Descending to the Roots

David M. Denny

RAISED in the Disciples of Christ Church in Indiana, and having spent the summer of 1970 in Kabul, Afghanistan, I celebrated my twentieth birthday in a Buddhist monastery in Denver, Colorado. I had wandered far from those Sunday mornings in Kokomo’s Main Street Christian Church next to Dietzen’s Bakery, where the smell of baking bread was the aroma of Sabbath. By 1975 I had entered a small Carmelite community of hermits, where the mysticism of the Mass began to break down my sense of separation between sacred and profane. But as I visited Catholic churches, I noticed a stark contrast between the majesty of the liturgy and the tackiness of the art. Genuine folk art of the Southwest, including the santos and retablos of New Mexican artisans, was a fresh discovery for me: a “naïve” art that sprang from deep faith. It was not tacky. But the music, art and architecture, especially of suburban churches, left me unmoved, except for puzzlement and a longing for spaces, music, images, and language that reflected the shocking mystery of the Incarnation.

Our community pursued what we called an earthy mysticism: not the neo-Platonism of some of the self-punishing early Christian monks, but a disciplined Christian humanism that finds Christ in nature and the arts. One of our priests was a bard: he wrote songs and song cycles that included the life of Saint Teresa of Avila, The Lord of the Rings, and the Antarctic ordeals of Sir Ernest Shackleton. My puzzlement grew as I found myself gleaning more spiritual nourishment from Dostoyevsky, Salinger, or Tolkien than from devotional works. I was tone deaf to church music, whereas, if I ever had a Pentecostal experience, it occurred at a B.B. King concert.

I admired the Zen monks who developed poetry, calligraphy, and simple ink and watercolor images as part of their spiritual practice. But I found solace and inspiration in the poetry of Saint John of the Cross and Gerard Manley Hopkins, and Marc Chagall’s paintings. What captivated me was their ability to appeal to anyone, religious, Christian, or not. They had penetrated to a level of sheer humanity and were able to express this universal spirit through their art. This spoke to my own Christology. Having lived with Muslims and practiced vipassana meditation with some diligence, I was hungry for a story that crossed borders, that would be so poor and simple and human, that it could speak in tongues, as the disciples did on that first Pentecost. Not glossolalia, but a raw, recognizable language that could voice human goodness, truth, and beauty without evading or whitewashing vice, lies, and squalor.

I recently moved into a new hermitage and opened a bank account. To mark this risky new venture, I wanted my first purchase to reflect the meaning of this difficult transition. I found a website that offers reproductions of fine art and ordered a copy of Chagall’s White Crucifixion. A color photocopy of this image
has accompanied me for years, and it is no longer merely an image; it has become an icon. The reproduction now hangs in my bedroom next to a window that looks out on the cottonwoods that tower over nearby San Isabel Creek. So I have two windows, one that looks out on the finite realm of nature, while the second, seemingly opaque with oil paint, looks into infinity: the crucified Christ, draped in a Jewish prayer shawl, suspended in a beam of light, while chaos roils around him: a rabbi fleeing with the Torah cradled in his arms, a burning synagogue, weeping elders looking down from heaven, panicked refugees in a lifeboat. The only source of warmth: a kindled menorah at Jesus’s feet. Its halo echoes the nimbus around the dead Christ’s head. Where does the profane end and the sacred begin?

Looking back over the past thirty years, I recall guides who have helped me wrestle with this apparent dichotomy in my life: my love for Christ, the liturgy, the church, and the need for a kind of truth, beauty, and craftsmanship that is more often available in seemingly secular arts.

