Lenten Retreat with Fr Denis McBride
Father Denis McBride will be leading a FREE online retreat this Lent, based on his two books Reflecting with Paintings Vol 1 and Vol 2. Redemptorist Publications are offering his audio book on 8 CDs (with a booklet of the paintings) and the set of two books at a special discount price for the retreat.
Reflecting with paintings
One of the things that has always intrigued me about Jesus is how so much of his teaching he chose to do through the medium of fiction. All his parables are fiction: each could begin ‘Once upon a time.’ Jesus asked his hearers to leave their own world and come with him into an imaginary world, and then return to their world to have an inner conversation of how they see things in the light of the parable. Jesus’ parable world is a world of great variety. You meet all sorts of people: difficult judges, committed burglars, broken families, wounded beggars, awkward neighbours, selfish priests, eccentric employers, desperate hosts, surprised guests, wise and foolish virgins.
Paintings, too, have their own language, from pictorial to representative, to coded, to abstract, to you-name-it – communicating another world to the onlooker, another slant on looking at people and things, or simply to provoke unspoken communication between the artist’s emotions and the viewer’s. For this Lenten retreat I invite you to look at selected paintings, to imagine another world, and then to return to your own story in the hope that some inner conversation might be provoked through the strange encounters.
Denis McBride, CSsR
First week in Lent - Wed 24 Feb
Praying the Rosary – Old Woman Praying the Rosary by Paul Cézanne
Second week in Lent - Wed 3 Mar
Growing up hyphenated – Jojo by J W Miller
Third week in Lent - Wed 10 Mar
Food for thought – The Promenade by Fernando Botero
Fourth week in Lent - Wed 17 Mar
Facing the truth – Logo for Frankfurt Book Fair, 1998
Fifth week in Lent - Wed 24 Mar
Bearing up – Peasant Woman with Buckets and a Child by Kasimir Malevich
Palm Sunday - Sun 28 Mar
Hat trick – Pilate’s Wife by Sebastien Champion
Good Friday - Wed 31 Mar
Letting go – Pieta by Vincent Van Gogh
Easter - Sun 4 April
When words are not enough – The Reconciliation of Peter by Iain McKillop
