View Towards Pontoise Prison, In Spring 1881

I get the sense that Camille Pissaro was always on the outside looking in for something new. This painting is titled, View Towards Pontoise Prison, In Spring. That may seem strange, a painting with a prison at the center. Pissarro's contemporaries might well have painted out the prison because it disturbed the bucolic interpretation of nature. Like the factory smoke stacks in another painting we viewed, a prison on a perfect spring day would spoil things.

Here, Pissarro boldly but gently includes the building. Ah! Right away there is a simple soul-place the painting might touch. Many people paint out from mind and heart what or who they don't like, disapprove of, are disturbed or threatened by. They frequently don't see the tendency in themselves. It isn't a Christly way.

Notice that we are looking at the prison building through the window of a new Spring: the leafed out trees, the sky of amazing color and cloud, the fullness of light, the field planted with young plants. It's a picture of hope and possibility. Our nation has a disproportionately large prison population. A chronic complaint about it is that it is more punitive than restorative. Our recidivism rates are high, which suggests that time in prison hardens people rather than evolves them. We love to say we are a Christian nation, but Christianity is about helping the new man, new woman, to emerge and grow into possibility.

We realize too that while looking at this painting we might think of prison and prisoner as something far off when in fact, we might all well be prisoners in our own right. Addictions are prisons. Being taken in by the culture of owning things is a prison: "I want it all and I want it now". There is the prison of anger, resentment, prejudice, pettiness, dissatisfaction, indifference to the plight of those far away. I can live in the prison of my own denials. Religion fails when it doesn't help us to see ourselves. At Easter, Jesus exits the prison of the cold, stone tomb. I'm supposed to follow. For us, that cold, stone tomb is an inner reality.

A final thought - though you may well have your own: Do prisoners have a place in my prayer? There are prisons for juvenile offenders, the criminally insane and women. I might pray for those who work in prisons who often lose heart and become embittered themselves. I might pray for the families of prisoners, those who have been victimized by terrible crimes, those imprisoned for life who are mentally and spiritually destroyed by incarceration.

There are prisons around the world that brutalize people instead of trying to help them. We send out rockets to the farthest reaches of space, but often don't try very hard to reach far inside prisoners. We might wonder whether we really believe in the converting power of  Christianity. Or does conversion only mean getting someone to leave their old religion to join the "truth" of our own. That's a rather small view of conversion.

A Street in Auvers, (Thatched Cottage and Cow) ~ 1880

The fifth of eight Impressionist Exhibitions was held this year - 1880. Remember, Pissarro and his friends collaborated in creating these exhibitions in response to the exclusive, tradition bound, high style of the Paris Salon. This year, Cezanne, Renoir, Sisely and Monet, the groups most important members, chose instead to participate in the Salon exhibit.

I can't help but feel Pissarro's disappointment and perhaps sense of betrayal, as four collaborator-friends must have talked and planed, behind his back. Anyone of us may know that feeling. Pissarro is fifty years of age when he paints A Street in Auvers. Money was scarce and he had a family to support.

Having said that, this painting is not gloomy or dour. The blue sky is full of clouds, but they are not storm clouds.

The two peasant workers have stopped for a chat, the man is carrying sticks for fuel, the lady is walking her cow to pasture perhaps. They live in this little commune of Auvers, a cluster of houses with thatched (straw) roofs. 

Notice there is a path or rough road through the village. Seeming to invite us in, it is wide at our end but then quickly narrowing, it disappears around the bend of the unknown. Poor Camille, his friends left the Impressionist Exhibit going to what they perceived to be tried and true (or simply more lucrative). Pissarro needed the money, still he leaned in, trusting, but certainly unsure of what lay ahead. 

The Persian Mystic, Rumi wrote: "As you start to walk on the way, the way appears." Some people quit or even turn back when the future feels unsure or the present moment paralyzes them. But Pissarro found his way by setting out and carrying on, apparently trusting his inner voice.

Jesus did that. From the very start we see Jesus in the Gospels on the road to Jerusalem, where the great drama of his dying and rising will take place. 

A Path in the Woods, Pontoise 1879

What a day for a walk through the autumn woods. Notice the ground is slope-d, as if we are in a hilly place, unable to see too much into the distance before we come to the hill's crest. How alive this wood is - every leaf, every bit of ground, every whisp of cloud, every pathside flower is a dot, a stroke, a touch of paint on the canvas, which makes for an image that seems to vibrate with life. 

The sun is playing with the trees and path. There are golden footprints on the ground. "The earth is charged with the grandeur of God," the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins wrote. Note the word, charged. It is as if the world is electrified with God's energies. This is grace.

But how sad and dangerous for our planet that every year the earth loses three trillion trees. They are largely destroyed by human carelessness and greed: mining, drilling, deforestation for grazing and the raising of drug crops. In many places the trees are completely gone, having been chopped down or bulldozed for developments, malls, parking lots. What a sad sight, a city tree struggling for life: suffocating in the midst of traffic's poisoned air, or imprisoned in cement and asphalt.

"What would the world be, once bereft of wet and wildness? Let them be left, O let them be left, wildness and wet; long live the weeds and the wilderness yet." Hopkins - Inversnaid 1881.

To whom is Hopkins addressing his plea for nature to be left alone? God? Humankind? Is this a prayer or just an expression of his heart-desire?