Redtree Times

The Wisdom Beyond Words– Coming to Principle Gallery, June 2025

There is in all visible things an invisible fecundity, a dimmed light, a meek namelessness, a hidden wholeness. This mysterious Unity and Integrity is Wisdom, the Mother of all, Natura naturans. There is in all things an inexhaustible sweetness and purity, a silence that is a fount of action and joy. It rises up in wordless gentleness and flows out to me from the unseen roots of all created being, welcoming me tenderly, saluting me with indescribable humility. This is at once my own being, my own nature, and the Gift of my Creator’s Thought and Art within me, speaking as Hagia Sophia, speaking as my sister, Wisdom.

— Thomas Merton, Hagia Sophia (1961)

I was looking for something to accompany the new painting shown here, The Wisdom Beyond Words, and came across this passage from Thomas Merton. It’s the opening section of his prose poem Hagia Sophia written sometime around 1961.  Though it speaks through the dogma of Catholicism, it matches very well the belief system I somewhat laid out here a week or so back. As it often is with most religions, the underlying structure and belief is very much the same idea but with symbols, stories, and representations that reflect cultural differences. 

In short, this passage captured in words what I see and sense in this painting. It could very well be used to describe the theme of my Entanglement exhibit that opens June 13 at the Principle Gallery, which I have described as being how everything is contained in small part in every other thing. Much as it is in the theory put forward by Stephen Hawking that when a star dies it collapses into itself until it is finally a single tiny point of zero radius, infinite density, and infinite curvature of spacetime at the heart of the black hole formed from the star’s collapse. A single point of immense mass and energy This was referred to as a Singularity. 

Hawking looked at this singularity and wondered since this was the end point of star’s death could it not also be the starting point for future new universes that might emerge if this singularity were to explode outward– the Big Bang Theory.

The underlying thought is that the universe and all that it is was once a single thing before the Big Bang created all that we know the universe to be now from that single point.

We were all part of one thing. We were that one thing.

And it’s that unity and wisdom of all things, much like that of which Merton wrote, that I sense in this painting.