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Posted: January 30
(Rome) Last evening at table we had a wonderful conversation in Spanish and Italian about a book in English. Fr. Jose Yoldi, who works in the archives, sparked the discussion by mentioning a book someone gave him called, Finding God in the Dark. The second part of the title is "Taking The Spiritual Exercises Of St. Ignatius To The Movies." Two Canadian Jesuits, John J. Pungente SJ and Monty Williams SJ, offer a version of the Spiritual Exercises in everyday life by providing a list of 53 movies that a retreatant could watch as thematic material to lead one through prayer exercises. The basic concept is old hat to me since I have been using a daily movie as a reference point in the eight-day preached retreats I give once a year. Stories are always important in a retreat and the very best stories come from what I hear from the retreatants themselves—but you cannot tell those stories because that would break the confidentiality that I promise retreatants, and probably scare off those making the current retreatant from telling me anything interesting. So I tell stories from the movies; they make the point more vivid and they are all in the public forum.
Yoldi liked the idea of using movies in a retreat and our discussion centered more on which movies each of us would use. One of the other people table was another Jesuit from Barcelona, whose Spanish kept tripping me from Italian into Spanish. Both languages suffer when that happens. But the conversation was interesting and leads me to raise the question, Which movies would you put on your own list if you were leading a group in a retreat or some kind of prayer reflection? One of my own favorites is Babette's Feast, which works at multiple levels but certainly points to differing perceptions of how God treats people and how they should respond: whether in measured duty or wild abundance. I will write more about the movies I choose later, but I would be very interested in learning what other people would pick.
Just before eating I went to the an exhibit of paintings by Henri Matisse and Pierre Bonnard. The show closes in a few days so I needed to slip away from work and catch it. The two Frenchmen were life-long friends as artists but Matisse has much the greater fame. The show even said that although Bonnard was a "great painter" he was not as important in art history because he did not keep pushing the avante garde limits as did Matisse. That attitude seems unspeakably foolish in the face of the beautiful paintings that Bonnard created. I was surprised because much of what I had seen before was not very interesting, but this show has many stunning pieces. I thought of a contemporary painter whose work I admire who claims to be a "tonal painter" very interested in the expressive power of grey. That certainly expresses what Bonnard did in many of his landscapes. While Matisse uses bright, increasingly simplified colors to sort of hit you in the face, Bonnard offers a subtle wealth of color that comes when scenes are illuminated from a light source behind the subject. That is true for both of the self-portraits that the show offers as well as for city scenes and landscapes. Bonnard seems a real discovery to me, and I found myself thinking of several paintings that I want to make.
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