Vanitas Still Life,
Painted by Herman Henstenburgh (1667-1726),
Circa 1700,
Watercolour, gouache, and gum arabic on parchment
© Metropolitan Museum, New York
Vanitas Still Life,
Painted by Herman Henstenburgh (1667-1726),
Circa 1700,
Watercolour, gouache, and gum arabic on parchment
© Metropolitan Museum, New York
All Souls' Day
Matthew 11:25-30
Jesus exclaimed, ‘I bless you, Father, Lord of heaven and of earth, for hiding these things from the learned and the clever and revealing them to mere children. Yes, Father, for that is what it pleased you to do. Everything has been entrusted to me by my Father; and no one knows the Son except the Father, just as no one knows the Father except the Son and those to whom the Son chooses to reveal him.
‘Come to me, all you who labour and are overburdened, and I will give you rest. Shoulder my yoke and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. Yes, my yoke is easy and my burden light.’
Reflection on the gouache on paper
It is highly likely that we have all lost some friends or family over the past year. Today is a day where we pray for all of them. Even though they passed away, we still love them. And as Christians we can express our love for them through prayer. We know that so many of our friends and family members were good people. But we also know that they were people. They made mistakes and had shortcomings, hence we pray for them today.
As Catholics, we believe that when we die our souls can go to three places: heaven, hell or purgatory. Souls who go to heaven, are those who died in a state of perfect grace and communion with God. Hell is where the souls end up if people died in a state of mortal sin. The middle place, so to speak, where our souls may go is purgatory. It is thought that that is where most people, free of mortal sin, but still in a state of lesser sin, probably end up. Purgatory is thus a place where the souls can be 'purged' and cleansed before they are invited into Heaven (see Catechism of the Catholic Church nr. 1030). Our prayers today can directly help these souls. Precisely how our prayers for the dead help them to attain Heaven is deeply mysterious, but we believe that it does have a beneficial effect.
Life is indeed transient. Before we know it, we leave these earthly shores. This very thought led to a whole style of genre paintings, emerging in the 17th century. At a time of great mercantile wealth and military conflicts in Europe, paintings and drawings were made to remind the viewer of the transience of life. These vanitas paintings were filled with symbolic references. Our highly detailed watercolour on paper by Dutch artist Herman Henstenburgh depicts music sheets (giving the earthly pleasure of listening and the ephemerality of human existence), a flute (whose sounds would seduce people), a blown-out candle, a knocked-over hourglass, and blossoming flowers, all surrounding a skull. No matter how much we surround ourselves with earthly delights and excitement, we will all end up like the skull in our painting.
But today, on All Souls, we are called to remember those who have died, especially those who have died in the past year. We pray for their joyful reunion with our Loving Creator.
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Mi reflexión sobre el día de hoy: Hoy es un día para recordar. No podemos olvidar que nuestra morada en la tierra no es la definitiva. ¡Nos morimos, pero somos hijos de la esperanza en Cristo!. Nuestros difuntos nos marcan el camino: un camino lleno de dificultades, de invitaciones a no caminar, a seguir otros caminos …. Dejémonos llevar del recuerdo, no de la melancolía. Los nuestros están en buenas manos, están en las manos de Dios. La muerte no destruye nuestra vida, solo la trasforma
Consolémonos unos a otros, sabiendo que , aunque nos entristece la certeza de morir, nos llena de gozo saber que compartiremos la vida con Cristo.
Thank you Elvira. You write in very clear good Spanish which I can fully understand although I have to reply in English! Your faith is stated in elegant terms – I am pleased to read it and learn!
O quam cito transit gloria mundi !
The American in me makes me think of Patton and this scene from the movie with George C. Scott:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uPiH-LBna5I
The Roman in me makes me think of this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p0o72VvEv1s
My country and the West are in an ‘interesting’ time…….we must pray our leaders know what they are doing…..
I fear they have opened Pandora’s box…..how this decade and century ends is anyone’s guess.
Patton … dank je wel.
Nu oorlog overal … 🥲
We are on the edge of a volcano and we don’t quite know when it’s going to blow.
Isaiah 8:40
The grass withers, the flower wilts,
but the Word of our God stands forever.
Saint Gertrude the Great, OSB (1256 – 1302) was a German Benedictine nun and mystic.
A wonderful pray to say for the month of November:
The Prayer of St. Gertrude the Great……
Eternal Father, I offer Thee the Most Precious Blood of Thy Divine Son, Jesus,
in union with the Masses said throughout the world today,
for all the Holy Souls in Purgatory,
for sinners every where,
for sinners in the universal church,
those in my own home and within my family.
Amen.
