VISUAL MEDITATION - "Interpreting Life's Suffering"

Paul G. Chandler
Apr 19
7 min read

By Paul G. Chandler - April 18, 2025:

Detail of Veronica wipes the face of Jesus by Nigerian artist Bruce Onobrakpeya — Detail of *Veronica wipes the face of Jesus* by Nigerian artist Bruce Onobrakpeya

As those from the Christian tradition are remembering at this time the suffering Jesus experienced during his final excruciatingly painful days and his death, I find Kahlil Gibran’s interpretation to be deeply refreshing, looking at what happened almost 2000 years ago through a different lens. Gibran wrote:

“Long ago there was a man that was crucified for being too loving and too lovable.”

(Sand and Foam)

This is a time of the year that naturally leads to contemplating the profound suffering that so many are experiencing around the world today. We remember Gaza, Ukraine, eastern Congo, and of course closer to home, all those experiencing unexpected life hardship, trauma and upheaval.

It also leads us to think anew about our own suffering, and how we interpret that pain and hardship within in our respective life journeys. I am reminded of the poignant words of Isak Dinesen, the late Danish writer best known for her memoir Out of Africa; “All sorrows can be borne if you put them into a story or tell a story about them.”

During this time of year, those from the Abrahamic faith traditions, Christians, Muslims and Jews, are remembering their own stories of suffering, pain and sacrifice. In the region of Africa where I grew up, I find it fascinating to see contextualized interpretations of familiar and yet painful stories of suffering.

My Muslim friends are looking forward to their commemoration of Eid al Adha, the “Feast of the Sacrifice,” when they remember the personal pain that Abraham experienced and the faithfulness he modeled through it. In Senegal, where I grew up, this Muslim festival is known as Tabaski, and it is interpreted in a way that reflects local West African culture and traditional spirituality. Hence, their feast is celebrated quite differently than in the Middle East, where I lived for years. And Jews are now celebrating Passover, remembering another story of pain and faithfulness. Interestingly, in Morocco the Jewish celebration is replete with Arabized and Berber traditions, absorbed from among the culture in which they have lived for many centuries. Each has reinterpreted their ancient sacred stories of suffering through the lens of their local context.

It is fascinating to see the variety of artists’ depictions of Jesus on the cross throughout the ages, which evoke the deep sense of suffering within in their local contexts; from the first crucifixion scene around 1500 years ago that was carved into ivory, to a tapestry in Mongolia with Jesus on the cross looking East Asian in a form of meditation, to a black Jesus with tribal markings on the cross in a cathedral in Yaoundé, Cameroon, in Central Africa, to Nicaragua, where Jesus is portrayed as a peasant farmer, hanging on a cross dressed in his work clothes in the middle of a field.

Picasso painted Jesus in a Spanish bull ring, while the French painter Georges Rouault showed him in the midst of laborers, prostitutes, and dying soldiers. I have been particularly struck by the moving crucifixion paintings of Marc Chagall, a Russian Jewish artist. He painted over 20 crucifixion scenes during his lifetime – many of them during the Second World War – in which Jesus clearly represents the suffering of his people at that time.

Perhaps the most famous of these paintings by Chagall is titled White Crucifixion which hangs at the Art Institute of Chicago, not far from where I live. In it a jaundiced Jesus hangs suspended from the cross against a swirling grey backdrop. His waist is wrapped with a tallis, and floating all around him are scenes of destruction: A battalion of men, with sabers and red flags raised, storm a burning shtetl littered with debris; a red-faced figure rushes into a religious meeting place that's consumed by flames in order to save its Scripture and other sacred artifacts; peasants and another figure, cover their faces and wail. Chagall was obsessed, as he wrote in his memoir, with “the pale face of Jesus,” for it represented to him the suffering of his people and the world. Every time I revisit the painting, I find people lingering in front of it, meditating upon it.

One powerful contemporary example comes from Bruce Onobrakpeya, a legendary figure in African art, who turned 92 this year. A celebrated Nigerian artist, sculptor, painter and printmaker, he is seen as the founder of Nigerian modernism, and has had a major impact on the development of the art scene in Africa at large. Onobrakpeya gained renown in the 1950s as a founding member of an influential collective of artists known as the “Zaria Radicals” who were committed to decolonizing visual arts and reasserting Nigerian artistic methods and practices in synergy with Western ones.

