In the 2008 film, Birdsong, Catalan filmmaker Albert Serra portrays the three kings’ trek toward the Holy Family. The black and white film unfolds like a dream, capturing the internal journey of the kings as they stumble through a bleak landscape, accompanied only by the song of birds. Other than their crowns and robes, they lack regal trappings. By stripping away the opulence ordinarily associated with the Magi, Serra allows their essential humanity—at times clumsy, comic, or serious—to emerge. The kings are led by a vision: “We’re awestruck with the beauty of things,” one remarks. After nearly an hour of cinematic wandering, they reach the Holy Family and prostrate themselves before the newborn and his parents. Eventually, they trudge off, saying, “We won’t be coming back—we’ve had enough of this sand.” It’s a funny line, but also a poignant reminder of the singular nature of the kings’ journey and their willingness to take it.

Medievals touched, kissed and asked for the prayers of the saints portrayed in stone, paint and stained glass, who were rendered with such verisimilitude that they seemed alive, like part of the family. Inside the church was a marvelous democracy of beauty that, like heaven, was available to poor and rich alike. By the 19th century, as the church tried to suppress some superstitious practices, the familial relationship of the faithful to their churches began to devolve into a more formal, less lively relationship with the structure itself.

Living in churches

In 1898, centuries after the heyday of the medieval pilgrim, Frederick Evans, a former bookseller, discovered his life’s calling: photography. In time, he built such a reputation as a photographer, particularly of the cathedrals he loved, that when he turned his camera’s eye to Westminster Abbey, custodians moved the pews and furnishings so he would have enough room to work.

Like the pilgrims before him, Evans would live in a cathedral for weeks at a time. He would walk the church, through the nave, down the aisles, around the cloisters and into its far corners from early morning until sunset, observing the subtle changes in light and atmosphere. One can imagine him, lugging his equipment, framing potential images in his mind and waiting until the light descended into the darkness in just the right way before clicking the shutter and capturing a holy world. Evans sought to create “a record of emotion rather than a piece of topography,” as he wrote in 1904. To do that, he had to become thoroughly familiar with the complex play of light and darkness that is the hallmark—beyond stained glass or flying buttresses—of the Gothic cathedral.

An overwhelming, beautiful new book

With a tenacity that would have drawn Evans’s admiration, the German photographer Achim Bednorz logged some 93,000 miles over the past five years to take the 1,000 photographs that grace Ars Sacra, an overwhelming, beautiful new book (h.f.ullmann, 2011). This massive encyclopedic survey covers Christian art and architecture in Europe from its beginnings in the catacombs of third-century Rome to the present day. Bednorz, who has photographed Christian architecture for nearly four decades, illuminates the inherent sanctity of the buildings and works of art he knows well and imbues their images with a sense of awe. His task, like that of Evans and every artist, was to understand how things look in order to re-present them in a way that transcends the material world.

Ars Sacra is organized chronologically, enabling readers to track cultural shifts and structural innovations. Overviews of soaring church interiors are coupled with illustrations of minuscule details that recall the story of the cathedral artisan who, when asked why he would carve a bird high in the rafters where no one could see it, replied, “God can see it.” This God’s-eye view is extended by the decision of the editor, Rolf Tolman, to emphasize the most significant developments of a given period, highlighting, for example, Romanesque sculpture, Gothic structural technology and Renaissance painting.

This is a book for the ultimate armchair traveler, although, since it weighs in at nearly 25 pounds, a table is needed, too. Hauling this tome from study to dining room and back renewed my appreciation of the literal and metaphoric heft of the visual arts, a precious legacy and wellspring of Catholic devotion.

A creature of light

Architecture, like photography, and like faith, is a creature of light. The world as most of us know it would cease to exist without light, which gives form to its visible dimensions. “Even a room which must be dark needs a crack of light to know how dark it is,” noted Louis Kahn, the modernist architect. Time is also shaped by light, its passage apparent in light’s evanescence—shifting, coming and going—a fleeting quality that moves us because it mirrors our brief time on earth. Light cannot be understood apart from darkness; knowledge of one depends on the other.

During the Advent season, as the days shorten, we fill our churches and homes with candles that focus attention on the light in the darkness, while acknowledging just how dark the dark can be. We reflect on the birth of light, the new light—Christ—remembering that Christ came into the world of visible realities to illuminate what cannot be seen. All the beloved symbols that accompany our celebration of Christ’s birth—the star, the crèche, the straw, sheep and camels—remind us that redemption is embodied and takes place in a world, now illuminated, that we can see.

