One of my sisters in the convent keeps a pinboard in her room on which she has tacked a variety of prayer cards and holy pictures. For a time, the centerpiece of her devotional collage was a postcard-sized print of Pieter Bruegel’s The Procession to Calvary. Painted in the sixteenth century, it is a vast, overwhelmingly crowded landscape in which brightly colored figures swarm busily around a pathetically tiny Christ, stooped beneath the cross he is carrying and barely discernible to the viewer’s eye. The first time I saw The Procession to Calvary pinned to my sister’s corkboard, I commented on how striking I found it. “It’s remarkable, isn’t it?” she said, and then added wryly, “It’s a picture of my soul.”

Sacred art in the spiritual life wasn’t something I had much time for before I entered the convent. Perhaps fittingly, it was the sister with Bruegel’s Procession on her wall who helped me the most to appreciate it. Whenever I have caught a glimpse of her collaged pinboard over the years, I have seen something to remind me that while there is a time and a place for reading, writing, and arguing about theology, there is also much to learn by simply looking – looking with a gaze that can rebound from the image up toward God and then downward, inward, into ourselves.

After all, Christian discipleship has something very important in common with the creation of art. Both are matters of perspective and proportion. It is the task of an artist to decide how large they will make each of the figures in their landscape, and where they should place them. It is the task of the Christian, meanwhile, to decide what place their Savior will take in the messy and overpopulated landscape of their interior life. Images like Bruegel’s Procession are effective because they are both alarming and familiar: alarming, because we know it is not good that Christ should be hidden from our sight in this way; familiar, because he too often is.

Bruegel was a follower of Hieronymus Bosch, and the pangs of spiritual queasiness that Bruegel’s Procession draws out from me are matched only by another painting from Bosch’s school. It is the anonymous Christ’s Descent into Hell, in which the frenzied crowds of gaping demons and damned souls upstage a miniscule Christ, who is peeking through a backlit door into Sheol like a mouse through a mousehole. It makes a strange contrast to most other artistic depictions of Holy Saturday; my favorite example is a ninth-century fresco beneath the Basilica of San Clemente in Rome, in which an almost comically huge Christ wrests a startled-looking Adam from Sheol while trampling a scrawny, goblinesque Satan underfoot for good measure.

We might be tempted to conclude that such startlingly disproportionate images of Christ’s descent into hell are simply a result of poor artistry. But as we make our own way towards Holy Saturday, it might be worth considering that they are, in fact, a far more realistic portrayal of the nature of good and evil than we find in Bosch and his followers. And when Christ descends into our own inner hell, into the depths of our suffering and sin, will we see him as a tiny figure swallowed in darkness, or a conqueror of vast and near-incredible size?

There is a passage in C. S. Lewis’s The Great Divorce in which Lewis, now safely in the “Real World” of heaven, is shown hell by his companion, George MacDonald, “the Teacher.” The Teacher uses a blade of grass to point to a miniscule crack in the ground. “All hell is smaller than one pebble of your earthly world,” he says, “but it is smaller than one atom of this world, the Real World.” Lewis is unimpressed: “It seems big enough when you’re in it, sir,” he says. But the Teacher is unfazed by this argument. “And yet all loneliness, angers, hatreds, envies, and itchings that it contains,” he replies, “if rolled into one single experience and put into the scale against the least moment of the joy that is felt by the least in heaven, would have no weight that could be registered at all.”

Lewis is not wrong. Hell, as he says, seems big enough when we’re in it, just as Christ seems small enough when we have strayed from him. Christian theology tells us that evil is a privation of good. But none of us have ever seen a “privation of good”; instead we have seen death, trauma, illness, injustice, pain; we have seen our own sin, pride, vindictiveness, selfishness, and willingness to deceive and to withhold forgiveness. The wounds caused by these evils have taken up their place in our interior lives, and there is no use pretending that they are smaller than they actually are. Instead, we must follow the example of Lewis’s Teacher: not trying to make them smaller but adjusting our gaze to see how small they already are compared to the promise of heaven.

In the season of Lent, we are invited to adjust our perspective. We may feel more at home with the world of Bosch and Bruegel, searching for a Christ hidden from our sight by an evil which seems big enough when we are in it. But by the time we arrive at Holy Saturday, those Lenten practices of prayer, fasting, and almsgiving may have opened us up to the grace by which God reshapes the figures of our inner landscape until they are restored to their rightful size. This daily choice to look at things the way they truly are is, for me, the basic spiritual discipline of Lent: the discipline of remembering that hell may well seem big enough when we are in it, but it is nothing compared to the love of Christ.