Explainer

Belief

Creed

16 March 2023

4 min read

Hold or cut the golden thread?

There's a ‘mysteriously beautiful’ vision threaded through our world, writes Stephen Cottrell. In an extract from his Dear England book, the Archbishop of York considers the Beatitudes.

Stephen Cottrell

Stephen Cottrell is Primate of England and Archbishop of York. He has authored 20 books.

A CGI render of a grid of golden lines receding into the perspective

The golden thread.

Joshua Sortino on Unsplash.

The heart of Jesus’ teaching is found in the longest teaching passage in the Gospels, it is known as the Sermon on the Mount.

It begins with a mysteriously beautiful passage known as the Beatitudes.

Here Jesus sets out a series of maxims that at first sight seem to be his equivalent of the Ten Commandments. Like Moses, the Old Testament prophet who received the latter, when Jesus receives the Beatitudes he has gone up a mountain.

And like Moses he has a series of short, pithy things to say that will then need a lifetime to work out.

However, the Beatitudes are not a moral code. They are not things you can either do or not do. They are attitudes to which we can aspire. Rather than describing the moral life, a code by which we can justly live alongside each other in society, they describe what it looks like to 'go the second mile’. They describe what perfect love in action looks like.

Here they are:

Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted.

Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth.

Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled.

Blessed are the merciful, for they will receive mercy.

Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God.

Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called children of God.

Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness sake, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

I don't propose to spend ages unpacking these. But alongside the Ten Commandments themselves, the Lord's Prayer and the Creed, the Beatitudes have become one of the central documents of the Church.

Living by them is the work of a lifetime.

They are the centre of Jesus' teaching. Their meaning, however, isn't always self-evident. Like his stories, they need inhabiting.

They are very challenging. It isn't easy to be merciful. It isn't easy to make peace. Especially if the likely outcome is the persecution we usually make efforts to avoid. Not that there is anything good about persecution. As we know, mockery and ridicule hurt. How much more hurtful is it to be hunted down because of your witness to peace? Nevertheless, it is witnesses to peace that Jesus is recruiting here. His own life, and everything that he teaches, led this way: to the peace that is beyond the world's understanding and is about a wholeness and totality of giving and receiving love.

Jesus is inviting us to live with a different set of attitudes. And he does not baulk from acknowledging that these attitudes will bring us into conflict with the carefully protected interests of those who secure power and influence for themselves at the expense of peace. They exchange it for what is little more than a truce. At best, an absence of war, what we live in our jealously guarded siloes and forcibly protect our borders, repelling intruders and stamping on those who even dream differently.

In our own society, thankfully, we enjoy freedoms of speech and action. This means that we rarely meet with much opposition beyond people's unreflective apathy or polished disdain. But these freedoms we enjoy should not be taken for granted. They have been hard won. They could easily be lost. Especially if we fail to see where they have come from; precisely this realisation of the dignity and worth of every person and our responsibilities to each other that arose through Christ.

Unfortunately, these things that underpin what is best in our society are not self-evidently the best. We've got so used to them that we easily imagine they are. But actually, we don't observe them in the world around us. Nature, for instance, is not democratic. Nor particularly caring. The weakest usually die first. The fittest survive. Nor is it much different in human communities. Our history - always written by those who win - is one bloody story of conquest after another.

Empires rise and fall, and there is very little to suggest that there might be another kingdom where a different set of values prevails, and where the king turns out to be the servant of all. But that is precisely the Christian narrative. It is a golden thread running through human history. In every age it can either be held on to, or cut away; left to our own devices, especially when our backs are to the wall, we find that the human compass is usually set towards self-preservation. Our empires and systems are usually designed to keep others out. Or at least in their place, so that they can serve us. In this so-called ‘real world’, shepherds do not go in search of one lost sheep, as Jesus suggested God does, in one of his parables. That would be uneconomic. Like the rest of us, they play a percentages game, and for the sake of the ninety-nine, we accept the loss of the one. The strongest and the wiliest prevail. That's just how it is, we say. If we can help the weak, we will. But if we can't, or if it affects us badly, we won't and we don't.

This is why the world needs a set of values - and a story - that will save us from ourselves, and our worst instincts. This is why we need a set of values that are rooted in a tradition whose stories and whose very heart are, gloriously, the life and teaching of a person who is himself the revelation of God's love and purposes for the world he made and loves - who even laid down his life to search out those who are lost: the very image of the invisible God. More than that: someone who loves us and knows what it is like to be us, who has experienced from the inside just what it is like to inhabit a divided and compromised world.

Therefore, the Beatitudes are a set of values and attitudes by which we can inhabit the world differently and through which we can begin to see what matters in the world and what must be done.

Dear England: Finding Hope, Taking Heart and Changing the World is published by Hodder & Stoughton.