During the later part of the 1960s, Onobrakpeya was commissioned to interpret what is known as the Passion of Jesus (the short final period before his death), for St. Paul’s Cathedral (Catholic) in Lagos, Nigeria. The commission resulted in a narrative series titled Fourteen Stations of the Cross, which I had the privilege of seeing recently at the Smithsonian National Museum of African Art in Washington, D.C. in an exhibition titled The Mask and the Cross. The exhibition highlighted Bruce Onobrakpeya’s numerous works melding Nigerian tradition, folklore, and cosmology with Christian motifs and biblical stories.

His Fourteen Stations of the Cross was seen as provocative by some at the time of their creation as Onobrakpeya reinterpreted Jesus’s final days and crucifixion within a Nigerian African context. In his depictions of the stations of the cross, the individuals are African, dressed in traditional vividly patterned African clothing, including headscarves, worn by the Yoruba people in Southwest Nigeria. The Roman guards and executioners are recast as British colonial-era police. Jerusalem is replaced by a post-colonial Nigerian city. Each image has symbols and markers of Nigerian life, including masks of the Yoruba people and geometric patterns of northern Nigerian architecture.

Bruce Onobrakpeya, Simon of Cyrene carries the cross for Christ — Bruce Onobrakpeya, *Simon of Cyrene carries the cross for Christ*

There is also a political message in them as he is "decolonizing" the visual arts as taught by Europeans to Africans. The word “mask” in the exhibition’s title, The Mask and the Cross, refers to African indigenous religious symbols and practices opposed by European Christian workers who arrived in Nigeria backed by brutal colonial regimes. Onobrakpeya poetically described his unique interpretations as new “masks” forged from the ashes of African masks that were destroyed by the foreign missionaries associated with colonialism.

His artworks were displayed at St. Paul’s Cathedral in Lagos for almost 45 years. However, sadly, they were ultimately seen as too controversial by some in the congregation. Instead of being understood as an indigenous “reinterpretation,” they were seen as a distortion, and were eventually taken down. Some vocal members of the church considered Onabrakpeya's interpretation of the Bible as contemptuous in its characterization. The subjects looked too Nigerian and so they felt they represented a distortion of history.

Bruce Onobrakpeya, Jesus falls the second time — Bruce Onobrakpeya, *Jesus falls the second time*

Reflecting on it all, Onobrakpeya says, “I painted the figures as black. The ordinary people felt that the figures should be white. My own strong argument is that Christness goes beyond mere dressing or skin color; it is a universal message at every stage; the lesson that it taught [is] that we should have our local traditional Christ-way in behavior, not necessarily in mere dressing.”

Onobrakpeya aimed to capture the essence of this sacred story of suffering, as opposed to depicting Jewish and Roman history and geography, thereby treating the story as universal. His depictions are of a Jesus who suffers like us, and therefore the paintings invite the African viewer to enter into the story, encouraging them to see themselves within it. “My art tries to bring out what Christ means to our people in a way they can understand,” says Onobrakpeya. By positioning the crucifixion story in colonial Africa, Onobrakpeya makes it identifiable to his people. It becomes personalized, as they see themselves within the scenes, mourning and suffering alongside Jesus and his wrongful oppression.

Artist Bruce Onobrakpeya speaking in his studio in Lagos, Nigeria about his Fourteen Stations of the Cross series

Beyond its impact in Africa, I find Onobrakpeya’s print series to be a profound reflection on life itself, positing a question to us all: “How do we interpret the hardships within our lives?” This time of year, while thinking about suffering depicted in our sacred stories, we are being invited to think afresh about what it all means for us personally. Life is certainly full of challenges. This is the norm, as opposed to the exception.

Although no artwork can fully make sense of life’s hardships, the artwork of our lived experiences in and through hardship can shed light on these mysteries. This is a special time of the year to take time to pull aside from life’s demands to sit in front of the sacred stories of suffering in our respective faith traditions, to bow our hearts, and to be reminded that the way of hardship can actually become a way that leads to new life.

In Jesus’s final days of suffering, he ceased to be a teacher. He instead became a teaching, illustrating for us on the canvas of his life that in the midst of any suffering or brokenness we may experience, our Creator, the Divine Artist, journeys with us through it all, and as the poet Edwina Gateley describes, creates within us with whatever pieces remain “a kaleidoscope of beauty – brilliant as sunrise.”