View a slideshow of images from Ars Sacra

Photo courtesy Achim Bednorz
This article was first published in the December 19, 2011 edition of America Magazine

Full of Grace takes the reader inside the Virgin Mary’s world in ancient Palestine while showing how thoroughly she inhabits the 21st century. The book touches on Mary’s Jewish roots, veneration by Muslims, and powerful presence in Hispanic communities. The joys of friendship, nature of surrender, and dignity of work are explored through a Marian lens in 59 illustrated essays.

* 2011 Catholic Press Association awards: Best Book on Spirituality and Best Design.

To win a copy:

“Like” Full of Grace’s Facebook page and share a few lines about the Virgin Mary’s influence on your life.  Or, if you’re not on Facebook, share your comments here.  Send entries by December 11th. Winners announced on December 12th.

Feel free to re-post and forward to friends.

Paradoxically, temporary commemorations like the one made for Matthew Diaz sometimes achieve universality by their specificity. They express raw emotion that typically is lost by the time a permanent memorial is erected. Ripped open by tragedy, we give ourselves creative and spiritual permission to explore life’s big questions—Why I am here? Where am I going? How will I be remembered?—that do not often come to mind on ordinary Tuesday mornings. These sharp but evanescent insights illuminate our deepest yearnings to know ourselves and to know God.

9/11’s Immediate Memorials

Beginning on the afternoon of the attacks, posters of missing persons blanketed New York City; they were made in response to the initial belief, soon dispelled, that victims were walking around in an amnesiac state or lying unidentified in hospital beds. The photocopied posters were remarkably consistent in design—an 8.5 inch by 11 inch sheet, with a family photo, minimal identification and some contact information—yet they represented an invention of mourning and remembrance at its most compelling. It was easy to identify with the missing, poised over barbeques, at weddings, on vacation, because variations of those same pictures are glued in our own photo albums. They were us.

A second wave of posters gave additional data about birthmarks, scars, earrings, shoes and tattoos to aid forensic identification, intimate details that increased their familiarity further still. The images evolved a third time, now marked “Remember me,” “Pray for me,” or other words of release, into posthumous Everyman memorials that were both germ and zenith of the vast photographic collage that would emerge from that day.

In a gesture that proved to be a cathartic gift to the nation, The New York Times published “Portraits of Grief,” more than 2,200 thumbnail profiles of 9/11 victims that ran daily from Sept. 15 to Dec. 31, 2001, and continued sporadically into 2003. Taking their inspiration from the posters of the missing, the profiles featured stamp-size photographs and impressionistic biographies that revealed those lost—traders, firefighters, new parents, gourmet chefs, literary escapists and fanatical golfers—sometimes in all their lovable idiosyncrasy. The “Portraits” section evolved into a national shrine of sorts. Reading them became a daily ritual for many. As my brother said at the time, “I have to read them. Every day, I meet more great people.”

Michael Arad’s Response

Shortly after the attacks, the architect Michael Arad created a temporary installation on the rooftop of his East Village apartment to express the emptiness he felt. The work consisted of water that flowed into two square-shaped cavities, giving the effect of two black voids floating on top of a ghostly pool. Those rooftop seeds of grief and hope, transmuted in Arad’s winning memorial design of 2004, became the double inverted fountains of the National September 11 Memorial and Museum. Arad’s essential idea was that the most fitting response to the loss of so many souls and the skyline itself would be absence, not presence, a void, not a solid. Although the design team eventually included ideas from the landscape architect Peter Walker and others, the fundamental memorial concept was in place within weeks of the tragedy.

Not all temporary memorials have equal weight—teddy bears and key chains are not the stuff of high art—but they all point to what is to come. Unlike permanent monuments that are built to outlast the people who built them, temporary commemorations show vulnerability. They express a deep need to mark an event, like Jacob planting the Bethel stone. Such memorials shout, “They mattered! And I matter too!” Even permanent memorials are not a final step, but rather one more stage in the process of reconciliation.

Names are also important, as is the way they are presented. Maya Lin taught us this when she insisted this the names of fallen Vietnam veterans be listed on the Washington, D.C., memorial in the order of their date of death, instead of alphabetically, which would have had the heartless anonymity of a phone book. Given past commemorative debates, the task of arranging the 2,982 names of those who died was a challenge for the designer of the national memorial at the World Trade Center. (This number includes the six people killed in the truck bomb explosion in the parking garage of the north tower on Feb. 26, 1993.)

As Arad explained, the aim was to “place the names of those who died that day [Sept. 11] next to each other in a meaningful way, marking the names of family and friends  together, as they had lived and died.” The names are organized by “meaningful adjacencies” that reflect where victims died, their work affiliations and their personal relationships. In those last moments, when all the trappings, accomplishments, and hierarchies were stripped away, people who barely knew each other formed bonds that were stronger than death.  When reading their names, we must remember that love was their ultimate truth.  For all that was lost that day, love itself was not betrayed.

