Did you know -- and it's not really surprising -- that half of the pictures we takeare taken during the summer? Summer vacations. Family reunions. And then summer ends. Fall begins. And we put our favorite pictures on exhibit, into frames or into scrapbooks, so we can remember.
I this spirit, the spirit of summer's end, this morning I shall take you on a little tour of pictures at an exhibition. For our lives too are like pictures at an exhibition, a very special kind of exhibition. We are both subject and viewer. This is perhaps most obviously demonstrated when we leaf through old family photograph albums.
There I am on my first birthday, looking mysteriously like my own son, my father like me. Then, a little later, Forrest Church, 5 years old, crewcut, big ears, Harvard T-shirt, proudly holding up a pint-sized trout that should have been thrown back. Who is that little boy? He is I, and yet not I. Not only has much happened since to shape and change who I am, but much that had happened before, constituting my five-year-old memories and dreams, is all but forgotten now. There I am in one picture with a grandfather whom I obviously knew well but now do not remember. We are laughing together. It is a reminder. I too shall be forgotten.
Family pictures at an exhibition. We are the viewer and we are the subject. But not just one subject. Rather, a series of subjects, familiar strangers, growing, changing, negotiating rites of passage, entering and passing through new stages of life.
It is not only a matter of age and time. We also are known through our relationships. I am or have been a son, grandson, colleague, husband, father, student, teacher, minister. In each of our roles we are somewhat different, different in the ways we behave, in the nature of our intimacies, our attitudes, our personalities. I admit, when it comes to knowing who one really is, all of this can be quite confusing, all these selves. As Lewis Thomas once put it, there are sometimes "whole committees of them, a House Committee, a Budget Committee, a Grievance Committee, even a Committee on Membership, although I don't know how any of them ever got in. No chairman, ever, certainly not me. At the most I'm a sort of administrative assistant. There's never an agenda. At the end I bring in the refreshments."
This offers cause for considerable humility, but also for great hope. By way of a second example, I think of the stunning Picasso retrospective which showed at the Museum of Modern Art a few years back. Picasso's pictures at an exhibition, paintings of life and from his life' experience, running from his early representational work, through cubism and on to the most evocative forms of abstract art. A story in stages, of passages and changes. Picasso's imprint is felt on every canvass, and yet how different they are one from another. There are differences of mood within periods and between them.
On his canvases are wars and rumors of war, evidences of pain deeply felt, his own and that of others. There is tragedy and compassion. But there is joy as well, and ample testimony to love, given and received, taken and betrayed. One constant remains, even beyond that of artistic excellence. The life's work of this man testifies that Picasso remained fully engaged, alive, growing and changing until the very day of his death.
Our lives too fluctuate from rose to blue. They are representational for a time and then abstract. Sometimes they scream from the canvas. At other times, they blend harmoniously into their own landscape. Cardinal Newman once said, "Here below to live is to change, and to be perfect is to have changed often." By such a definition, Picasso's art -- if not his life -- is perfection, daring each of us to liberate ourselves from the life-denying strictures of fear and rigidity. Not all dares should be accepted, but when we cease daring to grow, and risking the changes growth shall surely bring, life's animating spirit is stifled.
As a counterpoint, there is another set of pictures I should like to include here. It is actually a piece of music, written by Mussorgsky, in which a troubadour leads us through a gallery and describes, one by one, the paintings there. "Pictures at an Exhibition" was written for solo piano. Since that time, however, Mussorgsky's music has been scored at least five times for full orchestra. The best known of the transcriptions are those of Ravel and Stokowski. In the former, the voice of the troubadour is written for an alto saxophone, in the latter for an English horn.
In a way, each of these versions might be seen as the original child come of age. In either case, a large measure of the simplicity of the original piece is lost with full orchestration. In the Ravel, the added layers of complexity can be seen to enhance and deepen Mussorgsky's original, whereas Stokowski's rendering, to me at least, is untrue to its promise. It is brassy and somehow inauthentic. The same piece of music, mind you, recognizable in either case -- but of such different quality.
In our own lives as well, each of us is limited and determined in considerable measure by accidents of birth. Each of us is born with certain genetic, or to follow my example, thematic lines. We cannot change, in this sense at least, who we are. But we can and always do in fact shape who we become. We can become complex or simply complicated, complete or over-wrought. This is the challenge, burden and promise of freedom.
For me at least, each of these three series of Pictures at an Exhibition is evocative of the human condition. As we look back in our family albums we discover ourselves as familiar strangers, changing according to age and circumstance, different in different settings, determined by our relationships which themselves are always changing. The Picasso, and other such retrospectives, demonstrate, as D.H. Lawrence once wrote, that "each of us, as long as we remain alive, is in him or herself a multitude of conflicting people." In spite of this, and sometimes because of it, the ongoing process of living can be one of continual growth and occasional fulfillment. Reflecting upon Mussorgsky's "Pictures at an Exhibition," even as Ravel and Stokowski shaped the same piece of music in such different ways, our existential freedom to move within and fill out the limits of our essential being is both exhilarating and chastening.
Even as we are free in considerable measure to change and grow with each new day, we are also free in looking back to utilize our memories in ways that sustain rather than diminish our self-image and accordingly our hopes. We can dwell upon our failings or losses, refusing to let go of the darker sides of our past. In a sense, this is like saving only the pictures we don't like, darkening our walls, ruining our scrapbooks. Or we can do the opposite and keep alive fond memories. Each of us has loved a spouse, a parent, a friend, who is lost to us in death. We can remember the love or dwell upon the loss. As John C. Meagher writes, "Tell me what you keep as your historical landmarks, what pictures are in your private album, and I will tell you who you are. But I remind you that you are, in substantial part, who you choose to be."
And so, as yet another summer turns to fall, let us choose from the images of summer that we wish to remember. And as we press them in our scrapbook, we might also take the time to crack open and dust off an old page or two, lovingly to reflect on earlier summers gone: departed loved one's smiles and sparkling eyes, friends who have gone before us, grandparents, parents, spouses, sometimes, sadly, even children, the pictures of our lives, our most precious keepsakes, whether saved in a book or fixed in memory. Precious, most precious, because of this: because above all others they remind us that we are who we love. Yes, if we love in little ways we will only hurt in little ways, our albums will take little space, our hearts will almost never break. But this is not a way to choose to be,
One final though, autumn is a good time for picture taking too. A time of new beginnings, new choices, new possibilities. If our past is filled with poignency, the present is full of promise, ours to seize, ours to give, not tomorrow, at least not surely, but today.
Copyright All Souls Church 1997