The Healing Art Of William Blake

         

I share this painting by William Blake because it gives life and overflows with peace. Gaze into it. Go beyond theology, beyond concepts, and sink into the radiant depths of divine Imagination. Use art for healing. 

The painting is of the Death of St. Joseph, husband of Mary.  Jesus and the Holy Spirit (feminine emanation of Jesus) are ministering to this wise, strong, humble father. 

As I study his long prophetic poems, like 'Milton' and 'Jerusalem,' I'm amazed by Blake's very personal relationship with Jesus, and the child-like innocence of his faith. He believed that Jesus IS the divine Imagination, whom we can meet and love in our own creative vision. "Imagination is the divine body of the Lord Jesus, blessed forever!"

For Blake, Jesus was not a symbol of some higher consciousness, nor a mere social reformer, but a living Person who dwells at the subtlest level of feeling and perception in the heart. Jesus is actual energy, the very substance of the Imagination, in whom we participate, generating the cosmos out of luminous inspiration.

In 'Jerusalem' (Plate 4), Blake recounts the words that Jesus speaks to him: "Wake! Expand! I am in you and you in me, mutual in love divine, fibers of love! .... I'm not a God afar off, I'm a brother and friend. Within your bosom I reside and you reside in me."