Tag: our sunday visitor

Everyone gets an inheritance; everyone gets a choice

What was the prodigal son’s actual sin?

That question popped into my head as I heard the Gospel reading that I’ve heard countless times. The obvious answers — essentially, sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll — seemed unpersuasive this time. Is this really just a story saying that if you go and do the really common bad things that people tend to do, then God will still forgive you?

Well, yes! It’s definitely that. Jesus, in telling this parable, was showing the Pharisees and scribes that he hung around with sinners because he wants to forgive them and be reconciled with them.

But here’s something odd: The prodigal son says that he has sinned against God and against his father. Obviously, fornicating and getting drunk are sins against the Ten Commandments, and thus sins against God. But what sin has he committed against his father?

The sin of squandering. What an evocative word. His father had something good, and he gave it to his son as a gift so he could use it for some particular purpose. But, instead, he squandered it. That’s worth looking at because it also sheds light on the part of the story that troubles many people: the father’s attitude toward his other, obedient son.

So what’s so terrible about squandering an inheritance?

First, it’s clearly terrible for the son himself. He burns through his money and ends up humiliated and starving. It was a bad plan, and it bit him in the butt.

It was also bad for the father. He very likely wanted to help set his son up with a homestead of his own so his wealth would flourish and grow. A young man with a sizable inheritance could easily marry, likely have children of his own, and bring joy and delight to his father.

His sin was also bad for the community. By squandering his inheritance, he refused to enrich the land or make jobs for the next generation. I know how tediously modern that sounds — “His great sin was that he failed to engage in community development!” — but it’s true! Things haven’t changed that much. When you get something good, you’re not supposed to waste it. You’re supposed to use it to help yourself, show respect to the person who gave it to you, and help other people. That’s what good things are FOR.

But on every count, the prodigal son did the opposite. 

When we are assessing our lives (a very good practice during Lent!), it may or may not be helpful to ask ourselves, “Am I sinning?” It will probably be fruitful, though, to look at what good things God has given us, and to ask ourselves what we are doing with it. Are we using that inheritance well? Or are we squandering it?

An obvious example of an inheritance is money. If we have it, are we spending it on dumb or bad stuff that hurts ourselves and other people? That’s squandering. But using it to help other people would be using it for its intended purpose.

There are less obvious examples. Gifts of time, energy and health are all things we can either squander or use well. Even our personalities can be an inheritance. If we have been given the gift of a quick wit and sharp sense of humor, what do we use that for? For being nasty to other people and humiliating them? That’s squandering it. For making people laugh and helping them take life lightly? That’s putting it to good use.

Or maybe we’re naturally confident and charming, and we find it easy to persuade and influence others. Some people use this gift to get their way, and finagle themselves into situations they haven’t really earned and can’t really manage. That’s squandering. But some people use the gift of charisma well, buoying up everyone around them, bringing out their best and leading them down good paths.

You get the idea. Whatever it is you have in life, whatever strengths you possess, whatever talents you can claim, whatever skills and abilities you have, these are your inheritance. You can accept God’s help to get yourself set up in a thriving life that makes him proud and benefits everyone. Or you can stuff whatever gifts you have in your pocket, run far away from your father’s land and squander it all. And you see where that second choice lands you. Sooner or later, you’ll be wishing you had it as good as a pig.

So what about the elder son? In the story, he didn’t run through his inheritance. He obeyed his father and did his work, and when his loser brother comes crawling back, he’s indignant at how thrilled their father is. The elder son comes across, at first, as innocent and justified.

But listen to how Jesus tells it…. Read the rest of my latest for Our Sunday Visitor. 

Image: The Return of the Prodigal Son by Maestro dell’Annuncio ai Pastori, National Museum of Capodimonte (Naples) via Wikimedia (Creative Commons) 

Missionaries for Music: Ashuelot Concerts brings global talent to rural New England

Louisa Stonehill faced a row of kindergarteners. Their eyes were closed, their necks craned forward, and each one was doing his best to feel the music she played on her violin — with their ears, and also with their faces, their jaws, their chests.

“I can feel it,” one girl said, her eyes still closed.

That is what Louisa and her pianist husband Nicholas Burns came for. They are a kind of missionary, evangelists for music, answering a call.

The couple, founders of Ashuelt Concerts, moved to New Hampshire from Greenwich, London, in 2016, with two suitcases, a 2-year-old and no real plan.

