Rory C. McInerney

Pictures for the Struggling Pilgrim

[rcmac]

‘The Right On Marvin Gaye/Holler love across the nation... we proclaim love our salvation’

July, 2021

After Listening to Marvin Gaye’s 1971 album ‘What’s Going On’.

“We can rock the world's foundation / Everybody together, together and holy” (Wholly Holy)

I love everything about this record. In this appreciation piece (thankyou letter?) I wanted to show it’s beauty and it’s toughness and the vulnerability throughout. The title seems a bold assertion that we are about to hear the truth but it so easily becomes a question too: What is going on? I can scarcely think of a better description of the Christian condition, or at least mine. Sometimes you’re high on the mountain, others you’re down in the pit. Gaye’s ability to find beauty, and find God, in the torn up ghettoes of 60′s America is inspiring in the good times and reassuring in the bad. He saw the seeds of love longing to grow under the concrete and in the hearts of Americans twisted by hatred, attack and revenge, action and reaction. It’s also way ahead of its time in linking how we treat Creation to how we treat each other and the totally holistic nature of Christ’s saving love for the world. It also doesn’t flinch from the holistic nature of the destrcution that awaits all things if we don’t bring this love to pass. It’s a record full of humanity, full of love and full of hope that never ignores how difficult it can be to feel these things yet never forgets the neccesity of it.

“God is my friend, Jesus is my friend / He made this world for us to live in / And gave us everything / And all He asks of us / Is we give each other love”  (God is Love)

[rcmac]

‘The Right On Shūsaku Endō/Even if He had been silent, my life until this day would have spoken of Him’

July, 2021

After reading the 1966 novel ‘Silence’ by Shūsaku Endō. “Sin, he reflected, is not what it is usually thought to be; it is not to steal and tell lies. Sin is for one man to walk brutally over the life of another and to be quite oblivious of the wounds he has left behind.” (p.114)

The silence of God and the dryness of prayer. It is something I encounter often. Shūsaku Endō‘s novel explores these things, and the nature of suffering and the nature of Divine Love. The Mystery. I wanted to include traditional Japanese images in this piece in the same way that Endō does in the novel, to explore the relationship between the local and the universal. What are just the fragments of this time and what is of The Kingdom? Why is it so painful never to be sure and why is God so often silent? Endō concludes that even in HIs silence God in Christ is near us, suffering with us. We must take up our cross and take others down from theirs. To work for love and justice not with guarantees and insurance policies but with faith. As I closed the book it felt so liberating to agree. Hallelujah. 

“Everything that had taken place until now had been necessary to bring him to this love” (p.257)

[rcmac]

‘St. Paul of Tarsus’

June, 2021

After meditating on 2 Corinthians 5:17: ‘The old things have passed away, behold: The new things have come’.

Recently had my mind blown by N. T. Wright’s biography of Paul. Alot of scholarly work on Paul is too much to get my head around but this story of an indefatigable man - beaten, whipped, stoned, shipwrecked - yet never veering from his task of proclaiming the good news was totally electrifying. And what good news it turns out to be. There were times when I couldn’t tell if I was learning something new or being reminded of something primally important and long forgotten. Paul’s message is that with Christ’s death and resurrection the new world is already here, breaking through into this fallen world and beginning to renew it, firstly in our hearts and then in our actions. Despite how dark it often seems outside (and inside) the dead idols can always be swept away by a torrent of life-giving water and the prison doors can always be opened by earthquakes. It’s a message of liberation that starts right now because it is the living message of the living God. 

[rcmac]

‘Making Aliyah/Gonna be iron like a lion in Zion’

June, 2021

After meditating on Genesis 17:1: ‘When Abram was ninety-nine years old, the Lord appeared to him and said, “I am God Almighty; walk before me faithfully and be blameless.’

I see images like these alot. The wilderness of this world, the hot and dusty desert stretching ahead almost as far as the eye can see; but there’s always something else. A burning bush, a rushing river, a city on a hill, a tree of life. Always these same colours. It’s in this shimmering heat we have to keep the faith, try and ‘love one another as I have loved you’, fail, get up and again, try again and keep on walking under the mechanised son of this industrial exile, until we get home. After meditating on this I felt so powerful, a stranger in this world, but totally okay with it. As Van Morrison says ‘I got a home on high, in another land’. Not a place to visibly manifested in space or time but a connection with my neighbour, an encounter with my God. That’s my home.      

[rcmac]

‘The Mocking of The Christ #2: St. Dominic answers de Montfort’s violence with contemplation’

June, 2020

The Cathars thought the body was evil, that matter is evil. That God and the devil are equal in the cosmos, fighting for ultimate control, a spiritual world of light and a material world of wickedness that one must chose between. The history of all hitherto existing life has been the history of moral struggle.

They forgot about the incarnation. They forgot about bodily resurrection. They forgot about a lot of things, but that isn’t our point here.

I recently read a book about how St. Dominic went to the south of France to preach to The Cathars. To preach about a creation that is good, and a God who is three, a God who is supreme. To preach about an endless, enveloping mercy. To expose sin and death as paper tigers, the marks of history on the hand’s of Chrit’s body, the new creation born every second. To remind them about love.

