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A reflection and prayer to start the day with the Revd Dr Craig Gardiner, a tutor and chaplain at Cardiff Baptist College.

Good morning.

Today in 1890, the artist Vincent Van Gogh died, aged just 37. He remains once of the most significant and instantly recognisable of painters, famous for his post-impressionist renderings of Sunflowers, Café Terraces and Starry Nights. His art saw the world in a very different way and his expression of it often draws us in to a shared sense of beauty and wonder.

In a way, this is what all good artists do: it is the poet’s craft and the musician’s skill, it is the vocation of dancers, potters, novelists, actors and painters, to beckon us through their work, to stop and pay attention to the splendour and mystery of our living – but also to be sensitive to the harsher realities of its brokenness and suffering.

Van Gogh was no stranger to such struggles. Famously he cut off his ear during a time when his physical and mental health were deteriorating. He wrestled too with the place of faith and prayer between the beauty and the pain. In later life he was more circumspect about religion than his youthful ambitions to be a priest and his time spent as zealous a missionary among impoverished coal miners. And yet those early experiences led him to affirm that Christ lived ‘as an artist greater than all other artists, scorning marble and clay and paint, working in the living flesh.’

Van Gogh is only echoing what the ancient Psalmist wrote on some other starry night: When I consider the heavens I see it as the handiwork of God’s fingers, and then I think about us human beings, and realise that we have such an awesome part to play in it all.

We are all artists of one kind or another, so:

Thank you, Creator God,
For the splendour of your creation;
and the chance to add our own brushstrokes of beauty
to the world of our living today.
Amen.