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.

Photo courtesy Flickr

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

In 2003, hours after the former Iraqi president Saddam Hussein’s sons, Uday and Qusay, were killed in a military ambush in Mosul, the American government released graphic photographs of the two brothers’ bloodied heads, paired with images of them taken while alive. Here, the world was told, is incontrovertible proof of their deaths.  It wasn’t enough.  Even Iraqi farmers paused in their fields and said, Wait, that’s not them, we need better evidence.

Skepticism about the photographs’ veracity grew to a collective scream for the head of John the Baptist on a platter. Additional photographs followed in rapid-fire succession, but did not quench demand for proof. New photos showed the Hussein brothers wiped clean and shaved, with faces heavily reconstructed by plastic surgery. Ignoring the reality that current surgical techniques can make anyone look like someone else, it was accepted, finally, that Uday and Qusay were dead.

Early reverence for photography’s mystical ability to recreate the world has long since evaporated, revealing our increasingly relativistic approach to authenticity. Today, able to be altered digitally in ways not imaginable less than a decade ago, visual images are suspect messengers of truth and hence of memory. But absent a body, apparently buried at sea, photographs of Bin Laden, along with searing memories of all he destroyed, will remain with us for a very long time.