Charles Williams and C.S. Lewis confirmed for me what I intuited in the poetry of Saint John of the Cross. Christianity, they held, is never stoic; it is romantic and ascetic. “Romantic” is a difficult term. Here it refers to “the way of affirmation,” as described in Lewis’s commentary on Williams’s poems on the Arthurian myth. In “The Prayers of the Pope,” Williams imagines a pope celebrating mass at the end of a promising age. It could be the time of Arthur’s death. It could be 1054, when the Latin and Greek churches split apart and Islam had conquered much of what had been Christendom. Or it could be 1944, when the poem was written, and Hitler had destroyed any hopes that had arisen after the First World War. “Again and again,” Lewis writes, “if not the Grail and the Parousia, at least some great good almost descends to earth: again and again something arises which seems to be ‘beyond history, holding history at bay’; and each time the birth goes back, the sun, after one morning gleam disappears.” Lewis and Williams claim that these fleeting moments, these frail epiphanies of goodness, truth, beauty, peace, justice, and love, are not to be spurned as if they were merely mortal images of the real thing, the Kingdom of God. Williams wrote:

But each loss of each image
Is single and full, a thing unrequited,
Plighted in presence to no recompense....

When we lose an image, an epiphany, writes Lewis, “Its loss leaves us ‘rich in sorrow’...and ‘laden with loss.’ And in so far as we feel ‘loss’ we are affirming the lost image.” We should value images. To say, when a great moment passes or a beautiful piece of art or architecture is destroyed, or a great person dies, “Oh, well, it was no big deal; she was only a mortal woman; no one lives forever,” contradicts the fundamental Christian ethos. “The acceptance of loss therefore combines in itself the two ‘ways,’ the romantic and the ascetic, the affirmation and the rejection of images. We affirm the image at the very moment of affirming its opposite. This is an ambivalence which...human consciousness carries,” according to Lewis. What we sacrifice, whether it be a home, a way of life, a relationship, is good, and the loss rightly leaves us wounded and grieving.

We long not just for a world that affirms God, but for a world affirmed by God. That is the meaning of the Incarnation. But Christian mystics are careful to counsel against a fixation on images, on the merely natural. During the twelfth century, when the Benedictine network of Cluny monasteries were dazzling centers of liturgical music, art, and architecture, the ascetic impulse arose in Saint Bernard of Clairvaux. He had a profoundly aesthetic sensibility himself, as is evident in his immortal prose and excellent calligraphy, but he railed against art that distracted people from prayer. He called for a diaphanous art that called attention to the Creator more than to itself. And he called for a purity of heart that opposed the mercenary spirit:

Everything...is covered with gold, gorging the eyes and opening the purse-strings. Some saint or other is depicted as a figure of beauty, as if in the belief that the more highly colored something is, the holier it is.... People run to kiss them, and are invited to give donations.

Bernard isn’t denouncing art; he despises a distracting aesthetism and the commercialization that Jesus denounced when he cleansed the temple. He distinguishes between decoration and the sacred and decries their confusion.

Four hundred years later, Saint John of the Cross described how we must pass from attachment to opaque idols to true worship through the translucent icons:

We are not in agreement, nor do we desire to be, with...those pestiferous men who...have sought to remove from the eyes of the faithful the holy and necessary use and the renowned cult of the images of God and of His saints. Our doctrine is far different from theirs. We are not asserting, as they do, that there be no images or veneration of them; we are explaining the difference between these images and God, and how souls should use the painted image in such a way that they do not suffer an impediment in their movement toward the living image, and how they should pay no more attention to images than is required for advancing to what is spiritual.

John’s asceticism was not a flight from the world, but a flight to the Christ whom he loved, and who loves the world into being. He insisted that beginners in the spiritual life develop complete detachment from all that is less than God. The gap between Creator and creatures is infinite, and creatures are infinitely unworthy of our grasping, clinging, and craving. But this is no disparagement of nature; it is a sage lover’s inevitable response to the boundless beauty of the Beloved. John heard a call to climb the mountain as quickly as possible, without distractions, to arrive at the full experience of his humanity. This meant Calvary. It also meant Easter.

