ABSTRACT
This love not only establishes the identity of every created thing but raises that thing into a harmonious relationship with all other things and people. For Spencer this was about taking the ‘in Church feeling out of church’60 If we believe with Thomas Aquinas that grace does not destroy but fulfill nature then in Stanley Spencer’s paintings we see grace at work on our disfigured world, transforming human relationships into a holy communion of the divine and the human, the divine expressed in and through the human, the spiritual in and through the physical, the holy in and through the mundane, the beautiful in and through what sometimes strikes us in his pictures as the ungainly or ugly. For all was embraced in his vision and raised into a heaven of here and now.
