Wounded in Spirit: Advent Art and Meditations

Book, 2018, 157 pp
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Christmas can be a time of joy but also of tears, memory and prayer. Celebration does not always come easily.

Christmas is a difficult time for many of us. While others are expressing joy, we're re-living painful memories and reminders of loss. This book is a journey of beauty and meditation for those for whom ordinary Advent devotionals could never help.

David Bannon writes from profound personal experience. His reflections provide a way to commune with Scripture and with God. These are paired with twenty-five beautiful paintings created by wounded artists that gave the world masterpieces of hope: Gauguin, Tissot, Caravaggio, Tanner, Delacroix, van Gogh, Dürer.

We've heard the names. We recognize the paintings. But do we know the artists? They were flawed and often troubled people: a widower that saw a vision of Christ; a murderer who painted himself as Peter; a grieving father that drew his sons as Jesus and John; an orphan who saw his salvation in the Holy Family. Despite their wounds--perhaps because of them--these artists achieved the sublime. Their humanity inspires us.

Based on the latest research in history and grief, Wounded in Spirit returns us to where Christian art began. From mourning in Roman catacombs to works of the masters, we join the world's great religious artists on their pilgrimages of hope and brokenness. In their wounds, in our wounds, we may once again encounter "God with us."

"For those who are hesitant to leap into the good news too quickly, David Bannon’s book of Advent art and reflections will be a valuable resource. “We are so accustomed to rushing through life,” says the author in the introduction. Bannon, who has a felony conviction and whose adult daughter died in 2015, has lived through the realities of failure and grief. In this book, he intersperses carefully curated photos of Christian art with his own reflections on the artists—their lives, their tragedies, and their persistent hopes. Bannon also evokes an honest grappling with grief by including brief quotations from a variety of thinkers: Carl Jung, Annie Dillard, Terence Fretheim, Isabel Allende, Elie Wiesel, Julian of Norwich, Simone Weil, N.T. Wright, and Søren Kierkegaard make appearances. Particularly evocative are the excerpts from Friedrich Rückert’s poems, which Bannon translates here into English for the first time: “Do not wrap yourself around the night, / bathe it in eternal light. / My tent is dark, the lamp is cold, / bless the light, the Joy of the World!” —Elizabeth Palmer, Christian Century

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