The Rev. Dr. Henryk Paprocki, Polish Orthodox theologian, pastor and a personal friend of the artist, shared with us the sermon he preached at the funeral service of Jerzy Nowosielski. We would like to thank him for it once again here. We reproduced the sermon not only because of the Departed, but also because in our opinion it can have broader importance apart from these sad circumstances. In a sense, Rev. Paprocki’s reflections may be seen also as Lenten reflections. For what else is the forthcoming period of the Great Lent if not a “stay in the desert” when we have to “listen to Christ’s silence in order to understand his words.”?
Apart from fragments of liturgical texts, the author used in the sermon also a poem by Sergei Avernitsev. Below the Polish text we embedded a film from the funeral, which contains Rev. Dr. Paprocki’s sermon.
“Though Thou didst descend into the grave, O Immortal One,
yet didst Thou destroy the power of Hades.
And didst rise as victor, O Christ our God,
calling to the myrrh-bearing women: Rejoice!
And giving peace unto Thine Apostles,
Thou Who dost grant resurrection to the fallen.”Accompanying Jerzy Nowosielski with word on the day he is celebrating his last and definitive Pascha, is a task both honourable and very difficult. Pascha is passage from death to life,
and the Christian funeral is a space of hope: “I am the resurrection and the life…”.
Above all, I would like to recall the recent years when Jerzy Nowosielski was bedridden by his physical suffering, and when his home, which was both an atelier and place of so many encounters and wonderful discussions, was slowly becoming a hermitage, while he himself, denuded of everything, was becoming more and more transparent to God. Just like the silhouettes and faces of the hermits he used to paint so willingly. Jerzy Nowosielski’s hermitage in the centre of Cracow was the place of his withdrawal from life, because he was not longer interested in the things of this world, but only in what is most important and most relevant. The desert is a place of a special encounter with God, isn’t it? It was in the desert that God spoke to Israel.
In the first place, we should thank God for the long life Jerzy spent entirely on seeking Christ. Through youthful atheism, overcome by finding the certainty of resurrection and finding the intellectual freedom of [Eastern] Orthodoxy, for it was in the Orthodox Church that he found his own place and faith, or rather achieved the certainty of faith.
God granted him unbelievable talents.
Above all the talent for painting, one unequaled in the world. Where the discursive thinking ends, there begins the icon, more broadly: art, as he said himself: “I prefer to paint rather that to theorise. Painting an icon is for me a means to penetrate certain mysteries difficult to be expressed with words, among other things from the field of theology or Christian anthropology. Mysteries we can’t become aware of in a different way, for only certain aspects of that anthropology can be described with words.”
As if in defiance, the second talent had to do precisely with discursive thinking, with meditation and reflection on the mystery of God and human, with developing the Christian thought, which was accompanied by outstanding erudition and breadth of vision. In his reflections he saw the world with painter’s eyes, with his great sensitivity. This all was accompanied by yet another talent: of the courage of thinking. That is a talent not very often cherished and developed.
When he had already achieved not just some form of faith, but the certainty of faith that “the moment a human being grabs a small piece of the reality of resurrection, faith is virtually not actual any more. One lives not by faith any more, but by a kind of certainty”, then he found his Father’s house. “Christ is my personal Saviour. Really, I trust Christ. I am afraid of everything in the world, only not of Christ. Such is the Christ of my intuition and faith.”
As an artist, he was always moving towards the other side. He was not interested in the empirical reality, but in the point of arrival, the transformation of the world. He preceded this transformation in his art, in every picture of his is visible the glare of the Kingdom to come. No matter if this be an icon, a landscape, a still life or a nude. The reality elevated to the dimension of the transformed world, the world of the day which won’t be followed by another one any more. Moving continuously towards the other side: that was his life. Completely trusting Christ, he would say he wasn’t afraid of death.
“When death will laugh at me
As the one that has the last laugh,
And will take the power from my organs, one by one,
May your Power be with me.”He had trust that the Power of Christ will let him go through that last earthly experience of every human being, which means also that “love is stronger than death”.