Nine years later, they’ve built a thriving international chamber music concert series, playing 18 concerts a year, bringing world-class performers to tiny New England stages — and, even more remarkably, to area schools. The couple, along with a revolving roster of musicians, will travel to any school within 45 minutes of their base in Keene, New Hampshire, to introduce kids to classical music.

Nick and Louisa, the parents of two boys, ages 7 and 10, reach something like 5,000 children a year, many of whom might never otherwise encounter classical music, much less in a concert played live and up close just for them.

“We literally put a 5-year-old from a rural area a few feet away from one of the best musicians in the world, playing one of most valuable, famous instruments in the world,” Nick said.

A visceral response

Nick and Louisa make a point of not condescending to kids. They play movements from larger pieces, from seven to ten minutes each. It’s a big ask for little kids, but they help the children understand what they are hearing.

Sometimes they wonder if they’re expecting too much. Louisa recalls a “horrendous” musical passage by Shostakovich that evokes prisoners forced to dance before their own graves. They didn’t share that detail with the kids, but the music made its point. How did it land?

“They went absolutely bananas,” Nick said. They said it was like a horror movie, and they loved it. 

He added, “We’ve been shocked to our core –“

“– at how viscerally the children respond,” Louisa finished. “We don’t dumb it down. We give it to them real.” 

Real, live music brings out an emotional, vibrational delight like nothing else.

Along with the music, the couple delivers lessons kids will need to know no matter where life takes them. 

Lessons, for instance, about talent. While some people take to instruments more readily than others, talent alone is not sufficient.

“Talent is the product of learning, practice and discipline, and the act of humility and the act of being honest,” Nick said. 

The kids are skeptical, but Nick and Louisa insist: Three weeks before the concert, they couldn’t play the piece. They practiced, they slowed themselves down and they had faith they would prevail. And once you have put in the work to learn something, it’s inside you for good, Louisa said.

“It’s really freaky. You can literally not have played a piece for a year or two, and when you open it up again, it will just take you a second to find that pathway in your brain.”

In faith as in music

Here is where the couple’s Catholic faith asserts itself, even though they do not speak overtly about religion.

“Everything we talk about has parallels with the faith. It’s a living embodiment of our faith,” Nick said.

They both emphasized how vital it is, in faith as in performance, to begin with humility, to accept how little you know and not to get ahead of yourself.

Another parallel: It’s normal to go through a stage of questioning, of rebelling against rules that seem senseless and discipline that feels tiresome. But this stage is worth conquering, because through the discipline of practice, something amazing comes about. You learn to become a vessel for something greater than yourself.

“When you stand up on stage and you’ve got a big audience and they’re all staring at you in expectation, you have to put yourself to one side. It’s not about you anymore. It’s about communicating this great piece of art,” Nick said.

Louisa, an adult convert, describes the almost mystical experience of sharing with kindergarteners the voices of long-dead musicians.

“You’re connecting these two souls in such a unique and special way. You’re bringing these composers down from the heavens, almost, into their arms,” she said.

Great musicians and Catholics share a sense of humility, self-awareness and a generosity of spirit, Nick said. And both groups recognize the flash of genius as a gift, something they’ve been blessed with from outside oneself.

Called to a new community

But even with these overlaps, the “aggressive secularity” of London’s chamber music scene was one of the things that drove the couple away. How did they land in New Hampshire?

Read the rest of my latest for Our Sunday Visitor. 

Photo courtesy Ashuelot Concerts

All seasons have their purpose: The eremetic art of Margaret Rose Realy

Margaret Rose Realy isn’t really an artist, she insists, even though her paintings of flowers, clouds and the Sacred Heart hang in houses all over the world. She isn’t a natural author, either, even though she’s written four books: “A Garden of Visible Prayer,” “A Catholic Gardener’s Spiritual Almanac,” “A Garden Catechism,” and “Planting with Prayer.” 

“The only reason I did it is because God asked me to,” she said. 

Listening to God is one of the few things Realy, 70, will admit to being skilled at. She is, in some ways, a professional: She’s a Benedictine oblate, associated with a local monastery in Michigan, who has lived an eremitic life marked by silence, solitude and prayer for many years. Realy follows the rule of St. Benedict, which she calls “a gentle rule.” 