A name-finder on the memorial’s Web site combines aspects of the “Portraits of Grief” and the posters of the missing, providing a photo, life dates, birthplace and professional affiliation. Like an inscription on a headstone, these brief bios tell us something, but not nearly enough to convey the fullness of a life. Taken together, however, these snippets form a democracy that emphasizes what we all share: namely, a creaturely destiny to become part, sooner or later, of an eternal continuum. Here, in the midst of names and portraits, I find Matthew Diaz, who is smiling broadly. He is far from those black shoes, having gone up the high mountain.

Finished and Unfinished

Unlike their ephemeral cousins, permanent memorials generate controversy because what is being argued is history itself. The finished monument does not tell us what happened but instead represents how the majority thought an event should be remembered.

The commemorative process is strikingly similar, no matter what the event or site: the overwhelming consensus that an event should be memorialized is followed by debate, sometimes acrimonious, from which the memorial design emerges. On the dedication day, sometimes only a few weeks later, the controversy is forgotten, the design extolled; most accept the monument narrative as “the way things were.” One might say that what is finally built is mostly a marker of the soul-searching process that brought it into being. Inevitably, the monument will fade into the fabric of the landscape and attain the peculiar invisibility of the familiar.

The New Memorial

The 9/11 memorial consists of two massive pools, each an acre in size, which are placed in the twin towers’ footprints. Water cascades down their sides and disappears into a still lower pool. The names of those who died are inscribed in bronze panels that surround the pools and stretch in either direction as far as one can see. The names are stencil-cut, allowing visitors to look through them to the water below, or to run their fingers over each name, one of the most ancient forms of homage. At night, light will shine up through the letters, transforming each name. Matthew Diaz and all of those who died that day will become exceedingly white and shining, like snow, provoking reflection on what is to come.

While the horizontal name panels locate the victims and those who mourn them within the human collective, the vertical axis—the one stretched between the seemingly bottomless depths of the pools and heaven above—engages our individual, spiritual selves. By placing temporal concerns in a larger, timeless context, memorials remind us that our true nature is not of this world. But it is also not apart from the world.

As we approach the dedication of the permanent memorial in Lower Manhattan, a milestone event that will mark the closing of one chapter and the opening of a new one, it is important to remember those promises we made to ourselves in the autumnal days of 2001: to meet more great people every day, simply by deciding to see their greatness; to treat ourselves and others with kindness and compassion; to stop and consider the beauty of the world; to do those things that frighten us most, whether offering an apology or moving away from habits or habitual situations that keep us stuck; to give thanks, often.

The new 9/11 memorial, a massive double baptismal font of sorts, beckons us to immerse ourselves and emerge into a new life.

Photo courtesy Michael Arad.

This article was first published in the August 29, 2011 edition of America Magazine.

Spoiler alert now in effect.

My fellow moviegoer may have been commenting on the film’s minimal plot, which centers on the O’Brien family living in Texas in the 1950s. The storyline about the family (with the father played by Brad Pitt, the mother by Jessica Chastain, and their three sons) proceeds in fits and starts, moving back and forth across time.  There’s no linear narrative with a tidy ending that we have come to expect of big American movies, no comforting order that divvies up the good and bad guys and makes sense of the world, at least for the few hours we sit in the dark munching popcorn. At the outset, the narrator declares, “There are two ways through the life — the way of nature and the way of grace. You have to chose which one you’ll follow.”  Not standard big-screen fare.

Or perhaps her complaint, made in an art house at the epicenter of liberal America, was spurred by the movie’s Christian perspective and images of baptism and confirmation, stained-glass windows, and, most overtly, a lunar eclipse that looks like a giant eye accompanied by a voice intoning, Follow me.  (That would be God.)

But the film isn’t about Christianity or any other religion, for that matter. It is a visual meditation on the nature of grace and fundamental human need to find meaning. Life’s big questions pepper the narrative, asked of God in yearning whispers, “Who are you?” “Where are you?” “Do you care about us?”  Divine replies come in the form of stunning imagery shot by cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki that captures simple beauties (of fluttering curtains, birds in flight, soap bubbles) as well as vast galaxies delivered with Miltonian opulence and scale.  In frame after frame of heart-stopping beauty, Malick insists on the primacy of the grace embodied by the world itself. It’s not surprising to learn that he was once a philosophy professor, a student of Heidegger, and as such vested in the “thingliness” of things and the exquisite world we have been given, and so often fail to appreciate.