As one continuously moving towards the other side, he was ahead of us, who are moving in the empirical reality of this world, and he was throwing his paintings and his thoughts to us, being ahead of his times. That is the fate of every human being whom God has granted the charism of greatness and genius. He was a thinker and an artist of that small group that paint and write for the future. Jerzy Nowosielski has not yet been fully recognized. That is the task of the future generations. His sometimes shocking thoughts are meant for those who will come after us and who will find themselves in the critical point of loosing hope, any hope. His paintings to are meant for those who want to ponder on the human existence. He himself considered that existence to be infernal, but faith gave him the certainty that every tragedy, every catastrophe is a leaven of resurrection. Christ, who rose from the dead and overcome the whole tragedy of suffering and death, is also able to make the whole evil of this world a place of Glory. So he listened to Christ’s silence, because only the one who understands his silence can understand his words. He listened to the thoughts written down in the Bible in order to make them nourishment of his own thoughts and his own art, until the last day:
“When thought will drown in impotence,
When my will looses itself,
And when even my name I will have forgotten,
May your Name be with me.”Nowosielski was a thinker open to other human beings. One forever young in his search. His whole life, he has been learning from the greatest masters, from the Church Fathers, from philosophers, from the Russian religious thinkers. He belonged to these people marked with Orthodoxy who are interested only in the most important problems, the frontier questions that are also decisive of life choices, which determine the whole life. I think that in this matter he was following the opinion of his friend, Fr. Jerzy Klinger: “It doesn’t pay to be lukewarm in the theological reflection.” So he was always hot. In both the discursive thinking and art. In his whole art. For he believed that some of his paintings communicate certain theological intuitions of his in a greater degree than icons do. He dedicated his whole art to the sacrum. He dedicated his whole thinking to it. All his statements, and now,
“When an end will be put to speech
And my tongue so eloquent
Will stiffen in the silence of grave,
May your Word be with me.”Yet there is a price we pay for everything in this world. So talent has its own too, and especially such a great talent, which overwhelms one and forces them to paint. He confessed it in one of the interviews, saying that he was aware that he has to paint in this way and not another, that it is simply a creative imperative. Being a creator, daring to paint the transformed reality, means also taking part in the continuous work of creation, a task assigned by the Creator himself.
Especially if we remember that Origen called God a great artist and a great painter, who painted his image in the human being. On the last day, when the fashion of this world will have passed away, the Holy Spirit will touch all what had been created by humans and will preserve it forever. And God thinks things, what he thinks about, comes to being, doesn’t it? That is why in the Prayer for the Departed we ask that God keeps them in his eternal memory, which means that he makes them eternally alive. There are no dead with God, there are only the living. He is the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, God of the living. Only the living. And that requires love. From his eternity God, who is all Love, and only Love, had loved us even before he created us. For he wanted to share his love with the human being, with his other. And he didn’t hesitate, in person of his Son, the God-Man Jesus, to die in the horrible passion of the cross, to die out of love. And now Jesus stands at the door and knocks. Everyone who hears that knocking and opens the door, encounters Christ. Jerzy opened the door of his heart for Christ, and Christ, the same yesterday, today and forever, allowed him to see in flashes of genius the other side, the hidden bottom of reality, and actually the truth about beings and about people, the essence of Christianity, allowed him to unveil the curtain of matter and see the immaterial Emptiness, pulsing with the fire of Christ’s presence, a world different and yet the same, the God-Man’s world.
Prof. Jerzy Nowosielski’s coffin in the church where he was baptized
So Jerzy Nowosielski was creating under the pressure of that and not another kind of painting, gaining the certainty that fully liberates from despair. The cross of Christ, which is an icon of the resurrection, of life transformed and victorious, which descends to Hades in order to make the whole world a teophany, a place of God’s Glory, a place of victory, that cross was for Jerzy Nowosielski in the first place a sign of Love.
In such situation is born the childlike trust to the Lord of history, who came to us out of love. He should be seen in beauty, for beauty is the synonym of the Holy Spirit. See him and fall in love in the noumenal and imperishable beauty, which infinitely surpasses the beauty of this world. When we lack words, when thinking stops on the threshold of mystery, the colourful contemplation contained in the icon, contained in every painting and drawing of Jerzy Nowosielski, lets us penetrate deeper the hidden tissue of the empirical reality, which just then can be seen as the reality of the place of salvation, the place of Glory. The risen Christ gives us salvation, and as the homily of John Chrisostom from the paschal matins says:
“O death, where is thy sting? O hades, where is thy victory? Christ is risen, and you are overthrown! Christ is risen, and the demons are fallen! Christ is risen, and the angels rejoice! Christ is risen, and life reigns! Christ is risen, and not one dead remains in a tomb! For Christ, being raised from the dead, has become the First-fruits of them that slept.”
Until the moment when God “sets us as a seal upon his heart, as a seal upon his arm: for love is stronger than death”, and takes us to himself.
“When everything will have faded which had seemed to be,
Which the dreamer had daydreamed,
And the disgrace of nonexistence will have been revealed,
Fill my emptiness with Yourself.”Dozens books were written about Jerzy Nowosielski when he was still alive, hundreds articles, and also series of poems. And he, having moved continuously toward the other side, today stood on the ridge of heaven in order to see the reality he had been looking for his whole life, and which he loved. Yet he left us his unique art in which glares the Glory of the Kingdom. He went a difficult way of life in order to stand before Christ and say with the word’s of the Paschal Canon:
“Yesterday I was buried with you O Christ, today I rise with you as you arise. Yesterday I was crucified with you glorify me with you, Saviour, in your Kingdom.” Amen.
Fr. Henryk Paprocki
