This is What God is Like

By Father Casey

Last year the New York Times began a series they call the 10-Minute Challenge. In this age of shortening attention spans, when it feels harder and harder to stay focused on a single task for any length of time, the series invites viewers to look at a single piece of art for ten minutes. The art selected is diverse, beautiful, but not widely known, so there is little chance of an existing relationship with the piece. I’ve tried it a few times, and it’s a wonderful, if challenging, exercise. It’s a bit like praying: I hold my attention for a few minutes, then my mind wanders a bit, then something in the picture brings me back. All the while, I’m making connections between things I’m looking at and things in my life, between what I see and what I feel.

This Lent we’re conducting a class on art and faith, Images of the Invisible God. The feedback I’ve heard is quite positive, and it seems from what I can tell that you’re enjoying the chance to reflect on the spiritual potency of art. After all, Transfiguration is an art-loving community. Beauty is one of our core values, I would say, and we have wonderful, and spiritually-deep, art all around our campus.

In this vein, I want to invite you to try your own 10-minute challenge. But unlike the Times’ series, the painting I invite you to spend time with is quite well-known, or at least, if you don’t already know it, it’s by a painter you do. The piece I invite you to sit with is The Return of the Prodigal Son by Rembrandt van Rijn (click here to access a high resolution version of it). It is among the great master’s final works, completed just a year or so before his death in 1669. The art historian Kenneth Clark once described it as a “picture which those who have seen the original in St. Petersburg may be forgiven for claiming as the greatest picture ever painted,” and famed priest and author Henri Nouwen once spent eight hours sitting in front of it.

I don’t want to tell you what to notice in it – I trust the Holy Spirit will have plenty to share with you – but I do want to give you some context. The painting depicts the parable we’ll hear this weekend, of a young man who insults his father, takes his inheritance early, burns through it all with “dissolute living” (imagine what you will), hits rock bottom, and returns home to beg his father for forgiveness. Jesus inserts a twist, though, to what might have been an obvious moralistic tale by having the father run out to greet his returning son, and before the son can offer his apology, the father throws his arms around him and calls for a party to be thrown in celebration.

Rembrandt depicted this scene a few other times, mostly in sketches, but by this late stage of his life, he pulls us into the emotional and spiritual climax. The son kneels in wretchedness before the father, his desperation evident in his rags. He has buried his face in the father’s embrace, and the father radiates with tender compassion. You can feel the weight of his hands pressing down with love, and almost hear his gentle utterances, reassuring his prodigal son that he is safe, he is well, he is home. In the background are the rest of the story’s characters, particularly the other son, who looks on with graceless disapproval, but they are in the shadows, illuminated only by the light emanating from mercy incarnate.

If you choose to conduct this little exercise, and spend ten minutes gazing at this picture, consider holding as a sort of mantra these words: “this is what God is like.”

This is what God is like.

This is what God is like.

This is what God is like.

Fr. Casey