The silver-haired, soft-spoken woman whose chronic health struggles have made it harder and harder for her to move seems like mildness personified. She is a master gardener and says that working among flowers has brought her closer to God. Her gardens are a form of “gentle evangelization.”

But do not mistake Realy for a sentimentalist. Her docile manner veils a soul on fire with passion, courage and fierce trust.

Realy speaks quietly of her physical pain, and just as quietly of her harrowing personal history of abuse and neglect; and she speaks of her desire to see her abusers again in heaven. 

“I can’t wait to know who God really meant them to be, who they were supposed to be,” she said. “I still want to love them, and I still want to know that love, and give it.”

 

Beauty and grace are like seeds that God has planted in even the darkest and most tormented souls, she said. It takes a terribly strong conviction to refuse forgiveness from God.

“I don’t think hell is as full as we might like to think it is.”

Again, do not mistake Realy for a pushover. Many of her paintings are sweet and simple depictions of the beauty of nature. But some, like her Sacred Heart series, are a disciplined exploration of something she didn’t understand and didn’t want to face. 

“I was highly repulsed by some of the older Sacred Heart images, this graphic, gory mass. It was beyond my ability to connect to it,” she said.

The images were so gruesome, they pushed her away from Jesus. So she pushed back. She prayed, pressing the Lord for an explanation of this distressing devotional. He told her to paint. 

She obediently began to depict the Sacred Heart, but “bound up in nature,” intertwined not only with thorns but with vines and buds. 

“I was drawing the Sacred Heart in a way that wasn’t frightening. Drawing closer to what it means to have a heart so sacred (that) our Lord was willing to let it stop beating,” she said. “It was drawing closer to the heart of Jesus for me, who has experienced much violence in my life.”

Realy’s post-traumatic stress disorder used to make the sight of a crucifix intolerable. Now she embraces it. That turn marks the time when she began to converse with the Lord “casually, personally.” 

She does say the Rosary and other formal prayers. But she also simply speaks God. 

“And I listen, of course,” she said. Using something like the Gestalt “empty chair” technique, she is ready to hear answers that aren’t verbal. 

‘What am I supposed to do now?’

Her faith began to grow many years before she took up a paintbrush, in a physically active season of her life, full of backpacking and canoeing. The beauty of the natural world drew her to the Lord, and she returned the favor by throwing herself wholeheartedly into gardening and teaching others how to do it. 

But her physical challenges began to mount, until a debilitating bout of pain and inflammation landed her in bed for five days. When she got back on her feet, she headed to adoration to hash things out with God. 

“I sat down in a pew, and said, ‘Lord, you made me a gardener.’ I was crying, ‘I can’t do this anymore. You know I can’t do this. What am I supposed to do now?’… Read the rest of my latest for Our Sunday Visitor.

Transmitting light: Stained glass and painting by Patrice Schelkun

The thing about stained glass is that the artist doesn’t know how it will look until it’s installed.

“There’s an element of surprise along the whole process,” said Patrice Schelkun, who works in glass and also in paint.

When Schelkun works on stained glass, she pieces her windows together on a huge table and solders it tight, planning out every element, every color, every piece of glass. She must choose between clear or opalescent glass, and sometimes she adds more than one layer to create a sense of depth.

But it’s not until it’s completely done and held up to the light for the first time that she really knows how it came out.

Schelkun likes to add texture and detail to her glass pieces with paint, and this, too, yields unpredictable results. The paint, which is made of pigment mixed with finely ground glass, is applied with oil or water and fused to the glass surface in a kiln, eight hours at a time. Sometimes five or more layers of paint are applied, and fired in between each application. Sometimes the paint changes, and sometimes the color of the glass shifts in the kiln.

Or sometimes a piece turns out as designed, but then it’s not displayed for greatest effect. This was the case with “Adorned,” a panel with a sun-dappled face peering out from a crush of jewel-toned chrysanthemums. The piece was designed to be hung in direct light, but it was displayed too high up in an exhibit in Chicago, and the light didn’t shine through as Schelkun intended. When she retrieved that piece, she opted to install it on a light box, to display it at its best.

But sometimes this variability inherent in glasswork is an asset. Natural light, in particular, brings out the potential of glass to shift in appearance.

“It’s almost like the window is alive,” Schelkun said. “It’s the same thing if you’re walking by a window. It changes as you walk past it. It projects colors onto the floor. It’s kind of a living thing.”

