Horizon

Yesterday, Mom and I visited Seattle's Frye Museum, where the work of Buster Simpson is on exhibit, as well as some Hudson River School pieces and a curiously brief exhibit entitled "Horizon." The former two exhibits were intriguing for sure, but "Horizon" is the one I want to keep talking about...

The exhibit includes a long wall lined with a number of landscape paintings, all lovely and all from different artists and of different scenes - but, notably, the paintings have been hung so that the horizons are aligned. Thus, you may stand back and sweep your gaze across the wall and feel as though you are gazing out towards a real but continually shifting horizon. It is quite an effect.

On the adjacent wall are these words of explanation:

The horizon exists as an ever-shifting threshold where the literal gives way to the metaphorical and where the present passes into the future. It divides earth from sky and limns the boundary between the landscape we know through direct perception and the unknown landscape we imagine beyond it.  

Recent psychological studies suggest that the absence of a literal horizon, or “long view,” in our increasingly dense urban landscape, as well as our fixation on computer screens and smart phones as means to acquire and share knowledge, is contributing to new pathologies of depression. The future health of our landscape is likewise threatened by the lack of a metaphorical long view of our relationship with the environment. (See more at: http://fryemuseum.org/exhibition/5056/#sthash.CBwPeizt.dpuf)

On a (decidedly crazy) whim, P and I went to see a late showing of Man of Steel last night after dinner, and although I still feel bruised from the gratuitous building-crashing, I am willing to forgive the  excessive force of the film because of the way it casts Superman as an agent of Hope. Not justice, not even strength - but hope. 

And I think that's exactly the point of the horizon, the reason we need to see it: it gives hope. A hope of a future that is unknown, but is there, just ahead. 

These ideas and symbols ultimately come together for me in Christ, "the hope of Israel" (Acts 28:20). I need Jesus to be far more powerful than I am, superhuman, because I need Him to protect me from a Darkness that is also tremendously powerful - and set on destruction. But also, just as my psyche needs the physical reassurance of the physical horizon, my spirit needs regular orientation to Christ. I need to see Him, and I need to gaze into a future that is unknown, but is steadily His.

I pray that the eyes of your heart may be enlightened in order that you may know the hope to which he has called you, the riches of his glorious inheritance in his holy people, and his incomparably great power for us who believe. That power is the same as the mighty strength he exerted when he raised Christ from the dead and seated him at his right hand in the heavenly realms, far above all rule and authority, power and dominion, and every name that is invoked, not only in the present age but also in the one to come. And God placed all things under his feet and appointed him to be head over everything for the church, which is his body, the fullness of him who fills everything in every way. 

Ephesians 1:18-23  

[How's that for bringing together fine art, a summer blockbuster, and the Word of God? What can I say.... I've had a LOT of coffee since arriving in Seattle...]