Vasily Polenov created this marvelous painting in 1898 after his visit to Kiev, Ukraine. We see the Dydubchi Monastery tucked into the hills. Everyone traveling on the Dnieper would see these gleaming monastic buildings hovering over the river. Is that a steamer ship approaching the shore below? Perhaps there are pilgrims on board who will spend Sunday at the monastery.
It is morning, and the rising sun is striking the cupolas (onion domes). They are like fiery candles — images of the church aflame with the community's love and prayer. The monastery clings to the rock which falls steeply down to the river. Behind the main buildings and up into the forest, there is another church. Maybe Polenov was experimenting with a new impressionist style in his treatment of the green, hilly foreground. The calm blue river is filled with morning light; we seem to be able to see forever into the distance. Look at how the faraway, big water merges with the big sky. God is big. God is bigger than our tiny ideas and old insistences.
We might call this a thin place where the physical and invisible realms touch. Here, time doesn't matter. I want to awaken inwardly with this new day. Inner sky. Inner ground. Inner forest. Notice there is a diagonal line creating two spaces that merge — the watery, blue world on the left and the rocky, green-forested world to the right.
I'm sorry to share the photograph below, but there it is — the monastery and river today. It is reflective of our great forgetting. Notice how the monks are trying to hold on with the flowering forest they maintain around the churches. Vasily's painting invites us to enter God's paradise world. Earth, sky, river, forest, light — each a word of God. During Lent I may look for my own thin places. Though much has been lost, there is still some remaining.