What is muted in John’s prose coruscates in his life and his poetry: an acute intercommunication between his soul and the inner being of things. His entire ascetical program bears fruit when the eyes of the Beloved, after harrowing but soul-expanding dark nights, finally open within the soul. The divine thou, Christ, becomes the bridegroom, and awakens as sovereign of the soul. Is the mystic, the bride, now completely insensitive to the world? No! “The world awakens in the soul at the same time as God,” according to Hans Urs von Balthasar. She sees the whole universe, all creatures, aromatic and dancing in unison with God. Now “the soul knows creatures through God, and not God through creatures.... She knows these things better in God’s being than in themselves.”

John shows that Christian mystics do not follow a neo-Platonic flight into the absolute. Rather they fall in love with Christ, allow themselves to be stripped of all inordinate attachments, practice virtue, and wait in poverty, nudity, humility, and love, for the awakening of the new man. But all along the way, John is clearly an artist and a lover of nature. Both he and Saint Teresa of Avila loved the landscape of Spain. Teresa would pay a high price for a convent beside a river. John’s spiritual songs relish the detailed images of the open country. We sense that he is not just playing with the conventions of pastoral verse, but lovingly recording his observation of horses, flowers, streams, and forests. John loved the night; he loved to sing, to draw, and to carve. And he loved asparagus! He introduces us to an agapeic eros.

My Beloved is the mountains
And lonely wooded valleys,
Strange islands,
And resounding rivers,
The whistling of love-stirring breezes,
The tranquil night
At the time of the rising dawn,
Silent music,
Sounding solitude,
The supper that refreshes, and deepens love.

In meditating on the wonder of the Incarnation, John sees an iconic quality in nature:

Pouring out a thousand graces,
He passed these groves in haste;
And having looked at them,
With His image alone,
Clothed them in beauty.

Because the Word became flesh, because the tenor of Christianity is determined more by the descent of God rather than the ascent of man, and because, in plunging into matter, Christ clothes it in beauty, we can say, with nineteenth-century Jesuit poet Gerard Manley Hopkins, that “The world is charged with the grandeur of God.” Or, with twentieth-century Jesuit paleontologist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin:

What would our spirits be, O God, if they did not have the bread of earthly things to nourish them, the wine of created beauties to intoxicate them, and the conflicts of human life to fortify them? What feeble powers and bloodless hearts your creatures would bring you if they were to succeed in cutting themselves off prematurely from the providential setting in which you have placed them! Teach us, Lord, how to contemplate the sphinx without succumbing to its spell; how to grasp the hidden mystery in the womb of death, not by a refinement of human doctrine, but in the simple concrete act by which you plunged yourself into matter in order to redeem it. By the virtue of your suffering incarnation disclose to us, and then teach us to harness jealously for you, the spiritual power of matter.

What do these musings tell us about the work of art incorporated into worship? Objectively, if Teilhard is correct that the virtue of Christ has passed into all of nature, into every molecule, then the maker, the artist, may glean some new insight into his materials if he accepts Teilhard’s thesis. A spirit of reverence will keep the artist from torturing innocent molecules by coercing them into the form of an ugly lampshade, as W.H. Auden put it. And what of subjectivity? Does the intention, the state of being of the artist affect the work itself? Here I find Karl Rahner helpful. In his essay “Priest and Poet,” he claims that the world is not fully itself until it is seen with the eyes of love and celebrated in art. A tree becomes more “treeful” when it is praised, for example, by Mondrian’s interpretation. English painter and poet David Jones asks:

If one is making a painting of daffodils what is not instantly involved? Will it make any difference whether or no we have heard of Persephone or Flora or Blodeuedd [the name given in Welsh mythology to the woman made by magical processes from various blossoms]? I am of the opinion that it will make a difference, but would immediately make this reservation: Just as Christians assert that baptism by water “makes a difference,” but that many by desire without water achieve the benefits of that “difference,” so, without having heard of Flora Dea, there are many who would paint daffodils as though they had invoked her by name.

