William Kurelek’s joy

Posted on December 18, 2009 by doradueck

This week, in the local used books establishment, I found a real treasure: Kurelek’s Canada (Pagurian Press, 1978), which is no longer in print. It contains more than 30 reproductions in colour, as well as some in black and white, of the paintings of William Kurelek (1927-1977), and also his writing about them. And all this for only a dollar!

I’ve liked Kurelek’s work ever since I first encountered it, through A Prairie Boy’s Winter (1973) and A Prairie Boy’s Summer (1975), and then his wonderful A Northern Nativity, which pictures the holy family in a variety of ethnic and geographic settings — from a fisherman’s hut to an Amish Mennonite buggy to a boxcar to a soup kitchen. For many years, until they became just too faded, we had four framed calendar prints of some of the prairie scenes hanging on one of our walls.

Kurelek had an unhappy childhood in many ways and a complex relationship with his father — both hating and worshipping him, he said later. He was the oldest of seven children of a hardworking prairie couple (Alberta and Manitoba), his parents of Ukrainian immigrant origin. He was painfully shy, sensitive, artistic, but inept at those mechanical and physical things that might have earned his parents’ praise. So powerful was his desire to do art, however, that he risked their disapproval to study it.

In 1957, Kurelek risked his parents’ disfavour once again by converting to the Roman Catholic church (his family had been nominally Orthodox). His mother, he writes, was “particularly vocal in expressing her view that religion killed joy.” Yet the theme of Kurelek’s Canada is joy, he says in his foreword, “my view of joy, both remembered and observed, in this my native land.”

Kurelek was also a “message painter,” doing a series of 160 paintings on the Passion of Christ, for example, housed at the Niagara Falls Art Gallery, but there’s no didacticism in these paintings of ordinary people in the various parts of this country doing such ordinary things. They stir joy in me too, over the colours, over his sense of the land, its diversity and yet the way its parts cross-reference each other: the land in Manitoba “so flat it is like being on an ocean” and then the ocean off Nova Scotia giving him “the same feeling as the prairie in winter when the landscape is an endless series of wind-sculpted snowdrifts…”

Kurelek’s sensitivity to this country’s landscapes and history, and his sensitivity to the pleasures and dreaminess of being young, have always resonated with me. It’s as if his memories are my memories too, no matter how different the details.

"Skating on Spring Run-Off," pages 98-99

But in studying and enjoying my “new” book this week, I find this artist is giving me something else. He’s giving me memories of my father. What do I mean? Well, it occurred to me that the specific references in so many of these works belong to Kurelek’s generation, which of course, is my father’s generation as well. That’s obvious enough, but I never thought of this before, because I didn’t need to, I suppose, just delighting in them for my own reasons. Now, however, my dad (88) has Alzheimer’s disease and is so very gone from us already, and in the last weeks declining even further.

I took the Kurelek book along when I went over to see him yesterday afternoon. He was in bed, mostly sleeping. When he opened his eyes, I showed him “Skating on Spring Run-Off.” He looked at it but he didn’t seem to see it.

I see it though. I see his being, his memory, there. He was a boy of the farm, a boy of hard work, close to his horses and dogs, a boy sensitive to the land and the seasons, an athletic boy too, amazingly athletic actually, and here he is again, skating where the ice is found, “skim[ming] over the prairie surface with breath-taking ease,” feeling as the artist also remembered it when he painted the scene, “as though you have wings on your heels.”

Has this ever happened to you, a familiar story or beloved artist’s work suddenly meaning something else for you altogether?

The paradoxical gift of rest

Posted on December 16, 2009 by doradueck

The third gift I experienced at the “Winter Stillness” retreat this past weekend (see previous post) was rest. Opening the gift of rest wasn’t/isn’t quite as unambiguous as opening hospitality and silence, however.

In his article, “Sabbath Resting in God,” Ron Farr writes:

There is a terrific amount of momentum in our lives like that of a freight train…. Indeed, most of us seem to have an ambivalent relationship with the idea of rest. We feel guilty about doing ‘nothing’ and resting before we’ve cleared up things in the world…. In an odd sort of way it is painful for us to rest because resting means just sitting with things as they are for awhile, just sitting with our own unresolved struggles and anxieties, just sitting with our neighbor’s untended wounds and tears. In the silence of rest, we are forced to recognize our own limits and see all our underlying conflicts and bruised places to which we’ve blinded ourselves through the diversion of our busyness. There are so many forces and fears within us, pulling us like that freight train away from a simple Sabbath resting in prayer! Yet our deep need for such rest cannot be denied and cries out to be honored.

