Sister Wendy on love as an obedient art
Sister Wendy Beckett, The Mystery of Love: Saints in Art through the Centuries (London: HarperCollins, 1996) [#ISBN0551030121 It is no #mystery at all. All images and quotes are grabs from this book.]
Sister Wendy was a Carmelite nun who gained famed as an interpreter of art, especially on free-to-air television in the 1990s, and whose passion for this vocation was irrepressible.
The Carmelites are a Catholic mendicant order.
In her introduction to The Mystery of Love: Saints in Art through the Centuries her focus is to outline the importance of obedience. The context for this, and the examples, are of the individual and the christ exemplar, before the mono-god. This is in keeping with Christianity’s origins. The set-up here is “yeah but how do I know what pleases him [sic]?”
Well, that information is given by the authority and power of the church. Obey the church as you would god. For some reason, in more modern times this imperious attitude not said directly, but it structures all truly Catholic thought and its mundane legal structures. This is the shame of the church, its naked power, its pudenda. Sister Wendy does extremely well in covering it up. The fig leaf here is love.
Reaction?
Given the title of the book The Mystery of Love one might think Sister Wendy would use that little thing called love as its wellspring, but the Carmelite nun does not do so. Love is frameworked within obedience through respect and and honour. I.E. love is obedience, not any other sort of thing a young brainless flippetty-jbbet might want to indulge in.
It is no mystery at all.
See also
It is good to see that even in Sister Wendy the "world", as in worlding well, wins over obedience and faith. https://www.americamagazine.org/faith/2022/11/04/robert-ellsberg-sister-wendy-244078