Jones’s The Anathemata, a very difficult book-length poem, is in fact a paean to artifacts. Anathemata are works set aside to be offered in sacrifice. This setting aside does not distort their nature. Rather, this oblation reveals the nature of the bread, wine, statue, or music. Christ used bread and wine, “the work of human hands,” not wheat and grapes. So, according to Jones, “No artefacture no Christian religion.” Even something as utilitarian as a tool can become one of the anathemata. I attended a papal mass in Halifax twenty years ago in which workers brought the tools of their trades to the altar at the offertory. As someone who loves to cut firewood, I was delighted to see a hard-hatted woodsman place his Husqvarna at the foot of the altar! But Jones gives pride of place to the “extrautile,” the gratuitous—that is, to the fine arts.

Gathering up the insights of Teilhard, Rahner, and Jones, I have come to see a spectrum of matter, ranging from the most fundamental atomic particle to the body of Christ. Not a sentimental version of Jesus, but the Christ who harrowed hell, establishing, in Balthasar’s words, an infinite distance from God within God. This, to my mind, potentially leaves out nothing. In the Mass, we pray, “Let your Spirit come upon these gifts to make them holy.” In a sense, we are simply ratifying and making explicit what is already implicit.

Nevertheless, any artist recognizes standards. We know that “bad art” exists. We’ve seen it. The Dominican theologian Gerald Vann went so far as to say that bad art is immoral. Why? Because it distorts reality. It lies. His ire was directed not at pornography, but at kitsch, sentimental church art that has nothing to do with the way, the truth, and the life. The artist, then, suffers in a peculiar way the tension of being Christian: striving to remain faithful to the canon without idolizing it, and daring to attempt a “new thing.” In the end, only God can create the unprecedented. But by grounding ourselves in Christ, the Word through whom all things are made, we may “co-create,” as Teilhard put it. As John of the Cross described it, Christ begins to wake up within us, take life again, and speak a Word through us. “That is the glory of poetry, and of secular literature generally,” according to Nicholas Boyle, “that out of such slight material as the pleasure to be had from the weaving together of words it can make analogues of revelation that can illuminate and affect the whole of our life.” The same goes for the graphic arts and music.

Why, according to Boyle, do we take such pains to create? In part, it is obedience to a prodding, the Holy Spirit’s chronic vigor and boundless creativity. And because life, physical and mortal, is not frivolous or meaningless. Its purpose may be eclipsed, but “Life does not have to be shown as having a discernible purpose in order to be shown as capable of being forgiven,” claims Boyle: “it only has to be loved enough to be worth representing, and worth the labor of understanding that goes into enjoying the representation.... Only as a revelation that the world and existence matter eternally—matter so much that the God who made them died to restore them—is the phenomenon of literature possible.”

One of the loveliest anathemata I have ever seen is a chalice given to the monastic community in which I used to live. It evokes all the pathos described by Lewis and Williams in their reflections on romance and asceticism. Polished silver with a Celtic-inspired filigree around its mouth and stem, the chalice is studded with jewelry the donor, Dr. Casimir Bielecki, had given to his now deceased wife. Both of his daughters entered religious life; they would not be wearing the opals and aquamarines. So he let go of these anathemata. He is ninety-four years old now and I recently celebrated mass with him and one of his daughters. Before mass, twenty years after his wife’s death, he sat alone, held the chalice close to his nearly blind eyes, in his arthritic hands, and wept.

This is the spirit I want to bring to the sanctuary. I perceive the real presence of Janina Bielecki when we celebrate with that chalice. This helps prepare me for the Real Presence. Remembering her life and death prepares me to remember Christ’s Passion, resurrection, and ascension. And after we say, “The mass is ended, let us go in peace,” I do not recall the liturgy as a kind of background music or soundtrack in my life. Instead, I have descended to the womb, the tomb, the root of my soul, the root of all souls, and the nourishment gathered there strengthens me to tend the limbs and leaves of the Tree of Life planted in a fallen, forgivable, and forgiven vineyard.

Father David M. Denny is co-founder of the Desert Foundation, a circle of friends who share an interest in the cultures and spiritualities that grow out of the world’s deserts. He is also a visiting professor at Colorado College.

Issue #49 • Spring 2006