Being: God is Being itself.
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Over here "Whisper" is known as "Chinese Whispers". Heaven knows why.
I remember being told the (almost certainly apochryphal) story of how the front-line General despatched a runner with the message, "Send reinforcements; were going to advance." The first runner passed it to second runner and so on down the line until by the time the message reached headquarters it had turned into "Send three and fourpence; we're going to a dance."
I rather like the story of Jesus sprinkling water by the lake. It has a Franciscan quality.
At the end of the day I suppose it's up to each one of us to decide for ourselves which part of the Gospel message we're going to accept as "genuine". For every believer, a different Jesus- and why not?
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We tend to see these guys- Leonardo, Michelangelo et al- as towering geniuses, out there, doing their own thing, flashing their talent about, when in fact they were working for patrons who were generally very specific about the iconography they wanted.
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