Schelkun, 65, now concentrates more on oil painting and portraiture than she does on glass, but she wasn’t always an artist of any kind. She studied science but soon put that aside to raise her children. The family bought a house in Pennsylvania in the ’90s, and Schelkun got to work decorating it. She began in her oldest daughter’s room, which she festooned with a mural of flowers and bunnies, turning it into a little secret garden.

Friends who saw her work said she was good, good enough to start a business. She began decorating homes, and then businesses, and then a church.

A church bathroom, that is. The pastor gave her free rein to redo the ugly little room in the vestibule.

“I did a stone wall and a little niche, and he was like, ‘Whoa,’” Schelkun said. She was welcomed onto the committee for the parish’s building project and worked on choosing colors and furnishings.

At the same time, she started to study drawing and painting in earnest, taking private classes with artists when she could spare the time. She also took a class on stained glass at a local community college.

“I knew nothing about stained glass. Basically [the class] was teaching you how to cut glass and piece it together, and I said, ‘No, I want to paint on glass,’” she said. “My first love was painting.”

But there is something about glass, and its potential to capture, transmit and refract light in different ways. Her studio, Immanence Fine Art, shows works in both paint and stained glass. What they all have in common is an emphasis on light.

“Immanence is evidence of the divine throughout the material world. We can interact with God’s presence through the beautiful things we see in nature, and the way light strikes things. That’s evidence of God, to me,” Schelkun said.

When she paints portraits, she often composes them with strong lighting from one side, but even more often with “rim light,” light that bleeds out from behind the subject.

“If someone is standing in front of a sunset, the light halos around their head,” she said. “It’s the light I’m attracted to.”

She has seen firsthand how the light can attract other people, too….Read the rest of my latest artist profile in Our Sunday Visitor.

Creative destruction, violent creation: The art of blacksmith Evan Wilson

“I hit, beat, torture, manipulate, crush, squeeze, twist, punch holes in and hammer all those pieces of metal into shape,” said Evan Wilson, artist and blacksmith.

This is how he turns copper, bronze, iron and steel into furniture and firepits, leaves, berries, wings and hands, and, sometimes, the body of Jesus.

“It’s a mixture of brute force and finesse,” he said.

Wilson, 37, said his work is an emotional experience, and sometimes a spiritual revelation.

“For me, it’s become a way of understanding my own, and our universal, coming back to God. Of relating to the God who calls us to suffer and to grow,” he said.

At times he’s focused on being the smith who shapes the metal, but other times he feels more like the thing being shaped.

“I hit this material like I mean it. I really clobber it. But every hammer blow is at just the right angle, just the right amount, the right temperature, the right location,” he said.

What he’s doing is bringing about a “loving transformation.”

“But from the perspective of the metal, it’s like ‘Oh my God, stop beating me!’” he said.

Wilson isn’t just using his artistic imagination; he has lived it.

Wilson was received into the Eastern Orthodox church in 2023, but was raised evangelical Protestant. Wilson was all of 7 years old when he began to note the logical inconsistencies of a “sola scriptura” approach to doctrine. As he grew, he kept finding more questions than anyone in his community could answer, and the faith of his childhood had less and less of a grip on him.

“It left me with a lot of angst,” he said. “I never threw away Christ, but I always wanted to figure out what the deeper value of this story was.”

As an adult, seeking a life of meaning, he spent time in Afghanistan working for a nonprofit that taught literacy and offered pregnancy care.

“I lived in a mud hut with an ex-Taliban member, had a dog, rode my bike to work. It was an awesome time, but very difficult to reconcile the God I was told about as a child with what was occurring there,” he said.

He saw so many people, especially women and children, who seemed trapped and forgotten.

When Wilson returned to the United States, he took up with Mobile Loaves and Fishes, a nonprofit that serves the homeless in Austin, Texas.

“I could tell there was something embodied or incarnate in the faith that was in action there,” he said.

That something wasn’t picturesque. He recalls working surrounded with what founder Alan Graham called “the bouquet of Christ,” the aroma of incontinent and unbathed bodies, and crack smoke.

“We served them as we serve Christ,” he said.

Wilson still struggled with his faith, but Loaves and Fishes is where he began to use his hands. He ran a workshop teaching the homeless to build wooden bird houses and tree swings, so they could have some shot at supporting themselves. His program invited journeymen to come and host workshops, and this included a dozen master blacksmiths from around the world.