Simon De Montfort led his forces into these same areas and burned the Cathars who wouldn’t repent. He gouged out eyes and cut off noses. He broke the barons who resisted and as the cities burned and the smoke rose he added their lands to his own.

For us and for the church now as ever there is a choice. Do we give life or deal death? The green shoots in this piece grow despite the destruction and the murder around them, and the true servants of the church contemplate and pray without ceasing. Faithful of the answer.

[rcmac]

‘The Mocking of the Christ #1: Prophesy! Who is the one who struck You?’

June, 2021

It is impossible to live in these times at not think about violence. It’s everywhere, veiled or visible, a whispered threat or a screamed demand. intimidation, coercion, opression and dehuminisation. North, south, east, west, seems like everywhere is war and rumours of war nowadays.

This piece is inspired by Fra Angelico’s ‘Mocking of the Christ’ from 1441. I wanted to show the continued relevence of Christ’s mocking and torture at the hands of the Roman soldiers. How people who are standing up for justice, love and human dignity around the world are met with violence and derision at the hands of the state. More importantly though, I wanted to show the calm, the fortitude, the power that comes from being grounded in a self-giving love and knowledge that you serve a living God, not a dead idol, be it flag, race, caste or currency.   

Christ’s endurance of His passion gives us a glimpse of what we may have to endure -pain and loss - and what we may have to sacrifice - something that matters - in the name of love for the other and our own humanity. Love is stronger than death, humanity can resist power’s urge to make it an object or a commodity. 

Christ isn’t here to take away your sins, He’s here to show you how to transcend them. His death and resurrection aren’t a transaction, they’re a revelation.

This collage is for everyone on Earth going through their own passion and crucifixion right now; I pray you find the depths of love to stay human. Sooner or later we’re all gonna step out of the tomb and into the light.  

[theinwardlight]

[rcmac]

‘I make all things new’

June, 2021

Reflections on reading the news and the book of Revelation. When you feel minded to despair. For a broken creation, the flat fields like open palms and silty river mouths of your childhood. For a vicious, aquisitive society that puts the stranger, the orphan, the widow, the destitute in a detention centre of one kind or another and then tells you “It must be like this. It has always been like this”. When you deplore the actions of your people and are minded to despair not because you hate them but because you love them so much, because you want the best for them. When you see the low things your brothers and sisters lift up as idols, and worse, you feel the pull also.

Then we remember God’s promise. This is not finished. The cold wind can change, the dark cloud can clear and sinners can be redeemed to the rejoycing of Heaven. We can be different. New. Not an incrementally improved, nicer smelling, better mannered abomination. We can be holy. Our world can be made new.    

[rcmac]

‘St. Joseph the Worker’

May 2021

Carpenter, refugee, step-father, colonial subject, mourner, witness. St. Joseph shows us the difference between life-giving labour and death-dealing toil. When we say “yes” to the Lord and allow Him to direct our labour we find the unending, uncontrollable fecundity of life that is a life of love for our neighbours, our planet and ourselves (despite what the commercials say). When we slave away for the things of this world we are just that, slaves. Maybe to our basest desires, often to our fears, but slaves none the less. When the seed dies it bears much fruit. In this world we have to labour to die, and with God’s grace, be born again on the morning. 

[rcmac]

‘St. Lawrence of Rome’

April 2021

Burned alive for selling the treasures of the chuch and dividing it among the poor instead of handing it over to the imperial authorities. This is the faith of Jesus Christ, against the powers and principalities of this world, for the poor and downtrodden, until every created being is lifted up to its full dignity. As MLK said “When Jesus Christ calls a man, he bids him ‘Come and die’“. Maybe it will be a literal death like Lawrence, maybe it will be ego death, maybe the sacrifice of the things we put before God and love so much, so many idols. Seek your life and lose it, give your life and find it.

[rcmac]

‘St. Anthony comes to the Tree of Life’

March 2021.

Anthony is the first monk. The pressures of the world weighed too heavy on his neck and he fled the city for the deserts of Egypt. His struggles and visions in a sweaty cell are an inspiration as I fight to ever silence my own mind and encounter something mystical. I used the Ge’ez langauge of the Ethiopian Orthodox church for the quote from Amos “Let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like a ever-flowing stream” to symbolise Anthony’s influence in every Christian church; the hope that through spiritual discipline and humility we might see Him as he is.

[rcmac]

‘The Spirit of God moved on the face of the waters’

Jan 2021

While reading a book about the Celtic saints (some of whom are pictured here) I discovered that the wild goose was often used as a symbol of the Holy Spirit in the Irish church. This seemed so apposite to me and for some reason I couldn’t get it out of my head. Meditating on this idea has helped me greatly to understand the wildness, power and beauty of the Spirit.  

[rcmac]

‘I am the true vine/Save the bees’

Jan 2021

A piece on the nature of self-giving including images of St. Thérèse of Lisieux, Fr. Walter Ciszek (an American Jesuit who spent twenty years in Russian prison for saying the mass), the bee (who labours everyday to make the harvest happen). Finally, we see an exerpt from the Gospel of St. Luke in the original Greek detailing the ultimate act of self-giving, the birth of Christ, and God’s gift of his son, begotten not made, so that we might redeem ourselves and our creation through His example of love. 

[rcmac]

‘And the shepherd’s dogs arrived first to adore him’

Christmas, 2020