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Matter is spirit moving slowly enough to be seen.
— Teilhard de Chardin On a rainy morning last May, my wife and I viewed acres of contemporary art housed in two Biennale campuses in the Castello district of Venice, Italy. We encountered varying degrees of talent and vision — paintings, sculpture, installations, video — carried off with varying degrees of success. After an hour, with so much artwork to take in, my sensorium, as usual, began to frazzle, and the impulse to keep moving kicked in — a drive-by treatment that left me with a lingering sense of regret. In the afternoon, as the sun broke through to light the towers and cupolas and green canals of the beautiful, sinking city, I suggested we ditch the crowds and take the vaporetto for the quick trip to the island of San Giorgio Maggiore and its eponymous Baroque church designed by Andrea Palladio (1508–1580). The Benedictine church’s white marble façade and iconic belltower beckoned across the blue water. “There’s supposed to be an art installation there,” I added. “A sort of satellite to the official Biennale.” We entered the basilica without great expectations: we’d ingested a full diet of art in the morning, and I’m no lover of the baroque. Once inside, though, as I looked around, my footsteps slowed. Here, in the marbled brightness of a sacred space, several figures made of wax — archangels, I would learn — stood tall, mysterious and challenging as standing stones in a forest clearing. The few other visitors, I noticed, communicated in hushed whispers. And the words I’d never forgotten from the pen of French Jesuit priest, paleontologist, philosopher and writer Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (1881–1955), words that penetrated me like a spear four decades earlier, returned: “the power of the Word Incarnate penetrates matter itself; it goes down into the deepest depths of the lower forces.” The artist, Berlinde De Bruyckere, was born in Ghent, Belgium in 1964. She grew up with a different angle on life: her father was a butcher. The title of her installation, “City of Refuge III,” is the third in a series based on the Nick Cave song of the same name, a song with roots reaching back through Blind Willie Johnson to folk and blues: You better run, you better run/You better run to the City of Refuge. The humanlike archangels stood on their own pedestals, messengers from God reflecting our uneasy souls, their faces concealed by wax cloths. They were unbalanced, as if preparing to rise. Maybe. The works of Teilhard reached me at a crisis point, professionally and personally, when my life resembled an intransitive verb in search of an object. I was in my mid-30s, that vulnerable age Dante wrote of when he became lost in a dark wood “half-way along the road we have to go.” I read Teilhard’s bracing prose with the enthusiasm of a parched wanderer lost in the desert encountering a fresh-water spring. In describing his own dilemma, the priest and scientist put his finger on the modern one: “he will give up any attempt to make sense of his situation; he will never belong wholly to God, nor ever wholly to things; incomplete in his own eyes, and insincere in the eyes of his fellows, he will gradually acquiesce in a double life. I am speaking, it should not be forgotten, from experience.” In his vision of the universe, Teilhard established Christ as the Omega point of cosmic evolution. Whatever we do, in a Christ-centered cosmos, he wrote, it is through the care we bring to the tasks by which we earn our daily bread and, as responsible citizens, care for the least of those among us, that we create and build, and are in turn further created. Such is the “divinization of our activities,” Teilhard observed. “Christ is the goad that urges creatures along the road of effort, of elevation, of development.” De Bruyckere’s archangels are not so explicit; they are poignant in their ambiguity. But their very presence confronts us with the eternal question: how shall we live? In the sacred space of San Giorgio Maggiore, a sanctuary and refuge through the centuries, in a wounded, post-Covid time, the artist has asked the question with pity and tenderness. In the sacristy, De Bruyckere placed wax tree trunks on metal welding tables — a post-apocalyptic vision that nevertheless suggested possibilities of regrowth and redemption. It was a grim, psychological landscape, the broken trees seemingly splayed at random, unless one catches, however fleetingly, an image of order in the universe, like the washed-up driftwood we sometimes come across on the beach arranged in interesting, complex patterns. The installation was juxtaposed with an altar painting by Giuseppe Porta (also known as Giuseppe Salviati) (1520–1575), which shows Mary and Joseph presenting their infant child at the temple in Jerusalem. Two angels hover above the scene, one holding a cross foreshadowing the crucifixion. And resurrection. Other installations appear in the corridors of the gallery halls — wounded body parts of wax, wax casts of animal skins piled, more or less neatly, on bronze pallets, and tree branches, but the heart of the exhibit, for me, was found in the figure of a recumbent archangel on a pedestal resembling a coffin made from old building materials. Do we behold a corpse, an angel guarding an unseen body, or a slow chrysalis-like progress through a dark passage toward the light? Teilhard again: “that the perceptible enters vitally into the most spiritual zones of our souls — then we must also recognize that in the whole process which from the first to last activates and directs the elements of the universe, everything forms a single whole. And we begin to see more distinctly the great sun of Christ…rising over our interior world.” De Bruyckere’s “City of Refuge III,” installed in a very old church on an island away from the madding crowds of Venice, confronted us with a series of blunt potentialities: torpor or emergence; life as a warren of cul-de-sacs or a collaborative work of creation; to tread water or plumb the deep-down labyrinths to arrive, once again, at the overwhelming question: how shall we live? “For staying is nowhere,” Rilke famously wrote in his First Elegy. -- Mike Dillon lives in a small town on Puget Sound northwest of Seattle. A former publisher of community newspapers, his poems and essays have been published in this country and internationally, including Dappled Things, Rain Taxi, Kyoto Journal, Poetry Salzburg Review, Galway Review and many other venues. His new and selected poems, Nocturne, was published in October 2024.