“They were super generous, and I learned a ton,” he said.

That is when blacksmithing began to compel him, and it eventually became his main focus. It was not a smooth or graceful transition.

“My wife and I had our first son in 2020, I lost my job, and I got my first commission all in the same year,” he said.

That first commission was a Stations of the Cross. He calls it the beginning of his salvation, as he carefully crafted the tiny bodies acting out the suffering and death of Christ.

He first made the figures out of plasticine clay and shaped them with wooden replicas of his smith tools, to make sure he’d be able to form them from metal without using his hands. He literally wrestled with the little bodies as he worked.

“Pushing Christ’s arm just so, not thinking but feeling that; the tilt of the head here, the Roman soldier hammering the nails in. That’s how I was converted,” he said…. Read the rest of my latest artist profile for Our Sunday Visitor. 

Image: Evan Wilson in his studio with the Face of Christ (Mandylion) in chased bronze

Note: I’m expanding the scope of this monthly artist feature! If you know of a Catholic musician, composer, dancer, or other contributor to the arts who has an interesting story to tell, let me know. Shoot an email to simchafisher at gmail dot com. Thanks!

 

 

Look up!

One day, I was pushing my then-toddler on a swing while we waited for her big sister to get out of school. One of the dads was doing the same thing, idly pushing a swing and waiting for the bell to ring. As he pushed, he looked up at the sky.

“Look at the clouds,” he said. “They’re so cool! I never really looked at clouds before.”

I didn’t know such a thing was possible, to never look at clouds.

Clouds are some of my favorite things in the whole world to look at and think about. I sometimes tell my kids that God could have come up with so many ways of making the world function, but he seems to have chosen the beautiful and interesting and dramatic way, over and over and over again. He could have designed some other mechanism to move water up and down and around the water cycle — something dull or unchanging or even invisible — but he chose to design this system that’s so elegant, beguiling, ever-changing and recklessly beautiful. Clouds! And all we have to do is look up.

The same is true for so much of the natural world: the way seeds turn from tightly closed secret chambers into brave, tender little beings standing on their own; the way rocks and soil are ceaselessly churned up through the relentless jaws of continental plates. Heck, God could have made the world colorless. Soundless. Scentless. He could have organized the food chain so that birds are not necessary, but he chose to fill the world with strange, beautiful, sometimes nutty and hilarious creatures who not only hop and fly and swoop around, they make music as they go. Are you kidding me? And all we have to do is look up!

And that’s just the stuff we know about! That’s just the stuff we can see with a quick glance around us as we hustle from the car to wherever our next appointment is. There is also an immense natural world that is hidden from us, unfathomably busy with its own designs, that we don’t even know about: things working under the surface of the ground, things too small for us to see, things hidden within our own cells; secret signals between trees, arcane signs passed from species to species and generation to generation. Fungal kingdoms, pheromones, neural memories. Things under the sea; things under the ice; things beyond our atmosphere. The sheer liveliness of the world is too much to comprehend.

I’m lucky that both my parents taught me it was normal and rational to look at the natural world with fascination and delight, because it is fascinating and delightful. To have been raised this way is a gift, and for a moment, on the playground that day, I was crushed by the thought this man had been denied that gift for decades. In maybe 40 years, no one had taught him to look up.

But then I thought: How wonderful that it’s not too late. …Read the rest of my latest for Our Sunday Visitor. 

Artist and teacher Monica Dix walks the walk.

Monica Dix believes that if you’re the smartest person in the room, you’re in the wrong room.

That’s why the 53-year-old artist and teacher will sometimes tack up one of her in-progress drawings where her room full of eighth-graders can see it, saying, “Okay, five things. Critique my work.”

At first, they praise her art, and tell her she’s the best artist ever.

“Then they dig in,” she said.

They always find mistakes she didn’t see, and they’re not shy about letting her know she didn’t properly measure the space between the nose and the upper lip, or that something was off about the eyes.

“It’s great for my pride,” she said.

It’s also great for her students, because it shows them not only how to look critically at the objective elements that make or break a piece of art, but it shows them what it’s like to be an artist. Sometimes you can fix a mistake, but sometimes you have to start over.

“It’s that whole ‘walk the walk.’ I let them see that,” she said.

