ANGELS, ART, AND WHERE WE ARE NOW

Edward Burne-Jones

Many years ago, I had an art poster on my dorm wall at college. The picture was of a tall Pre-Raphaelite angel, and I loved it. I didn’t know anything about the artist, and it didn’t matter. The name of Scottish painter Edward Burne-Jones of itself meant nothing to me.

Skip to about twenty years later, and I was walking up Fifth Avenue in New York City one day. As I passed the Metropolitan Museum, I saw that a flag out front announcing a current exhibit was a picture of that angel! I was so excited to see the group of paintings that the angel was part of.

I was in New York at the time for a reason. I had been working on a book about spirituality and politics, ultimately called Healing the Soul of America, for which I was doing a deep dive into American history. At that point, I’d been reading about the Transcendentalists and their relationship to the Industrial Revolution. I read about Whitman, Emerson, Thoreau, and a group of artists and philosophers in the United States and Great Britain who foresaw psychological and spiritual dangers in the mindset accompanying the advent of Western materialism. While industrialization, mechanization, and Western science presented many benefits and opportunities for the betterment of humanity, artists and philosophers at the time also saw risks in our becoming so mesmerized by the outer world that our inner powers would begin to wither.

Much was coming together for me. On that day, as I entered the museum and procured the audio set that would explain more about those angel paintings to me, I learned that Edward Burne-Jones was a member of that movement of artists! In fact - this blew me away when I first heard it and it blows me away even now - Burne-Jones once said, “Every time they build a machine, I will paint an angel!”

The thread connecting spiritual and material planes has been an overarching theme in my life, and the world has certainly proven the Transcendentalists correct. It could be argued that having lost its heart, Western civilization began to lose its mind. Our economic, political and social systems - beginning with the Industrial Revolution - have been riven by a disconnection between brain and heart that has led, and is leading, to tragic results.

It’s time to repair, both ourselves and our planet. To reclaim our love for self and others, to reconnect the brain and heart, and heal the wounds of a very damaged world. We can do it, but the hour is late. Grace period is over, as is rehearsal. This is not a drill. We will open our hearts, or we will lose what we know of our beloved and precious world.

The Dalai Lama has said, “In order to save the world, we must have a plan. But no plan will work unless we meditate.” Clearly meditation isn’t everyone’s thing or even everyone’s passage into the realms of higher consciousness, but the point is still well taken. Until we clear out our subconscious demons, they will continue to destroy us. The limits on our ability to purify our hearts puts a limit on our ability to transform the world.

I say it so often because I need to hear it myself: “Pray in the morning, kick ass in the afternoon.” Both our inner and outer powers form the key to our deliverance, not separate but together, in complementary relationship, not only art on a canvas but the art of a life well lived.