Marianne Williamson Instagram – Many years ago, I had an art poster on my dorm wall at college. The picture was of a tall Pre-Raphaelite angel, and I loved it. I didn’t know anything about the artist, and it didn’t matter. The name of Scottish painter Edward Burne-Jones of itself meant nothing to me.
Skip to about twenty years later, and one day I was walking up Fifth Avenue in New York City. As I passed the Metropolitan Museum, I saw that a flag out front announcing a current exhibit was a picture of that angel! I was so excited to see the group of paintings that the angel was part of.
I was in New York at the time for a reason. I had been working on a book about spirituality and politics, ultimately called “Healing the Soul of America,” for which I was doing a deep dive into American history. At that point I’d been reading about the Transcendentalists and their relationship to the Industrial Revolution. I read about Whitman, Emerson, Thoreau, and a group of artists and philosophers in the United States and Great Britain who foresaw psychological and spiritual dangers in the mindset accompanying the advent of Western materialism. While industrialization, mechanization, and Western science presented many benefits and opportunities for the betterment of humanity, artists and philosophers at the time also saw risks in our becoming so mesmerized by the outer world that our inner powers would begin to wither.
Much was coming together for me. On that day, as I entered the museum and procured the audio set that would explain more about those angel paintings, I learned that Edward Burne-Jones was a member of that movement of artists! In fact – this blew me away when I first heard it and it blows me away even now – Burne-Jones once said, “Every time they build a machine, I will paint an angel!”
(read rest of “Angels, Art, and Where We Are Now” on Linktree or at mariannewilliamson.substack.com), | Posted on 25/Feb/2025 20:04:33