Sometimes, a kid will point out an error she’s made, and she realizes she’s not only executed something wrong, she’s been teaching it wrong. It’s like when one person raises his hand and asks a question, and it turns out there are ten people who also had that question, but were too self-conscious to ask.

“It helps everybody,” she said.

Dix has been teaching art to teenagers at Naples Classical Academy, a charter school in Naples, Florida, since 2021. In many ways, it’s an extraordinary school, where kids leave their cell phones behind and nobody aspires to be a TikTok star. The classical curriculum, provided by Hillsdale College, tends to attract families with a certain mindset, she said.

But in other ways, they bring the same attitudes and assumptions to her class that many Americans bring to art in general. Part of the curriculum includes modern art, and every year when she introduces abstract expressionism, someone will say, “I could do that!” or “A kindergartener could do that!”

She responds, “Then why didn’t they?”

She asks her students to learn what was going on in the artist’s life and what was going on in the world. They study art on the same timeline as they study history, so they begin to make connections and understand why some artists chose to break with tradition, and why we still remember their work today.

“I come at it from a historical standpoint, from a cultural history standpoint. (These things are) worth looking at,” she said.

She also gets her students to do more than just look. If they have time, she invites them to re-create art that baffles them — for instance, the intricate, dynamic layers of drips and splashes in a Jackson Pollock action painting.

It’s harder than it looks. Her students are allowed to say whether they like or dislike a piece of art, but first they should know what they’re talking about.

Dix makes herself walk the walk, too. …

Read the rest of my latest artist profile for Our Sunday Visitor.

Image: Sunday Afternoon At the Porch House Pub by Monica Dix (image courtesy of the artist) 

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Also, a note: I’m expanding the scope of this monthly artist feature! If you know of a Catholic musician, composer, dancer, or other contributor to the arts who has an interesting story to tell, let me know! Shoot an email to simchafisher at gmail dot com. Thanks!

Matthew Alderman finds ancient answers to new questions in church architecture

Matthew Alderman has a surprising weakness for neon haloes, the kind you might find lighting up the heads of stone saints in 1,000-year-old Italian churches.

“It can be quaint. I will take old, interesting kitsch over ’60s clip art,” he said. “At least it has honesty.”

But when Alderman works on church design, he tries to aim a little higher than honesty. Clients, weary of bland and barren sacred art and architecture, are ready for more.

“They want something transcendent that speaks to a higher order,” he said.

Alderman, 41, is a popular illustrator and heraldry expert, but his day job is with the venerable church architecture firm Cram and Ferguson, where he is the day-to-day design manager, working together with several other team members. The firm is known for its role in spearheading the revival of Gothic and other traditional styles. Its hallmark style provides a lively relief from the dreary errors of the past several decades. So much modern design is cold and sterile, bleak or banal.

But Alderman never wants to make a mere copy, or return to the past simply for the sake of returning. At the same time, he will never reject a design merely because it comes from a certain era, even a modern one.

“The artists who produced (church buildings) in the ’50s and ’60s did have a classical education,” he said.

There was a reason they made the design choices they did, even if the results come across as ugly, theologically dubious, or distasteful. But the generations that followed them were not necessarily educated or thoughtful, and the churches that came next were “copies of copies of copies.”

“They do not speak to us,” Alderman said. “It feels narrow and inauthentic.”

As he and his co-workers at the firm collaborate with painters, wood carvers, sculptors and the clients who commissioned it all, Alderman strives to see what can be learned from the past, and figures out how to make it work for the present. Rather than straining for design so artistically pure it becomes almost legalistic, or merely attempting to copy the work of great architects like Borromini or Gaudi, he tries to get inside their heads, identifying the essential principles that guided them. He asks himself how they would solve whatever problem is bedeviling him now.

“I have this particular style I’m trying to learn from, get behind it, think about what are the ideals, the first principles. It’s a wonderful challenge,” he said.

Alderman didn’t invent the idea of taking ancient principles of design and applying them in new ways. In the 19th century, portrait sculptors of great statesmen wanted to give their subjects the grandeur and nobility of emperors of the past, but they couldn’t show them wearing togas.

“They figured it out: Suits with overcoats wrapped around them,” Alderman said.

He mused that a contemporary artist could do something similar with images of modern holy men and women, like the soon-to-be-canonized Carlo Acutis.

