It was June 24, 2018 and I was in a small room on the second floor of the Yale Center for British Art. Canvases, whose surfaces were thick with textured brush strokes and haunted by a patina of soft greys and blue-blacks, hung around the room. I had come upon the work of British painter Celia Paul (born 1959) and I was mesmerized.

As I walked around the room, the broad swaths of texture and shape materialized into ocean waves, the stark outlines of the Bronte Parsonage and prominent-nosed female faces with strong cheekbones. I marveled at the vastness of the ocean scapes, fondly recalled my own time at the Bronte Parsonage (Yorkshire will always be England’s finest and wildest county to me) and realized that I couldn’t look away from the painting of four prominent-nosed female faces. This was a portrait of the artist’s sisters. In the painting, they sit in a half circle, their bodies shrouded in white robes and their faces contorted in grief. Paul painted it after the death of her mother and writes about the work in her new autobiography, Self-Portrait: “I needed them to sit for me all together because of the supernatural empathy that ran like an invisible skein between them.”

An “invisible skein” that runs through generations and emotionally ties them together in past, present and future—that phrase, and the ideas that swirl around it, now drift through my mind as I walk through STM’s Riggs Study and notice the portraits of past Chaplains, or, happen to glance into the Chapel’s choir loft and catch sight of the Tree of Jesse.

The Chapel’s Tree of Jesse, a mosaic fresco by Elsa Schmid (1897-1970), is the work of another artist interested in the connection—and the power of that connection—between generations. Yet, unlike Paul’s work, the “invisible skein” that ties Jesse to Jesus is made visible through sinewy branch and deep, verdant greens. A shoot shall indeed sprout from the stump of Jesse: it has already done so, is doing so and will do so again.

As we begin another liturgical season, another liturgical year, I’d like to think that we are given something tangible and comforting from that continual sprouting, something that steadily reminds us of the Advent that is yet to come.