Malick takes on the entirety of what is seen and unseen, all of it animated by the Spirit that runs through every individual, every bird, every ocean.  His deep reverence advocates the necessity of environmental responsibility and stewardship. Wake up! Malick seems to be saying. Look around. You are surrounded by miracles!  And the film delivers those miracles, not just in the cosmic expanses of outer space or the energy of roiling seas, but in the everyday grace of a child’s dancing shadow, swimming in summer, sunlight caught in a woman’s hair, all the loveliness of the ordinary.

Seeing, however, is a multifaceted activity. Sometimes it involves intense focus and sometimes it demands the willingness not to focus on any one thing but, unblinking like the moon that morphs into the All-seeing, to bear witness to everything that comes into view. “Unless you love,” the film reminds us, “your life will flash by.”

Though part of life’s larger continuum, each of us must deal with our individual histories.  The film meanders between displays of nature with a capital N and the oldest son Jack’s memory of his childhood, recalled in impressionistic flashes. Extreme long shots of the adult Jack (Sean Penn) picking his way over desolate rocky landscapes provide a glimpse of his inner emotional ecosystem and suggest a one-on-one relationship with the ineffable. The film never fully explores the stunning grace arising from human relationships, the Darwinian implication being that it’s Everyman and Everywoman for themselves. A loss.

At one point, Jack says, “Father, Mother, always you wrestle inside me.  Always you will.”  It’s hard untangling, or at least reconciling, one’s familial roots with present reality and the unknown future. That task is made more difficult because the past, present, and future all inhabit any given moment—a point Malick returns to repeatedly.

Jack’s observation takes on another dimension at the film’s end when Mother raises her hands to the sky and a female voice says, “I give you my son.”  Most literally, Mrs. O’Brien has relinquished her child, who has died, to God. Her anguish mirrors that of archetypal mothers and fathers throughout history who have been asked to make the ultimate sacrifice, whether the goddess Demeter, the patriarch Abraham, or the Blessed Mother at the foot of the cross.  Most provocatively, the voice echoes God’s words about Jesus—This is my son—making it unclear whether Mrs. O’Brien, Mother God or, per Jack, Father Mother God is speaking. By obscuring the gender of the Divine, which is not male, female, or anything that mere mortals can fathom, the filmmaker liberates us from yet another confining historical definition of men and women.  Two points, Mr. Malick, and thank you.

The Tree of Life is also a movie about movies, exploiting the possibilities of cinema itself — here, the medium is the message.  Malick plays with what film can do once untethered from the conventions of the stage, understandable scale, or need to connect the plot’s dots.  James Martin, S.J., aptly compared the film to “living inside a prayer,” while the Los Angeles Times panned it for embracing “every cheesy cinematic cliché,” although Leah Rozen’s review does provide an excellent guide to movies made about heaven.

At one point, the film dispenses with dialogue altogether, and revels in the first moment of creation—of the universe and of a child. It helps to surrender to the camera’s quixotic movement, sudden screen blackouts, and lack of anything so quotidian as linear time.  The insertion of digital dinosaurs is just plain silly, but, hey, dinosaurs happen.  Like life and faith, the movie moves inexorably toward the unknown.  It becomes the very mystery it seeks to elucidate.

This is not a perfect film—and it’s not trying to be. A work of art will always fall short of perfection, inevitably failing to attain the brilliant, redemptive, cosmic and/or comic dimensions that the artist first envisioned and struggled to express. That’s the nature of art and our nature too.  The Tree of Life stumbles along as we do, amidst flashes of brilliance, boredom, sorrow, joy, and hope.

—This review first appeared on Busted Halo, June 20, 2011

—Photo courtesy of NASA

So far, he’s lost 36 of the 100 pounds he’s promised to shed for the “Building a Church, Pound by Pound” capital campaign for the new St. Raphael the Archangel Church in Old Mill City, Illinois. Parishioners have pledged money for every pound their pastor loses. Some have begun dieting themselves and collecting additional pledges. With that money, matched by a donor, St. Raphael’s stands to raise at least $110,000 and get healthier, too.

“Everything about the church we are building is unique,” Jamnicky says of the new structure, which will incorporate the exterior and interior of two closed churches. “And everything we’re doing to raise funds is unique, too.”

Despite difficult economic realities, parishes continue to undertake church building programs, whether it is to renovate and repair old buildings, build a new home for consolidated parishes, or open a new church in a growing community. And these building projects are typically the largest a parish will ever undertake.

In addition to the nuts and bolts of construction and renovation, the demands of liturgy, aesthetics, education, and funding call for multiple layers of decision-making and coordination.

Such projects rely on the clear vision of the parish and the efforts of community members who feel called to this challenging but ultimately satisfying ministry. Above all, building a new church is an occasion of grace, one that invites the entire community to renew its faith along with its place of worship.