“You have to find an ideal balance between producing something so contemporary it becomes distracting, and something not recognizable as a saint,” he said.

Hoodies have a nice drape to them, or perhaps you could show Acutis wearing the hospital gown he died in.

“The problem with images of modern saints is that we’re going off photographs,” he said, which tempts artists to slavishly recreate the exact details on record.

“They should look like them, but they shouldn’t be the only thing we’re using to recognize them by,” he said.

He’s seen a few portrayals of Acutis holding a laptop, which is a tool he used for evangelization, but he’s not sure if it works.

“Maybe the decoration on the border could look like circuit boards,” he said. “There are so many ways to attack this.”

He takes similar problems under consideration in architecture, trying to find a balance between the wisdom of the past and the actual requirements of the present. Some elements of church architecture are immutable: The overall design should always focus attention on the most important things, the crucifix, the tabernacle, the altar.

“It should be building to that crescendo,” he said.

But while you achieve that goal, there is endless room for variation. The relative newness of the Church in America is fertile ground for creativity, even playfulness — and even a chance to right some wrongs of the past…Read the rest of my latest for Our Sunday Visitor. This article can also be found in the most recent print edition of OSV. 

Image: St. Paul Catholic University Center, photo by Father James Bradley. (Courtesy of Matthew Alderman)

Untamed territory: The iconogrphy of Emanuel Burke

“Iconography is not a science, where you follow the formula and someone has an encounter with God,” said artist Emanuel Burke.

“That’s not the way it works.”

Burke ought to know. The 33-year-old artist, who works under the pseudonym Alypius, recently saw one of his icons of Jesus shared on social media.

But far from encountering God, dozens of viewers jeered at his work and called him a fake Christian who was trying to undermine the Church. He had depicted Christ with large eyes and a small head, rather than with the prominent brow that often signifies wisdom in icons.

Burke, who is a convert to and a seminarian in the Eastern Orthodox church, found it especially discouraging to face personal attacks from his fellow believers. But he tried his best to respond with humility and a kind of radical acceptance.

“We long to be right in an argument, not to be perceived a certain way. But there’s a lot to be gained from being a fool, from being slandered and misunderstood,” he said. “I don’t know how that will shake out for me and for others, but in the end, it’ll be blessed.”

An art teacher at Canongate Catholic High School in Arden, North Carolina, Burke knows some of his icons are unusual and don’t conform to every standard of the art form. Though he doesn’t have any formal training in fine art, he’s very familiar with the traditions that dictate the spiritual significance of color, shapes and gestures in Eastern iconography. But he said these traditions have developed over time and are not as inviolable as some might believe.

“They are not dogmatics, in the same way as the Trinity or the hypostatic union or something like that is,” he said.

Burke rejects the idea, popular in some circles, that “if it doesn’t look like it was painted in the 9th century, it’s not an icon.” In fact, he thinks an icon that strives primarily to look like it is ancient fails in what iconography is intended to do.

“The thing about iconography is it’s always contemporary. It’s not supposed to be stuck in the past,” he said.

Instead, it is intended to speak to, and to be received by, the people who will actually encounter it.

Contemporary — but not modern

There’s a vast divide between the modern understanding and the ancient Christian understanding of art, Burke said, and he didn’t immediately grasp that difference. As a result, his first icons were a clumsy blend of traditional imagery and modern sensibilities. He ended up sanding down his first attempt to show the face of Christ and painting over it.

“The telltale sign (of a modern understanding of art) is the overemphasis on individualism. ‘This is the way I see things or how I feel about it,’” he said.

Then each viewer brings his or her subjective interpretation to the work, and it becomes even more individualized and fragmented in meaning, he said. “Whereas with the approach of a Byzantine or Orthodox iconographer, we do this with the mind of the Church. It’s never about me or another individual in a very rigid sense,” he said.

The artist is involved by necessity because he, too, is venerating the icon even as he paints it. Burke speaks of the work of painting as a work of self-discernment.

“But I don’t see myself as the only participant,” he said.

The viewer is just as important, and in a sense, the work is incomplete until it has been beheld. The face of Christ that got Burke so much unwelcome attention online was the 21st installment in a series he undertook during Advent, which the Orthodox treat as a “Little Lent.” As a discipline, he tried — but did not quite manage — to make an image of the face of Christ every day for the 40 days leading up to Christmas.

