Tromping through Italy this week has been a tour through the wonder and beauty of Christian art. For the hundreds of paintings, sculptures, and frescoes we have seen, one image stands out the most– Michelangelo’s masterpiece on the vaulted ceiling of the Sistine Chapel in Rome. One scene depicts God touching man, or almost touching, as He extends a single digit down to Adam in a kind of yogic transmission. The contact is incomplete. There is a space between.
The act of touching/not-touching is something we put into practice in yoga. We bring our palms close to touching in namaste. We curl our tongue back, holding it in space between the lower and upper palate. In meditation we listen to sound while abiding in silence and we have thoughts without getting consumed by them.
Gazing upward to Michelangelo’s masterpiece brought goosebumps to my flesh. It was not just the masterful detail on the faces of each figure–beatific faces and faces wrought with agony. It was not only the subtle rendering of pigment and light. It was the raw power of the very instant god transmits the spark of life, a moment that thousands of visitors get to witness standing in silence on the chapel floor with necks craned upward in awe. It is a gap, a space, connecting flesh and spirit, the earthly and the transcendent. It is a moment of transmission that makes the whole world possible.