C. S. Lewis on Purgatory:
“Our souls demand Purgatory, don’t they? Would it not break the heart if God said to us, “It is true, my son, that your breath smells and your rags drop with mud and slime, but we are charitable here and no one will upbraid you with these things, nor draw away from you. Enter into the joy.”? Should we not reply, “With submission, sir, and if there is no objection, I’d rather be cleaned first.” “It may hurt, you know.”–“Even so, sir.”
I assume that the process of purification will normally involve suffering. Partly from tradition; partly because most real good that has been done me in this life has involved it.” (Letters to Malcolm, Letter XX)
Good old C.S. Lewis, had a terrific mind.
I agree. I find it astounding that as an Anglican, he still believed in the Catholic doctrine of Purgatory.
“Many of the core beliefs he embraced as a “mere Christian” placed him decidedly on the Catholic end of the theological spectrum. He believed in the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist, which he referred to as the Blessed Sacrament; he practiced auricular confession; he vehemently opposed female ordination, condemning in forthright terms the danger of having “priestesses in the Church”; he declared his belief in purgatory and in the efficacy of praying for the dead; and, last but not least, he crusaded against the errors and heresies of theological modernism. It is perhaps, therefore, not so surprising that C.S. Lewis has ushered so many people into the Catholic Church.” From an article by Joseph Pearce in The Catholic World Report.
Hope this is helpful. Maybe the only thing that stopped him converting was the culture of his childhood and youth in a Protestant Northern Irish family.
Most interesting.
Thank you Andy. Great words.
Respice post te, hominem te esse memento, memento mori – nam mors indecepta.
Look behind you, remember that you are human, remember that you will die—for Death is inevitable.
My thoughts about death are:
It is written God knew us before we were born. Therefore, I believe I am a spiritual being having a human experience. I believe my human life is to learn/experience something spiritual in this life. I can positively say I am more loving, compassionate, understanding, kind, forgiving and gentle than I was years ago. I believe when I die, I will return to the place I came from. I think of that place as being in the presence of God; other’s call that place heaven. I believe I will be with God not because of who I am or anything I did or learned, relearned, or unlearned; I will be with God because of who God is. I believe God is Love; if that is true it is impossible for God not to love me, or else God would not be God. I also think everyone who ever lived will go on to be in God’s presence. I think of hell as where some people deny they are in the presence of God even though they are in heaven. God will know us after we die just as God knew us before we were born to this world.
That is wonderful George 😄. I have printed it off.
Chazbo and Noelle, another of my beliefs…I believe everything I believe is not true.😊
🤷🏼
That speaks to me, George.
Lovely George- thankyou.
spaceforgrace, see my reply above to Chazbo and Noelle. I like your identity (or whatever it’s called) a lot.😊
Yes George: and what if ‘heaven’ is not so much a place, as a way of BEING in God’s presence of love; the “Way” of existence-infinite as Vs. an ‘experience’-temporal? (CCC # 2794-6)
‘I bless you, Father, Lord of heaven and of earth, for hiding these things from the learned and the clever and revealing them to mere children.”
Your reflection reminds me of Lewis’s apt description of this dynamic of ‘heavens denial’ in his final volume, “The Last Battle”. I’ve just now taken up the, ‘Children’s story about children’s entry into Heaven’ – from the 12th chapter on – MOST FASCINATING to revisit! Interestingly, ALL those who have passed through the “Stable” (Ref, re: the portal of the incarnate ), including ‘The Incarnate One’ -Aslan/Christ – are now in a state of ‘real-Reality’s enlightenment.’ However there are those, as you point out, that are apparently still “…blind in the dark” as the dwarf Diggle and Co. insist (p. 131). It is with these that C S finesses a very nuanced understanding of God’s omnipotent/ omnipresent Love: “What I can, and cannot do” (p 134)… at the cost of love itself.
It is in such figures and parables that a Childlike understanding thrives and is able to see/reveal the Truths of God’s Mystery, clearly and ‘easily’. Is, ‘sin, suffering and death itself, truly inanimate and devoid of life; ‘too heavy a burden’ ? As Henstenburgh ‘vanitasic still life’ reveals, to the innocent inquisitive child’s eye: it is not really a ‘still’ life; there is the butterfly in flight, the rising smoke, the creeping snail and even the apparent life/growing of the cut-flower’s that engulf death’s mask – the divine irony is awesome. And the hourglass itself is seemingly in the midst of ‘falling/failing’ – its sand still held aloft in its glass globe … before shattering. “…Before the silver cord is severed, and the golden bowl is broken; before the pitcher is shattered at the spring, and the wheel broken…” (Ecc. 12:6).