Through the spiritual direction given us at this weekend’s retreat, we were invited to observe the “movements” we experienced as we prayed Scriptures that were given us by the director or that we had chosen ourselves. These movements might be of peace, joy, sorrow, anxiety, despondency, resistance, etc. We were invited to then journal about this, or perhaps go to the art room and express it visually.

Detail from "The Last Visit of Saints Scholastica and Benedict," clay sculpture, Helen E. Norman

So, it takes movement to get to stillness. Jesus said, “Come to me…and I will give you rest,” (Matthew 11:28) but that coming might be an eager run or it could be a lurching and stumbling procedure, or even a long and reluctant shuffle.

But it’s amazing how much movement there can actually be when there’s nothing else to do for a weekend but confront one’s restlessness. And for most of us in the group, it seemed, the weekend’s path ended in the longed-for rest and peace.

Or, in joy. Which again, paradoxically, isn’t exactly motionless either. I’m still chuckling happily over the phrase that jumped out at me from the last text my director gave me in Luke 1 — unborn John leaping for joy in his mother’s womb! Such a wild, excited creature he was, that John the Baptist, from the very beginning! Safe, secure, tucked away, receiving everything he needed from his mother, about as still as it probably gets — but when he heard the voice of Mary, the mother of his Lord, he simply had to leap for joy. That’s the paradoxical gift of rest.

Winter Stillness: two gifts

Posted on December 14, 2009 by doradueck

St. Benedict's chapel and monastery, behind trees

I spent the weekend at St. Benedict’s, a monastery just minutes north out of the city, at their annual Advent retreat, “Winter Stillness.” It wasn’t my first time at St. Ben’s, but it was my first time doing a retreat of this kind, all of us silent, and essentially on our own but for three meetings with a spiritual director to whom each of us was assigned.

A blog is too public, and the time too soon, to share the specifics of what I experienced during my hours of rest and prayer at Winter Stillness. Too much talk about the movements of one’s own soul can have the effect of “letting the fire out of the bones,” a good friend once observed, and I think she was right — so we wait on wisdom for the “when,” and the “how much.” (Incidentally, my last time at the monastery was with this same friend, on a retreat together while she was fighting cancer. She died 13 years ago this December. A long time ago, really, so I was unprepared for my initial emotions back in the place the first evening: that wrenching sense of the loss of her, once again.)

But there’s a few observations about the broader gifts of such a weekend — gifts we can open in other settings as well — that I want to share with gratitude after my days away.

The gift of hospitality: Hospitality is part of the Benedictine Rule, so they have a long habit of it, but my, how very well they do it! It’s the hospitality of warm welcome, as the “Christa” at the retreat entrance so aptly depicts. But it’s also a hospitality that, while attentive, strikes me as somehow inattentive too, unintrusive, never hovering. Completely unapologetic, trusting, accepting.

"Christa," 62 in. clay sculpture, Helen E. Norman

I think this fine balance of attentiveness and inattentiveness must truly come from committed practice of it, and I suppose the Benedictines have learned that eventually a hovering hospitality will exhaust its giver, if not the receiver. But perhaps it’s also a Spirit-gift. I’ve experienced it from various people at various times in my life, and would like to grow in giving it in that particular way. I’m not sure I’ve even found the right words to describe it, though. Perhaps some of you know the kind of hospitality I’m talking about and may have insights to share.

The gift of silence: Silence between people can be so many other things than a gift. It can be confusing, cruel, selfish. But when silence is shared and intentional, when it’s insisted upon for the purposes of personal soul care, it can be a wonderful thing to experience, even as a group of strangers. We came to be quiet; we were given permission to keep quiet. We might nod or murmur a greeting when passing, but we knew what the withholding of further niceties was all about and how respectful it was of ourselves and the others.

The group was small enough — about 15 or so — that we each sat at a table alone for meals. The only sounds were the occasional ping of cutlery against dishes, like the ring of a tiny bell, the scraping of a chair, sometimes the sound of footsteps (oh, and the crunch of taco chips at Saturday’s lunch!). But our last meal together was a “talking lunch.” How fine it seemed to get to know one another then, and share bits of our weekend. Once silence has been opened as a gift, speaking seems an extraordinary blessing as well.