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It is sometimes a radiant world,
this life in Christ. But only sometimes. Sometimes I am shy, afraid to name the body, to describe the strangers whom I love. The little nun who was never a nun, in her house of dusty corners, who worked in hospitals for years, with her smile and white curls, who studied and wrote songs and was never beautiful, but strangely weightless in a reappearing way, like sunlight, high and vaporous, within a winter day. Or the eternal neighbor who walks within herself, never selfish for news of others, yet always going to the doctor with some friend who’s lost his sight or is becoming distanced from his mind and slowly slipping away. She went to boarding schools and cleaned summer cabins, one arm withered by polio, although you’d never know it unless you chose to notice. She offers salvation in a neighborly way. Or the man with infants’ hands, so soft and unscarred that they might have just come from the womb, who talks, often, of cold moons and a creek-bordered farm where his ancestors labored and died, too soon. If I were to make a mosaic on the wall it would have to hold them all, each figure made of glass set in stone, each tesserae catching light and holding it, obscuring my perceptions and showing that they’re limited. When light shows brightly the forms are almost lost, the lines of colored glass embossed beyond simple distinctions, and I, and those I love, hide within the radiance. -- KPB Stevens is an Episcopal priest, poet and painter who lives in Columbus, Ohio. His work has appeared in Cathexis Northwest Press, Cardinal Sins, Squalorly, Inwood Indiana, Orion Headless and The Christian Century, as well as two EASE Gallery chapbooks, Wildernesses: Physical & Spiritual and Trespasses. His story 'My Beam of Light' was selected for The Wigleaf Top 50 Very Short Fictions of 2014. A year after she died
I stood in an oceanside church. The waves were echoed by chalice and stained glass. A year in which I never said “believe.” What is belief within the hollowness of grief? A year, a numbed highway, a blank staring at the day, a dissipation of memories. Then, adrift in stained light, we stood and said, “I believe,” I and these strangers who were holding my belief for me. I believe. God of wind and the ocean, and the woven pattern of the waves — of the birds, their wings wide, their bodies seed pods on the breeze -- God of the sky, the birds' cries, the whales breaching by the boat -- shadows move, sunlight strikes deep chasms in the sea — jellyfish slide by the boat's side — God of the world's eye — shadows deepen, shadows shatter into shapes that sing — gems of color along each wing — God of perception and perceived — God of everything. I believe. -- KPB Stevens is an Episcopal priest, poet and painter who lives in Columbus, Ohio. His work has appeared in Cathexis Northwest Press, Cardinal Sins, Squalorly, Inwood Indiana, Orion Headless and The Christian Century, as well as two EASE Gallery chapbooks, Wildernesses: Physical & Spiritual and Trespasses. His story 'My Beam of Light' was selected for The Wigleaf Top 50 Very Short Fictions of 2014. After the champagne toasts,
the fine bottles of red and white, the sugary dessert wine, the speeches in Spanish and English, the bride and groom were led across to the aero- service to ride a seaplane sweeping above forest and lakes, around the High Peak point after guests showered bird seed instead of typical confetti. We hurried to the bridge to watch a roaring take-off. The Best Man, a church bell ringer, arranged everyone heart-shaped on the beach sand to greet the pair returning, as we sang for the bride's birthday. And as we dropped our hands we felt how hard it was to let go. -- Royal Rhodes is a poet and retired teacher. His chief delight is hearing from many former students whose lives are helping to heal the world. Wrestle the written
And the Incarnate. Reverently adore the Holy hieroglyph, Diction and drafting, Laud and lexicon. Neither space nor time Nor anything created Can touch your soul, But Logos can. Existing before time For this-- Soul-shifting rebirth, Redirection of function. Power in minuscule Flecks and flexures: I am rewritten, My being restructured, Speaking and hearing, Worshipping the Word. -- Olivia Oster is a writer living on Lookout Mountain, Georgia, whose fiction and poetry explore the spiritual aspect of common everyday life as well as the elements of life with which she is most familiar: chronic pain, parenting, writing, the Bible and homemaking. Olivia’s poetry has been accepted in As Surely as the Sun, Spirit Fire Review and others. She has also published A New Grammary, a book of grammar formulas, and a poetry chapbook called Poetic Faith. Olivia is a teacher, wife, mother of five and student of the Word. |
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