If you’re ever in Florence or in Rome, one of the things that you will notice is that there are an enormous number of paintings of Jesus. And many of these paintings have him on a crucifix. And what’s interesting about these paintings is that being crucified is certainly a most unpleasant experience, about as unpleasant of an experience as you can imagine. But the face of Jesus on these paintings is always serene. And if we can understand at least the intent of what the artist is trying to portray or the point that they’re trying to portray, we can understand a lot about our own existence and our own life and what we should be trying to do.
Now, most of the time we’re not in the process of being crucified, but some of the time we are. And a lot of the time we are in difficult situations. And the world is constantly pushing and pulling and ripping at us in so many different ways. It pulls and pushes us in economic ways. It pulls and pushes us in emotional ways. It pulls and pushes us in familial ways, in relationships. Then, of course, there’s the body that pulls and pushes us and degrades as we get older. We are constantly in the midst of suffering through some kind of difficulty.
The world is a place that is full of difficulty. It’s its nature. Anything that decays is in difficulty, and the world is constantly decaying and rebirthing and so are we. We are part of what’s decaying. Civilzations decay. We may be witnessing that in our civilization right now. If we look at the history books, all the civilizations that were before us decayed. The question is in the midst of all of this, what would the painting of your face look like. And who knows better what that is than each of us. And this has to do with being in certain states and maintaining certain states as opposed to becoming involved with the nature of the difficulty that we’re going through.