Foundation work

A church is a community—and not just one building—composed of spaces that support assembly, worship, administration, education, and fellowship. Good design happens from the inside out, so before breaking out the tool belts, a parish has to put on its thinking cap and reflect on its ritual, devotional, and hospitality needs—and understand how these spaces relate to each other.

“My first advice is to help a community understand that this is a time of renewal for the parish, both spiritual and liturgical,” says Franciscan Father Gil Ostdiek, a professor of liturgy at the Catholic Theological Union in Chicago. “By asking themselves, ‘Who are we as a people of God? What do we do when we gather?’ the community can free itself to think more expansively.

“Of all the languages of liturgy, space is the most subtle and least attended to, and yet provides a powerful symbolic communal identity,” Ostdiek says. “Many of the spaces we have inherited are out of alignment with the shape of the rite and its performance, but people are reluctant to change [these spaces] because they are basic identity symbols.”

Guided discussions about liturgy and its architectural implications can help parishioners grasp what goes into creating sacred space. Practical conversations about the design and construction process will help the community select the right architects, liturgical designers, and contractors, as well as evaluate design schemes and budgets.

“With our pastor, Father Francis Peffley, the building committee visited 28 churches to see what we liked, what worked, what didn’t. We spoke to pastors and parish administrators, and learned from others’ experiences,” says Betty Childers, who with her husband, Kevin, headed up the capital campaign for Holy Trinity Church, a 1,200-seat church serving 3,800 families in Gainesville, Virginia. These observations shaped a requirements document that was sent to potential architects.

Typically, a parish figures out what it can realistically afford and then finds an architect who can work within its budget. “I wouldn’t distinguish between a client with a limited budget from one with a huge budget. In some ways, a limited budget encourages creativity,” says architect Craig Rafferty of Rafferty Rafferty Tollefson Lindeke, a firm that has designed dozens of churches.

This sentiment is echoed by Jesuit Father Gilbert Sunghera, who consults on church design through the University of Detroit Mercy. He helped an immigrant parish envision what was possible and within their means. “We simply found an architect who knew how to work creatively on a tight budget,” he says.

Budget isn’t the only thing to think about when deciding on an architect. “We interviewed seven or eight architects, but only one stood out as a man of faith, and everything in our church reflects that,” Childers says of Jim O’Brien of O’Brien and Keane, designers of Holy Trinity.

On the other hand, “Non-Catholic architects come in with a lot of questions that help us explore the issues in new ways,” Sunghera says.

Building codes

Church law gives the final decisions about architects to the local bishop. Some bishops work only with certain architects, while others “have firm ideas . . . making it more difficult for a parish to request something different,” says Rafferty.

American churches also must conform to guidelines set forth in the General Instruction of the Roman Missal and the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops’ “Built of Living Stones: Art and Architecture for Worship”

“Many dioceses and archdioceses have their own guidelines and policies. Local customs should not be overlooked,” says Father Richard S. Vosko, a design consultant for 40 years.

Many dioceses require parishes to hire liturgical consultants to lead planning and coordinate between parishioners, project committees, and design teams. Vosko says that a liturgical consultant engages the parish in the planning process by asking questions and worshiping with them.

“You browse around offices and classrooms to learn about their programs. You observe traffic patterns—both auto and human—and reactions to colors, textures, smells, and silence. You ask them to describe what they are expecting when they go to Mass.”

Parish leadership is critical. Successful projects rely on building and finance committees made up of individuals of diverse skills who can work well together as well as inspire the larger community. The diocesan review committee often asks the pastor for input from the parish.

“I train the building committee to talk to other parishioners, the Sunday school, the Knights of Columbus, women’s clubs,” says liturgical consultant Carol Frenning. “Helping them become experts in their own parishes builds ownership of the project.”

Money matters

While everyone is eager to build the church itself, it can be more cost-effective to focus first on the school, parking, hospitality rooms, and other facilities that are needed to expand the parish and its financial base.

St. Henry Church in Nashville completed a major renovation and expansion of its campus in two phases, starting with its school. “If we couldn’t afford something right away, we made certain that it could be accommodated in the future,” says St. Henry’s parishioner Bob Loedding, who served on the project’s building and finance committees.

“We learned some good lessons in the first phase that helped us in the second one,” Loedding adds. The parish retained the original contractor but found a new architect and liturgical consultant who were more sensitive to St. Henry’s culture. They also adopted a “soft sell” method for raising money.

“We weren’t contacting parishioners individually and putting pressure on them. We received pledges of $6 million, which exceeded the $5 million we thought we might raise,” he says.

Holy Trinity’s capital campaign was the parish’s first, and the first in the diocese of Arlington, Virginia. Headed by parishioners Betty and Kevin Childers, who had never raised money before, the campaign had an initial goal of $2 million—but $5 million in pledges was raised in 16 weeks.

