I viewed Chagall’s “White Crucifixion” at the Art institute of Chicago during the Parliament of the World’s Religions in August 2023.

Having dedicated myself to “contemplative life” since I was twenty-two years old, I still wrestle with the question of whether, when it comes to social and political action, contemplation is simply out of the picture. Lately I’ve been thinking that “out of the picture” can mean different things.

It can mean “irrelevant.” As presidential advisor Stephen Miller puts it, “We live in a world, in the real world … that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power. These are the iron laws of the world.” Greek economist Yanis Vanoufakis claims a manifesto produced by the AI company Palantir reveals “its desire to create a blood-soaked world where ‘ethics is for suckers.’” Palantir’s co-founder and CEO recently bought what used to be St. Benedict’s Abbey, a Trappist Abbey near Snowmass, Colorado. Contemplation is literally out of this picture.

But I have gazed at a different picture for decades: Marc Chagall’s White Crucifixion. Chagall finished it in 1938, in response to Kristallnacht, the “night of broken glass,” a pogrom orchestrated by Nazis that led to arresting thirty thousand Jewish men, burning a thousand synagogues, killing over ninety Jews, vandalizing Jewish homes, hospitals, schools and cemeteries, and then fining the Jews and forcing them to clean up the mess.

In the painting, a crucified Jesus, his waist wrapped in a tallith, hovers in a pale beam of light. The sky above his head roils with black clouds, like the clouds of toxic oily smoke that choke Iranians today. Patriarchs and matriarchs float in this poisonous heaven, weeping. Flames rise from a synagogue on the right. Flimsy ruined houses tumble like dice to the left. At the bottom, people flee by boat and on foot, clinging to a Torah scroll, a shouldered bag. Grimy wet snow melts on the ground.

A different kind of fire emerges at Jesus’ feet: dim candlelight from a six-candle menorah. A few days ago I noticed that only five candles are lit. I wondered about the number and thought about the seven days of creation. Is the extinguished light day six, the day God created human beings? And the seventh, the Sabbath, is nowhere to be seen.

Almost forty years ago, professor and poet Karl Plank wrote a magnificent meditation on Chagall’s painting and Elie Wiesel’s Night, a record of the Holocaust that Wiesel himself had endured. Plank recounts how Catholic writer Francois Mauriac met Wiesel before the publication of Night. Later Mauriac would write about the encounter in his Foreword to Night. He did not preach Resurrection to Wiesel. “I could only embrace him, weeping.”

When one witnesses an innocent young man hung and dying slowly, as Wiesel did in Auschwitz, it’s “a stumbling block not only for Wiesel, but for Mauriac; not only for the Jewish victim, but for the Christian onlooker who cannot interpret away the scandalous scene without trivializing its grossly unredeemed features.”

Plank recommends three virtues we need to practice in the face of atrocity: silence, humility and waiting together for God. “Where all is broken, words of promise turn rotten and oppressive, robbing the afflicted of the integrity of his or her own suffering,” Plank writes.

Mauriac’s embrace enfleshes humility and repentance. “Mauriac sees himself anew as an unwitting onlooker, the bystander guilty not of acts undertaken, but of acts not taken.” This embrace “creates a community of victims and their witnesses who wait together for God.”

In recent years, I see these virtues in organizations such as Parents Circle Families Forum, and in Colum McCann‘s novel Apeirogon. I’m eager to read The Future Is Peace, by Aziz Abu Sarah and Maoz Inon, two friends who ought to be enemies. “One cannot find hope,” reads a description of the book, “We must create it.” We don’t just wait. We co-create.

Which brings me to another understanding of being “out of the picture.” Instead of irrelevant, unreal, or impotent, the unseen may be the center. After all, Stephen Miller’s vision of the world, the Palantir vision of the world, leaves out Chagall’s central figure: the innocent, loving human Victim. Our political leaders leave poverty out of their vocabulary. Some religious leaders malign empathy. The Millers reject the keystone.

Abraham Heschel’s The Prophets formed me as a young monk and seminarian. Heschel said what some strict Christian theologians cannot say: the prophets voiced and suffered the pathos of God. Since God is perfect, God can’t suffer, according to a certain strict Greek philosophical tradition. But with Chagall and Wiesel and some of us Christians, we find Christ among the suffering “losers.” We experience God, or ultimate reality, as heartbroken. Exploited. Betrayed. Colonized. And instead of lashing out at a scapegoat, we pray, we meditate, we train for transformation. We try to love enemies. In Gandhi’s terms, we exert soul-force. We war on injustice, not the unjust.

Ok, a little philosophy and etymology here. Sorry. The Greek word for truth is aletheia. It means un-hidden. Out in the open. But think about it. That might lead us to believe that what’s hidden is unreal or false. Lethal. But what if, in the case of contemplation, it’s just dark and forgotten? The womb from which our small truths come into the open? What if the coin of Truth has two sides? What if what’s “out of the picture” for Mr. Miller is the only hope? What if Miller and his ilk suffer a kind of moral macular degeneration and can’t see the center? Scary. There’s something wrong with his picture. But scales can drop, eyes can open.

To experience empathy is to participate in the brokenhearted divine life. And it’s tricky. It can sink us if we let it. Or it can transform and divinize us. It takes some training: silence, humility, waiting and working together in compassionate solidarity toward justice. We have to learn to stand on a precarious edge, as Roshi Joan Halifax puts it. We can drown in suffering, sinking like an unbroken geode. Or we can let the world’s suffering break us open. Instead of sinking in opacity, we burst open to emit sparkling, healing light.

In a way, it’s always Advent. Well, it’s always Holy Saturday, too. For now. At least we trust the wick of the human candle can be relit. And then we can hope for the Sabbath and trust that Resurrection is quietly at work, like the quiet beam of moonlight bathing Chagall’s Christ right through the center of war crimes. It comes from somewhere out of the picture.

When I look beyond the Miller world, outside the headlines and harangues and culture wars, I find solace in the reports of people like “solutions journalist” Angus Hervey, founder of Fix the News. He notes that a few people can do and have done immense damage to our world quickly, as we see from today’s autocrats and oligarchs. The news is bad.  But he celebrates a “second asymmetry” of brilliant kindness in quiet, creative, compassionate groups who do the slow work of repairing rivers and nourishing human bodies, “negotiators and agitators, people that are good with spreadsheets and people who are good with people and people who dig trenches in the rain.”

I think this is what the Desert Fathers and Mothers did in the days when emperors claimed to be Christian. They quietly built a new way of life, far from Rome’s glamor and galas. Recently-fired talk show host Steven Colbert quoted a poem by Robert Hayden that describes the kind of “desert” attitudes we need today:

We must not be frightened or cajoled
into accepting evil as our deliverance from evil.
We must go on struggling to be human,
though monsters of abstraction police and threaten us.

We need to “renew the vision of a human world where godliness is possible.” Humble, quiet, communal, holy. Well, not always quiet: silent first, then, if it’s your vocation, a clarion cry of the prophetic heart.

I think of Russian poet Anna Akhmatova’s “Everything is Plundered.”  “Death’s great black wing scrapes the air,” like Chagall’s blackened sky. All is lost and “cherries blow summer into town.” Something wondrous approaches, something we thought was out of the picture:

And the miraculous comes so close
to the ruined, dirty houses —
something not known to anyone at all,
but wild in our breast for centuries.