Review

Art

Culture

4 September 2025

5 min read

Genesis Tramaine: the painter whose faces catch the spirit

New York's expressionist devotional artist

Jonathan Evens

Jonathan is Team Rector for Wickford and Runwell. He is co-author of The Secret Chord, and writes on the arts.

AN experessionist painting shows a face with a large open smile and many eyes.

Oh! Ye’ Faithful, 2024

Almine Rech.

Genesis Tramaine begins her presentation as part of the McDonald Agape Lecture in Theology and the Visual Arts 2025 by singing ‘Amen’, a gospel song popularised by The Impressions in the 1960s. Her presentation about her art is essentially an act of testimony, such as might be given in a Southern Baptist Church in the USA.

Tramaine is an expressionist devotional painter from the US who is deeply inspired by biblical texts and whose work is held in permanent collections, including the National Gallery of Art in Washington DC. The large expressionist heads she paints are not representational portraits but expressions of spiritual energies and forces within the person, often inspired by and showing biblical figures and saints, as well as church people, family and friends.

She speaks about having met the Gospel before meeting God, as she attended a strict Southern Baptist Church while growing up. She drew from the back of the church and also wrote thoughts and impressions in notebooks. She says that she loved church but that it fell out of place in her life as she grew up.

One day, far from home and needing help, she called her Nana on the phone, who said to seek first the kingdom of God. She found quiet in herself and prayed more, finding herself in conversation with herself. On one occasion, disturbed, she couldn't sleep and was experiencing physical manifestations. At this time, she says, she saw all of herself and surrendered to God. In the morning, she read Matthew’s Gospel - seek ye first the kingdom of God.

The words in the Bible started to make sense to her as a story reading itself to her and she began drawing faces. Her Bible had white images of Christ and Mary, so the words didn't match the images, and this was a spur to paint the women and children of the Bible revealing the beauty of black women in particular. She read the Bible in the King James Version, stopped trying to fit in and found the strength to play with and disrupt narratives. The tools and materials to do this were all one’s that she found in the Bible.

Eyes are our organ of vision, so faces sporting dozens of eyes are those which, like the saints, achieve the greatest insight into the true depths of reality.

Her current exhibition at the Consortium Museum, Dijon, France, is entitled Facing Giants’ and addresses these issues head-on. She has said of the exhibition: ‘I think it’s important that you paint a real narrative, an honest reflection. I don’t think [my saints] look like saints as they have been given to us...[those] were false narratives. The images of saints that we know and that are projected at us are all white with blond hair—and we all know that that is not true.’

She has explained that: ‘These are biblical saints who have faced giants whether those giants are actual giants or giants like fear, love, acceptance or non-acceptance, the giants of facing God and not being accepted, giants of judgments… those who have sat in the mud, if you would, and found a way to persevere. And I wanted to spend as much time as I could with those energies and those narratives, as a tool of self-encouragement and as a tool of encouragement for others.’ She feels these energies literally, speaking of entering the room where she paints with a sense of a whole other people - silent saints – being present with her when she is at the canvas.

While Tramaine emphasises the inspiration of the Holy Spirit in her work, critics have noted her stylistic closeness to graffiti art and she herself has explained that she was familiar with graffiti in her childhood in Brooklyn. Eric Troncy, Director of the Consortium Museum, relates her work stylistically to the expressionism of George Condo, Jean-Michel Basquiat, and Willem de Kooning. Tramaine, though, speaks of other influences including Sister Gertrude Morgan, Romare Bearden, and David Hammond. In the McDonald Agape Lecture, she spoke of Hilma af Klimt and Jack Whitten as inspirations, as well as gaining inspiration from the significance of the Iyoba Idia of Benin in Nigerian culture.

One of the distinctive features of Tramaine’s portraits is the plethora of eyes that often feature. Eyes are our organ of vision, so faces sporting dozens of eyes are those which, like the saints, achieve the greatest insight into the true depths of reality. Some more recent images have also featured a plethora of open mouths and teeth. Troncy writes that: ‘Her figures, it seems, have started to smile. To shout, perhaps; to sing—why not?; and to talk—most definitely.’

This is interesting, in part because, when I asked her in an earlier interview about her influences, she began by speaking about her love of gospel music, including that of Jonathan McReynolds and Le’Andria Johnson. She says this Jesus focused music ‘encourages me to praise from the depth of my soul; to paint, let go and trust from that space’. While she’s ‘not quite sure what happens’ then, ‘Black folk say I catch the spirit’. She speaks of losing time as you paint, saying that you can't be present when painting as you have to trust yourself to the process, surrender, and play in the space.

This is, in part, why she began her McDonald Agape Lecture presentation by singing.

Her testimony is essentially simple, direct and profound: ‘I've wanted to be an artist since I was a child. I took my prayers seriously, which means I began to develop a relationship with Jesus Christ, my Lord and Savior … I asked God if I could paint and pray, help and give, as an offering of service for the rest of my life. And the paintings began to mature. I committed to the relationship that painting offers spiritually, in Jesus’ name.’

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