Lent and the Agony of Francis Bacon.

If you want to prepare for Holy Week, I suggest you head down to the Art Gallery of Ontario and see some of the paintings of the late British artist, Francis Bacon. Go to not just see, but to feel how the darkest corners of the human soul, where violence and non-belief reside, can be viscerally, brilliantly, exposed with painterly skill. No other twentieth century artist could express that dark place into which the Son of God willingly journeyed.

Francis Bacon’s paintings are bearable only in the light of Holy Week when we recall that Jesus descended into every imagined and unimagined night.

Bacons’ paintings are visceral. Their message about the unconscious and about post World-War II society are as raw as the slabs of bloodied meat rendered around his screaming portraits. It’s the hell around him that he painted.

Francis Bacon, born into aristocracy at the turn of the twentieth century, completely rejected the faith into which he was baptized. He was unrelenting in satisfying his sexual appetites, even when tinged with brutality. Robert Fulford writing in the Globe and Mail remarked that Bacon imposed even on a famous portrait like Velasquez’s Portrait of Pope Innocent X, his own dark fantasy. Innocent is painted says Fulford, “screaming with terror, isolated in the geometrical cage that often structures a Bacon picture.” Bacon more than many other artists was able to express rage about a world without God, and certainly without Easter. In his work he was often trying to find out the meaning of human love and of human connection. Man is an accident, he once said. He didn’t believe that love was possible.

He once remarked to an interviewer that one couldn’t truly and deeply love another person because you couldn’t take that other person into yourself physically. That is an amazing statement in itself.

Somehow, Francis Bacon managed to sense a deep spiritual reality beyond his reach. Christians can see his work and weep for him because he was grasping for Easter. Behind the dark wall of painful and often violent human existence there lies the glorious reality of Jesus upon the cross – his torn flesh and the blood pouring down upon the world cancels the power of every sin and obliterates darkness. For us in Holy Week we will do well to remember that Easter cannot have its full meaning without moving deeply into all that preceded it.

Christians must weep that Francis Bacon was not able to see the profound truth of Christ in the institution of the Eucharist. Would he have been forever changed to see the love of God given in the forms of the body and blood of Jesus – to be taken into the body, consumed by each baptised believer? Would that not have transformed his soul and his tortured world? That is the hope offered to each person journeying through Holy Week in 2014.