- Something happens to you when you walk
into our nearly remodeled sanctuary. It’s not something you do,
it’s not something you choose, it is, rather, something
you experience.
- You can’t seem to help yourself. Your
eyes act like they have a mind of their own. The minute you step
through the door, up they go, looking high above. The new ceiling
draws them upward, makes them look beyond themselves, opens your
soul, makes you pause. You don’t remember this happening before,
even if you loved the old space dearly (and dearly loved it deserved
to be!) What is different?
- The new ceiling is more artful
than the old one was, with its rich color and darker trim pulling
your focus to the highest point. The new ceiling draws you out of
yourself, draws you upward. Because it is more artful, the space it
crowns seems more sacred as well.
- After a while your eyes begin to slide
down the walls, the way the shadow of the earth slides down the
sides of mountains at dawn. The stained glass windows were gorgeous
before; now they are stunning. They seem to jump right off the walls
at you. They seem to vibrate a little, pulse with life. Your heart
quickens just a beat or two. Your spine lengthens. You feel lighter
than you actually are.
- This is what sacred art is all about,
whether it has to do with the architecture of sacred space, or
paintings or sculptures or music or movement. This is why it is
worth the cost. Just to have this experience, to be drawn out of
yourself, to be breathed into and sung through by something bigger
than you are (which is what you will feel when the pipe organ is
back), just to be brought to a moment of pause, a moment when you
are more aware of who you are not than who you are. Just to
have this little moment when for once the ego and all its noisy
posturing is left speechless and still, so you can hear the whispers
of The Holy.
- In Menlo, Iowa there is a bit of sacred
art. Its home is not a building but a boulder. A 56-ton rock along
Highway 25 west of Des Moines, as a matter of fact. For nine years
now Ray "Bubba" Sorensen has been painting murals on it. They depict
the sacrifices of American service-women and –men. It takes Sorensen
about three weeks to sketch out and paint scenes on the rock, an
idea he got after watching the movie "Saving Private Ryan". He calls
it the Freedom Rock.
- Before he began to make the rock an
artful place, it was merely a catchall for graffiti. But since
Sorensen has been painting it, only once has it been defaced. When
that happened, it angered local veterans. "The rock is a pretty
sacred thing to our community," one remarked. AP, 5.21.07
- This story reminded me of the one I
told you last year, about a similar rock along the road near our
family’s summer place in Minnesota. It acts as a kind of local
billboard, and people decorate it several times a week with cute
sayings and announcements of celebrations. Last year, when a
well-loved citizen died, someone painted a memorial on the rock, and
it was weeks before anyone painted over it again. The rock had
become sacred space, sacred art, for that community.
- It doesn’t matter where you find it –
on a rock or inside a century-old quartzite building. It’s all the
same thing – sacred art. And here’s how you know you are in the
presence of it:
- You don’t need to explain it. You
simply need to pay attention to it. Its metaphors and meanings, the
stillness it evokes, the frame it puts around the moment – all of
that helps you see something beyond the ordinary. Helps you have a
second thought, changes the way you perceive things, changes what
seems to matter most to you. It happens to you, and you are never
quite the same again.
- "From the simplest lyric to the most
complex novel and densest drama, literature is asking us to pay
attention," writes word-artist Frederick Buechner. "Pay attention to
the frog. Pay attention to the west wind. Pay attention to the boy
on the raft, the lady in the tower, the old man on the train. In
sum, pay attention to the world and all that dwells therein and
thereby learn at last to pay attention to yourself and all that
dwells therein.
- "The painter does the same thing, of
course. Rembrandt puts a frame around an old woman’s face. It is
seamed with wrinkles. The upper lip is sunken in, the skin waxy and
pale. It is not a remarkable face. You would not look twice at the
old woman if you found her sitting across the aisle from you on a
bus. But it is a face so remarkably seen that it forces you to see
it remarkably, just a Cezanne makes you see a bowl of apples or
Andrew Wyeth a muslin curtain blowing in at an open window. It is a
face unlike any other face in all the world. All the faces in the
world are in this one old face." from Whistling in the Dark,,
HarperSanFrancisco, 1993:15-16
- That’s what sacred art is all about.
Getting us to pause a minute and pay attention, and see the world
for what it is. When Jesus talked about loving our neighbor as we
love ourselves, I think he assumed we would find a way to see our
neighbor first. To see our neighbor with the eyes of God, which
takes a great deal of imagination, which means we need a great deal
of sacred art around us to wake us up and slow us down.
- Which is why there is hardly anything
better in the whole world than being a part of a community that
finds a way to offer sacred art day after day, week after week, year
after year, to all who come near in search of a moment of awe.
- Which is why there is nothing I would
rather do than be a pastor to a people who get it.
- May you notice something
extraordinary today and pause as long as you need to
Reflections
on faith and life by Rev. Kathryn Timpany