Chapter 13 ends with Aslan’s epic proclamation ” Now it is Time!’ then louder ‘ TIME!’; then so loud that it could have shaken the stars, ‘TIME.’ The door flew open.”(p 135). Indeed, Heaven is that time when we will fully know, even as we have been fully known (1 cor 13:12) … that time we begin NOW.
Love your stuff. A bit of mysticism.
Thimas, Fr. Rohr is in error. I suggest you google Dr. Brant Pitrie on purgatory.
Good to hear from you Anthony.
Welcome back Anthony. I think Fr. Rohr is in error on many things.
I’m not getting this painting. Is it giving a thumbs-up to death? Most vanitas paintings have a darkness, a resignation about them; this seems frivolous, the sort of thing we did as students, like putting traffic cones on the heads of statues. It reminds me of the Mexican obsession with skulls – calaveras – which are so garishly/beautifully (depending on your view point) decorated for El Dia de los Muertos, when they can even be made out of sugar. The flowers are superbly painted, identifiable. Only the marigold is beginning to go over; it is being hopefully investigated by a butterfly. The slug looks harmless. The whole gives me an impression of levity.
Today we have wild weather here in the west; our electricity may well be cut off. How helpless we are still in the face of the forces of nature, so vividly described at the end of the book of Job. Maybe this is a time to surrender to the sadness autumn often brings, to think of our dead, to contemplate their lives, the good bits and the bad, and to pray they will find their home with God. Even though I’m elderly, society tells me, I can’t imagine being dead. It sounds ridiculous, but it is challenging to think of losing all the consciousness of life, the physical warmth, the use of the senses, the imagination, the vividness of our physical world. I need to think more about my “latter end”, am I acceptable to Jesus Christ? – he has plenty to redeem.
The dead will always be in the majority, and somehow the Latin prayer fits this day of All Souls, in its deeply serious beauty:
Requiem aeternam dona eis, Domine.
Et lux perpetua luceat eis.
Fidelium animae, per misericordiam Dei, requiescant in pace. Amen
I agree, Noelle, such a beautiful prayer. Thank you.
Have a good day, SfG, so helpful to share. 🌦
It is getting better.
That’s good to hear. Have been thinking more about the last paragraph of today’s Gospel: “Shoulder my yoke…my yoke is easy and my burden light.” Jesus is not saying there aren’t constraints, and heavinesses, but they are bearable. Found the most lovely photograph of a Shaker yoke, light in weight, of exquisite design and simplicity – an ox might be glad to wear it! Wish I could reproduce the photo….. 🌻
I’ve got loads of photos but I’m not allowed to attach them. The file is too big seems to be the reason.
They can be copied, but can’t be pasted, have often tried…
Thanks Noelle for your reflection and prayer.
Gracias. This morning I shared a short prayer for the dead with a lady from Peru, who happened to be at a coffee morning – an unexpected privilege.
Handel’s setting of todays text is one of the most beautiful pieces of music I know. It never fails to bring tears to my eyes: not tears of grief precisely, just the tears which refresh the spirit by release of emotion. I used to listen to it often when my husband was undergoing radical treatment.
‘Protestants don’t believe in prayers for the dead’, ; well, I am a Protestant, I suppose, in that I am not a member of the Roman Catholic Church* , and I always say a prayer today for all those whom I have known who are no longer in this mortal world.. Why? I think because it seems a better way of honouring them than simply remembering, and I think God likes it.
* What am I doing here, then? Well, I value the daily observance greatly, all the more since I cannot subscribe to the Church in which I was brought up.
I feel so happy to know that CA posters come from other faith backgrounds. I learn a lot from my friends from other denominations by talking as well as going to their services. We should cross paths far more than we do. The sentiments contained in the hymn “O thou who at thy Eucharist didst pray..” always resonate with me.
Blessings Niobe.
Well put, Patricia.
Morning Niobe. As this site is called Christian Art, surely all Christians are welcome, including the wobblers, the unsure, even the cynical. Perhaps Father Patrick has said/will say something about this?
A couple of questions Niobe. If you don’t mind. What is the name of Handel’s piece. His was the first music I came to love. I was most impressed that he composed the whole of the Messiah in under a fortnight!
What was it that means that you can’t subscribe to the Catholic Church. Maybe it’s too big a topic for here…..
Oh, I have not expressed myself clearly! I was born , baptised and confirmed Anglican, and I was a regular member of that congregation for many decades. I cannot follow the path that the current administration ( I can’t define it as leadership) has taken, so I am without the other two or three…..But so were the hermits in the Egyptian desert.
The music I meant is the conflation of Isaiah ‘ he will feed his flock, ‘ which then morphs into this reading..