“When Father Peffley asked for our help, I had just been laid off,” says Betty, who once worked in corporate business development. “That window of time, when we were running the capital campaign, was the best of my life. It was challenging, but from a spiritual perspective, there was incredible growth.”

Does it match?

Unlike most buildings, churches provide the rare opportunity to pause and look closely at the materials, lighting, and construction of a structure. While the scope of projects varies, the altar, ambo (lectern), baptismal font, and the tabernacle with its stand are the key objects in a church.

“These four components must speak to each other in terms of their materials, details, and finishes,” says Martin Rambusch, principal of the Rambusch Company, one of the oldest private liturgical design companies in the country. The firm designs as well as builds church interiors and furnishings. “The design-build approach allows a project to succeed liturgically, visually, and economically because the thread of design is carried from start to completion.”

Creative solutions to furnishing a church can be found in unlikely places. Architectural firm Gray Organschi wanted to salvage a diseased beech tree on the wooded site of the Jesuit Community Center in Fairfield, Connecticut. Because the firm has a woodworking specialty, they were “equipped to transform the tree trunk into a stunning altar and ambo for the chapel,” says Sunghera, who oversaw the project.

Inevitable project delays can also offer unexpected grace. When the long-awaited crucifix for Sts. Anne and Joachim Church in Fargo, North Dakota arrived, it was so large that it was laid temporarily in the apse. After Mass, the community was invited to come to the altar area. “Allowing our children to touch the crucifix was meaningful,” remembers parishioner Roxane Salonen. “To be that close and see it in a way we never would again was compelling.”

Art appreciation

While the marriage of art and faith has long been an uneasy one, the church has sought to reform and refine its understanding of sacred art over the centuries. The Second Vatican Council’s Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy, Sacrosanctum concilium, calls for art that is “truly worthy, becoming, and beautiful,” and its approval by those “who are especially expert.” Historically art has been an integral part of a church’s transformative power.

The quality of most religious art continues to plummet, however, dragged down by the easy availability of ersatz reproductions from catalogs and the general lack of art literacy. Exacerbating the situation is the perception that original art is expensive and a fear that less traditional work will cause controversy.

“When people ask me what kind of sculpture I make, I tell them I make statues that old ladies kiss, sparing me the contemporary-versus-traditional art argument,” says liturgical artist Anthony Visco, who understands his work as a vocation. He created an extensive art program for the Shrine of Our Lady of Guadalupe in La Crosse, Wisconsin in collaboration with Duncan Stroik and River Architects, designers of the shrine complex. “We’ve lost a sense of metaphor, our powerful signs and symbols,” Visco says.

To increase familiarity and comfort with the process of selecting art, liturgical consultant Carol Frenning conducts retreats for building committees that include a discussion of art and ritual. “Lacking professional training in the visual arts, most people base their judgments on a ‘feeling,’ ” she says, “yet people are hungry for ways to talk about art and make decisions about it.” Once a parish understands its needs, it can more easily find art that fits with its cultural identity—the art in a suburban church of young families is going to express a different spirituality, for instance, than an inner-city parish dedicated to social justice.

This includes art that will be visible from outside the church. “Art tells your story to the world and can invite passersby into the church,” Frenning notes. “You can use art as a tool of evangelization.”

One example is the monumental Christ the Good Shepherd sculpture, a 30-foot-long, 8-foot-tall bronze by John Collier that stands outside the bishop’s offices in Greensburg, Pennsylvania. The work depicts Jesus, who is holding a lamb and walking his sheep, being confronted by a wolf. Figures of Abel, David, and Moses, shepherds from the Old Testament, follow Jesus and hold crosiers.

The sculpture is located at the intersection of a busy thoroughfare—where it can’t be missed—and provides an arresting but comforting reminder that the church’s role is to protect and nurture Christ’s people.

That’s dedication

When a church is at last completed, its dedication is an occasion of celebration, acknowledging the community’s spiritual renewal, commitment, and hard work. The dedication rite is a living proclamation of faith. “The ritual is really about the dedication or re-dedication of the people of the church,” Vosko says.

“Everything was a first—the first candle lit, the first incense burned, the first Mass said,” says Roxane Salonen of the dedication of Sts. Anne and Joachim, constructed over 15 years. As the three-hour ceremony unfolded, she noticed how the sawdust smell of new construction gradually mingled with the scent of candles and incense. “At the end, it smelled like a church. A transformation had happened.”

This article first appeared in the April 2011 issue of U.S. Catholic magazine (Vol. 76, No. 4, pages 12-17).