Some of the images were painted with egg tempera; some were etchings done while he was experimenting with a cold wax technique, which uses a combination of paste and paint. He also works in ballpoint pen or even with Procreate, the digital painting app. He sees the value in making digital art that’s easy to edit and share, though he’s more drawn to the “very human” natural and tactile materials of egg tempera.

Burke admires some of the new styles of icons being produced in the Eastern Orthodox churches, especially in Ukraine. He likes their bold colors and use of geometric shapes. But he doesn’t like everything new he sees. Some innovations in modern iconography go further afield than he’s comfortable with. However, he doesn’t feel that he’s qualified to say that they’ve gone too far.

“These things get worked out over time. The openness to do something that’s a bit different helps move things away from that sort of robotic, printing-press approach to religious art,” he said.

Journey into untamed territory

Burke recently watched “Stalker,” a 1979 Soviet sci-fi film directed by Andrei Tarkovsky. It deals with a man who’s gone into “a wilderness that has been taken over with the modern innovations that were brought on by the Soviet Union.” He said that the film suggests that the experience of God is like this: It’s wild and untamed territory, and “not always a pleasant experience,” but sometimes a necessary one.

Burke himself was somewhat shaken when he first encountered the faith he now hopes to serve as a priest. He and his wife were raised Southern Baptist, although his wife, who was born in Thailand, also has early memories of practicing Buddhism. They were “freaked out” when they attended their first Divine Liturgy….Read the rest of my latest artist profile for Our Sunday Visitor. 

Memento vivere

At our house, there are no skeletons in the closet. All our skeletons — well, all the decorative ones — are outside, zip-tied to the trees, holding up the mailbox, and popping up between dead sunflower stalks. We are officially One Of Those Skeleton Houses, and they are there year-round, not just during Halloween.

This is hardly an edgy aesthetic these days. Lots of people set up elaborate skeleton displays at this time of year, investing hundreds of dollars in the deluxe 12-foot ones that loom over suburban streets. Lots of people never take their skeletons down and simply add Santa hats or Valentine hearts or Easter bunny ears, as the season demands.

But I’m different. I have a unique personal reason for keeping my skeletons up all the time, and it is this: I like skeletons. I always have. I think they are beautiful, charming and fascinating, tragic and dear. I also have a painting of a skull on our family altar and a painted, tin-winged skeleton Sacred Heart in the dining room, and I’m working on carving a melancholy little skull out of scrap cedar for my cold weather hobby. In elementary school, I obsessively drew skeletons dancing, climbing ladders and raking leaves. In college, I startled the chef by running a load of leftover ham hocks through the industrial dishwasher because I wanted to sketch those elegant bony curves and undulations. I just like skeletons! I think they’re neat.

For a while, I tried to persuade myself that this was a good old Catholic memento mori-type fascination. I was keeping all these skulls around as a reminder of my mortality, just like St. Francis or St. Jerome. Do all your work and live all your life as if it’s your last day on earth because you never know: It might be. Make your peace with death while you still have the choice, because it’s coming either way.

I wish this were my motivation, but it’s not. The last time death came to collect someone I cared about, I fell to pieces, as if no one had ever died before, and this was some new, monstrous means of torture designed specifically to make me, in particular, unhappy.

So I can’t claim to be particularly comfortable with death. Instead, I have made my peace with a related concept: not the fleetness of life, but the perseverance of the living, even after death. The tenacity, the sheer, dogged refusal of the human body to go completely away.

The German word sitzfleisch, which translates, as you might guess, “sitting flesh,” means the kind of single-minded persistence you need to, well, sit on your bum until you get the job done. And, in fact, sitzfleisch also means your bodily bottom, your “sit meat.”

Sometimes, it means not so much the meat you park in the chair as the patience you will need to sit in one spot until things resolve themselves, no matter how long it takes.

So here we arrive back at skeletons. There is nothing more patient than a skeleton. Osteogenesis, the process of growing bones, begins in the first few weeks after conception. Tiny little skeleton, bitty little pretty bones, raring to go, gratefully, eagerly borrowing calcium from the mother’s bones and teeth, with no intention of giving it back. Single-mindedly intent on adding to itself and not collapsing back into nothingness, while the mother, knowing or unknowing, steadfastly releases herself into building someone else.

This, too, is sitzfleisch…Read the rest of my latest for Our Sunday Visitor.