Isaiah 55:13
Instead of the thorn shall come up the cypress;
instead of the brier shall come up the myrtle;
and it shall be to the Lord for a memorial,
for an everlasting sign that shall not be cut off.
Last week I was graced by an invitation to view the wondrous Van Gogh exhibit in Atlanta at the Pullman Yards. During high school and continuing until this day I have had a fairly significant obsession with Van Gogh, the tortured soul known worldwide—and yet virtually unknown during his life.
Perhaps his most well-known piece is Starry Night painted in 1889 in Provence while he was in an asylum after a mental breakdown. The expressive and chaotic emotionality of the piece is evident in the rich layered brushstrokes known as impasto.
Art exhibits are created by curators because they select what the audience sees and doesn’t see. Curators occasionally suggest modes of interpretation and you’ll get some modest interpretation in this exhibit, although I should note that the best part is the beautiful immersive experience at the close of the exhibit which defies a single interpretation.
The Starry Night portion of the exhibit receives special treatment in about a five-minute video piece during which we learn that the beautiful and prominent cypress tree in the foreground of the painting represents mourning.
I did a bit of cypress digging and discovered that cypresses often are planted in cemeteries for just this reason. The association between grief and this tree is ancient. Cyparissus, the Greek mythological character, was so devastated by grief after he killed his pet stag that he became a cypress tree.
You’ll see cypresses differently once you carry that story around in your soul. Ovid renders Cyparissus’ tale this way:
His life force
exhausted by long weeping, now his limbs
began to take a green tint, and his hair,
which overhung his snow-white brow, turned up
into a bristling crest; and he became
a stiff tree with a slender top and pointed
up to the starry heavens.
Against this woeful history, the Bible takes a different interpretation. When Solomon was building the Temple he received a massive shipment of cypress logs from Hiram of Tyre. God’s dwelling place was constructed with the wood that represented mourning in Greek culture.
Isaiah conjures up a cypress as a fecund image of vitality and renewal. Instead of the thorn shall come up the cypress…and it shall be to the Lord for a memorial, for an everlasting sign that shall not be cut off.
What do you see when you look at the cypress in Starry Night? Do you see the grief of the artist, looking out his asylum window perhaps, imagining a cosmos that is beautiful and to use a term we learned at the exhibit: mercurial? Or do you see a vibrant sign of life, God’s answer to the swirling matter of stars and forces beyond human reach?
The cypress lives on: its Latin name could be translated as “evergreen” or “always living.” It strikes me that one of the wondrous things that God does is to take our symbols of grief and sorrow and offer us a different way of seeing.
The cross, that instrument of torture and death, came to mean life eternal.
The cypress, that image of grief and pity, came to mean life eternal.
I wonder which images we carry about in our souls and bodies that are ready for reinterpretation in light of God’s grace?
Daniel Headrick
