The Saturday Sessions

For the last few Saturday mornings a number of people have been braving the cold to participate in a number of talks on the theme of 'Being a Christian.' The talks have been led by members of the Aylesford Pastoral Team and so cover a wide range of topica and approaches. A recent session was spent exploring the theme of 'Communicating our faith to others.' Sheila Grimwood, a member of the team, relfects on the morning.

Using the art of Seiger Koder in a session on

 ‘Communicating our faith to others.’

After a short introductory talk on the meaning of communication, we invited the group to wander round a room where we had set up six posters of paintings by Seiger Koder.  Beside the paintings we had put written texts (some of which came from the booklets that accompany the posters, some were poems or similar reflections) and we had some Mozart playing in the background.

            Koder’s paintings are modern but representational.  They often contain the unexpected and need to be pondered awhile to see the depths of their meaning.  We chose 2 representations of the Last Supper.  In one the face of Jesus is reflected in the wine and the disciples are looking out, puzzled towards us.  The other, entitled ‘All are welcome’ is in fact an image of the banquet in the kingdom – Jesus hands are pierced, so it is post-resurrection - and looking at the disciples we see a motley group, welcomed to the table.  Two of our other choices had Koder’s idea of reflecting faces – the washing of the disciples’ feet, where Jesus face is reflected in the bowl of water and the Samaritan woman at the well.  We only see her looking into the well but in the water at the bottom she is reflected with Jesus. Our other choices were the return of the prodigal and the storm, entitled ‘Stronghold’ which only shows two hands clasping.

            The idea was that the group would then feed back their reactions and discuss how looking meditatively at these pictures deepened their understanding or perception of familiar scenes.  Different people saw different things  and several went back over coffee to look again – either to see what others saw or just to look  in more depth.

           

Koder's : The Last Supper