On Sacred by Brian Devlin

 

The natural inclination many of us have when we read the word ‘sacred’ is to be drawn towards what  organised religion has told us is to be especially revered. A shrine, a place of pilgrimage, a relic. Sacredness is a first cousin of devotion. It makes our hearts flutter and our gaze fall because we know that we are in the presence of something greater than ourselves.

In her body of work, Sacred, Fiona Mackenzie takes the inner sense of what religion teaches,  and focuses not on basilicas or cathedrals. Rather she draws our eyes and our ears to the sacredness and simple beauty of nature, particularly birds and small creatures.  Her artwork: so delicate, so intricate, brings us to a place of appreciation of the small beating (sacred)hearts that share our planet, our continent, our country and city and garden and even our roof-spaces. And our beds as the cat, Barley, purrs contentedly beside me. 

When I awaken early, depending on the mood I’m in, or the trepidation I feel for the state of our world, I increasingly choose to listen to the dawn chorus of chattering starlings and sparrows in the attic above my head, than the chimes of Big Ben and the news from London and Washington. 

 

The ousel cock so black of hue

With orange-tawny bill,

The throstle with his note so true,

The wren with little quill

In  Bottom’s song from a Midsummer Night’s Dream.  (an ousel cock is a blackbird, a throstle, a thrush), we see and hear the sacredness that Fiona gently nudges us towards. The little creature with his note so true is as dignified and expressive as any cantor in a High Mass.

With Duke in ‘As you Like it’ we note he 

Finds tongues in trees, books in the running brooks
Sermons in stones, and good in everything.
I would not change it.

 

None of this is to say religion has nothing to teach us about nature and its sacredness because all religion is steeped in reverence for the world we live in. 

Jorge Mario Bergoglio, we are told, as he announced his ‘accepto’ to become Pope had, whispered in his ear by another Cardinal, ‘do not forget the poor’. He took the name Francis, after the saint from Assisi. He did this purposefully and mindfully.  

In his first Encyclical letter called Laudato Si, on Care for our Common Home, he wrote about what compelled him to take that particular name. He said “I believe that Saint Francis is the example par excellence of care for the vulnerable and of an integral ecology lived out joyfully and authentically. He is the patron saint of all who study and work in the area of ecology, and he is also much loved by non-Christians.”

The ‘integral ecology lived out joyfully and authentically’ that Pope Francis wrote about is a sense of being that intertwines our humanity with our environment.  The natural world is not wallpaper that makes our home pretty. It is our home. It is our sacred place that we do not own, but we share. 

Fiona Mackenzie is a Scottish Highlander. Her artwork conveys the unalloyed truth: that amidst the mesmerising beauty of the landscape around her, sacred beauty is found in the smallest and flightiest of beings that surround her. The poet, John Keats would have loved her work as he wrote…

I STOOD tip-toe upon a little hill,
The air was cooling, and so very still,
That the sweet buds which with a modest pride
Pull droopingly, in slanting curve aside,
Their scantly leaved, and finely tapering stems,
Had not yet lost those starry diadems
Caught from the early sobbing of the morn.
The clouds were pure and white as flocks new shorn,
And fresh from the clear brook; sweetly they slept
On the blue fields of heaven, and then there crept
A little noiseless noise among the leaves,
Born of the very sigh that silence heaves:
For not the faintest motion could be seen
Of all the shades that slanted o’er the green.
There was wide wand’ring for the greediest eye,
To peer about upon variety;
Far round the horizon’s crystal air to skim,
And trace the dwindled edgings of its brim;
To picture out the quaint, and curious bending
Of a fresh woodland alley, never ending;
Or by the bowery clefts, and leafy shelves,
Guess where the jaunty streams refresh themselves.
I gazed awhile, and felt as light, and free
As though the fanning wings of Mercury
Had played upon my heels: I was light-hearted,
And many pleasures to my vision started;
So I straightway began to pluck a posey
Of luxuries bright, milky, soft and rosy.

I am very proud to have some of Fiona’s artwork in my house and from my chair in the corner of the room I look at one painting in particular and in amongst the delicate daisies that flower on a grey bank I feel I can hear “a little noiseless noise among the leaves”. And that makes me very happy indeed. 

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Brain Devlin is a Scottish Author based on the Black Isle