La Guadalupana (detail) D. Montoya, 1999

A while ago, just as summer was ending, I went to an art opening at Yale University. I met a student, a young girl about 18 years old, who possessed the kind of guileless beauty that needs no embellishment. As we talked in the heat of the crowded galleries, she took off her jacket, revealing to my surprise that she was covered, neck to wrist, with tattoos. Inscribed into her body were beautiful, artful images of flowers and storybook characters — several of Maurice Sendak’s Wild Things crept along her upper arm, Ariel from the Little Mermaid swam cunningly on her forearm, the rag woman Sally in Tim Burton’s Nightmare Before Christmas peeked from behind her elbow. These characters were the ones she loved best from childhood, she said, inflecting her words as though her youth were decades past.

We continued to make small talk, and eventually drifted off into conversations with others, but the memory of her painted skin and quiet beauty stayed with me. I was overwhelmed by the feeling I had been looking at the Virgin Mary, who bore the wounds of the world as her own.

I never saw the girl again, but the encounter was an awakening. Like a door thrown open, it made me realize the sacred, especially as it is revealed through Mary, can be found in unlikely places, usually when least expected. I began to experience what Aristotle called the ”joy of recognition” — not merely recognizing what is already familiar, but seeing the familiar, now illuminated, in its essence. Everywhere, it seemed, some part of the gospel was playing out before my eyes. Before me were the forgotten, the wounded, the addicted and the broken, as well as the kind, the compassionate, the joyous and the brave. This wasn’t due to any special insight or holiness on my part, but came about once I had committed myself to seeing God’s hand in all things — however pleasant or annoying — without exception.

Thanks to the tattooed girl, I became a detective of sorts while writing Full of Grace, on the lookout for those unexpected moments when grace appears out of the blue.

I began to consider love’s commonplace, rare and sometimes complicated expressions. Because in the end, I came to understand that Mary’s was a love story. Not just one, but many stories about love in all its nuance and variety that the Virgin Mary — as a scared child, soul sister, proud parent, grieving mother, beloved icon — has inspired. Through her, we can better understand love. Mary tells us about the love between two people; and about love as the wine that makes life worth celebrating and eases the dark edges of loss and sorrow. She tells us of the love that builds a home, and the love that picks up the scattered pieces left after divorce. She reflects the terrible tumultuous love at the end of life when the dying must say goodbye to everyone and everything they have ever loved, and those left must love enough to let go.

Mary knew a lot about letting go. For starters, God asked for her very body, to contain the Christ child. But throughout her life, which was impoverished and uncertain under Roman rule, she had to accept that certain things were going to be taken away — her social identity as a pregnant woman who was unmarried; her homeland when the Holy Family was forced to flee to Egypt; her pride when Jesus asked the crowds, ”Who is my mother?”; and, finally, on Golgotha, her maternal right to protect her child.

I’ve felt closest to Mary during the darkest periods of my life. When I’ve had to surrender my hopes. When something I’ve counted on has evaporated. When my expectations weren’t met. When there seemed to be every good reason to believe, and then suddenly there wasn’t.

No one wants to talk about loss during the Christmas season. After all, it’s a time of anticipation and good will. But it’s also a time of darkness and letting go. As we await the birth of Christ, and the gifts and parties that accompany that celebration, we are also asked to let go of our expectations and walk on faith. Mary shows us how.

Mary, who was ordinary in many of the ways that we are ordinary, illuminates the depths of faith and love that are available to us. Hers was and remains a wounded beauty. Wounded in the sense that she was scarred by life, and beautiful because she allowed the pain to transform and not disfigure her soul. It was not that she did not experience sorrow and loss — she was spared nothing — but that she turned, repeatedly, toward kindness, patience and forgiveness. Full of grace, beloved by God, as we are also beloved, she possessed an indelible goodness, and wore it lightly.

This blog was first published on Busted Halo, Dec. 9, 2010

Photo (detail): La Guadalupana © Delilah Montoya, 1999

Our Lady of Czestochowa

Today, perhaps, judged by the media’s polished criteria, the historical Mary, a peasant girl from dusty Palestine, might not have looked good. But she was good.

Over the past 2,000 years, the Virgin Mary’s face has been imagined anew by every generation. We depict her beauty according to current standards of attractiveness, re-inventing her to reflect our own priorities. Her portrayal over the centuries was fluid: Mary’s image absorbed the attributes of ancient goddesses; was an anathema to Islamic revelation in the seventh century; denounced during the iconoclasm of the ninth century and continuing; made more nurturing and familiar during the Middle Ages; royally bedecked during the Renaissance; relegated to the role of genial housewife by the Reformers; and shunned by the Enlightened, before she reemerged, officially recognized by Catholics as the Queen of Heaven, with the proclamation of the dogma of the Assumption in 1950.

Today, perhaps, judged by the media’s polished criteria, the historical Mary, a peasant girl from dusty Palestine, might not have looked good. But she was good. For as often as her exterior features changed over time, what they had in common was an abiding attention to the singular truth of Mary’s genuine, steadfast faith and uncompromising purity.

In that context, I can’t help but think about other female faces that are famous at the moment, especially those who tend to dominate the headlines. These are attractive women, by current yardsticks, but what strikes me is how similar they look and sound. There’s a smoothness to their faces, abetted by heavy make-up and good hair stylists, and by the camera’s long-time love affair with angular features that soften only when committed to film. Too often, when I listen to these women, I hear God being stuffed into small, hateful boxes that have very little do with authentic faith. Their words — shrill, one-note broadcasts that depend on the creation of fear — say one thing, their looks another.

Oddly enough, the same could be said of certain portraits of the Virgin Mary. Some of the most memorable ones show her as Renaissance royalty, her image bejeweled, embroidered in gold, and seated on a throne. Bling? She inspired it. The “Queen of Queens,” as Henry Adams described Mary in his 1904 paean to Chartres, had “richer and finer taste in color than the queens of fifty earthly kingdoms.” Like today’s talking heads, Mary glistens with holy righteousness in such portraits, appearing satisfied, smug even.

Of course, there are practical and theological reasons why Renaissance artists and their patrons pictured her this way. Mary’s face is youthful, showing her at the age when she bore Jesus, in order to illustrate her perpetual virginity. She is often dressed in blue (artists used ultramarine blue, once the most costly of pigments, to honor her). As the vessel of the son of God, she is gilded and encrusted with jewels as befits a sacred tabernacle. Her throne celebrates her Assumption, when she was carried body and soul into heaven, her reward for a faithful life on earth.

When I consider Mary’s life as it was actually lived, however, and the earthly reality of this olive-skinned, dark-eyed daughter of Israel who struggled to survive in a hardscrabble, politically oppressed society, a different image emerges. Her life was one of poverty and hardship, punctuated with spirit-extinguishing sorrow. Giving birth is a strenuous, messy job, even today in a hospital, much less 2,000 years ago in a cave intended for livestock after traveling for days on a donkey. Once her son was born, her maternal joy must have been tempered by the knowledge that hundreds of other mothers were grieving, their babies slaughtered because of her child. From temple elder Simeon she soon learned what she had probably already intuited: A sword will pierce your soul, too. And so it was. A few short years later, she stood by, helpless, as her son was sentenced to death, scourged to a bloody pulp, and nailed to a cross.

This other Marian history is hinted at by the image of Our Lady of Czestochowa, the fabled Black Madonna housed at the pilgrimage monastery of Jasna Góra in Poland. Like many icons, this one is also covered in heavy gold filigree and studded with precious stones. But the glitter cannot hide the palpable sadness — or perhaps it is anger? — in her eyes. Her intense, haunting gaze seems to look both backward and forward in time. Shot with an arrow, slashed with a knife, the icon’s face is permanently scarred. Similarly, Our Lady of Guadalupe, today the most popular image of the Virgin Mary, has been adopted by gang members, addicts and others wounded by life who respond to her tenderness, enough to melt the hardest heart. The historical Mary, also scarred by life, is eternally beautiful because she allowed suffering to transform rather than disfigure her soul.

When she agreed to bear the son of God, Mary chose to rely on faith, not fear. Yet she enjoyed none of the pleasures that we have come to conflate, mistakenly, with God’s presence. Too often the gratification of our senses and egos is taken as proof that God is on our side, as though a logical equation can be made between faith and what happens here on earth. For all of her regal and demure portrayals in art, and her near silence in the Gospels, Mary’s is a loud and often difficult message: Faith is not rewarded in ways that can be expected or anticipated.

We know so little about the girl from Nazareth, yet her life suggests the depths of trust that are available to us, and tells us something too about divine love. Spared nothing, she turned repeatedly toward kindness, forgiveness and compassion. Quite simply, she said “yes,” one woman’s personal act of unconditional faith that changed history. Full of grace, beloved by God, as we are also beloved, Mary possessed an indelible goodness and wore it lightly.

Photo: © Achim Bednorz/Bednorz Images

This blog was first published Oct. 29, 2010 on the Huffington Post Religion page.

Inspirational speaker Nicole Johnson uses my book, Churches, to deliver a powerful message of hope for everyone who feels invisible and taken for granted. I don’t know Nicole, but what she took away from Churches and how she brought the lessons of the Gothic cathedral builders to bear on today’s problems, blew me away. Watch, and be inspired! For more on Nicole, visit Fresh Brewed Life, hope for the daily grind.