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Affirmation and Reconciliation Christmas Fireside David Clark Knowlton December 21, 2003 The story of Christ's birth, life and death has brought us much of the greatest art in the West. A month ago I was in Chicago to attend a professional meeting, where I presented a paper that I had been working on for months. It seemed absurd that this was my third time in Chicago and I had yet to go to one of the important art museums in the United States, the Chicago Art Institute. So I stole a morning from my conference and, with guilty feelings, walked the few blocks down Michigan Avenue. The museum is massive and intimidating. After slowly walking up the stairs in the windy morning chill of November, then standing in line for what seemed forever, I entered the central cavern with stairs in every direction. I did not know where to go, having never been there before, so I tried to make sense of the guidebook and, as is often the case, found it more confusing. So I just started walking up to the top of a set of gleaming marble stairs, figuring a good plan would be to start there and slowly make my way down. A set of glass doors greeted me at the top of the stairs. I walked through them, crossing a hall, and then, after another set of doors, I entered a large room with four very large paintings, including a couple by Caravaggio. One caught my eye as I entered. I could not take my eyes from it. Even though what it depicted was not of my religious tradition, I was caught by the power of the image and the magnificence of the realization. It was a painting of Christ on the cros s by the Spanish baroque painter Francisco de Zurbaran. He was influenced by the Chiaroscuro developed by the Italian Caravaggio. Even though across from the Zurbaran was an amazing painting by Caravaggio, rich and colorful, it lacked the intensity and the purity of the Zurbaran. There was such passion and drama, as well as love, in the painting that I could not draw myself away. I felt I could almost see the veins suffering beneath the skin of the crucified Jesus. I imagined the ordinary people of the 16th century who, of course, did not have television, photographs, or even books. I thought what they must have felt when they entered a church and saw a painting of this nature, easily twenty feet tall, hanging on the Church walls above them. It would fill them with magnificence and religious devotion. In short, it made the divine story of the sacred and transcendence of Christ real and tangible. There was the Christ on the cross above them, glowing in space as the light streamed through the cathedral's windows. Light blessed his skin and made him real. Art makes stories real, especially spiritual stories. Art creates faith. Christ, whether the baby born in an inn and lying in a manger, the suffering Christ in the Garden of Gethsemane or on the cross, or the Christ transcendent in the heavens, is a magnificent image. Each version of Christ provokes strong feeling, as it connects theology with the circumstances of our individual lives. Each is critical to one version or another of Christianity and battles can be fought between devotees of one or the other. Nevertheless the set of images of Christ is a mainstay of our culture. Sometimes it is tawdry and clichéd and other times it strikes with intensity and overwhelming feeling. But in either case it draws on a context. This time of the year, when the days are weak and short, when the sun seems feeble and pagans bring ritual to strengthen the sun and return life and fertility to the earth, Christians celebrate the birth of a child. In the space of a few months, when pagans celebrate spring and the riotousness of growth and life, Christians will celebrate the death of the man that child became. This connection with nature rites of pagans holds a certain irony. The Christians, at one level seem curiously out of pace as they celebrate birth when the sun is dying and needs resurrection, and resurrection when the earth is filled with birth. But at another level Christianity uses the experience of the short, cold nights to say "fear not" as the angels told the people in Luke. It also claims spring to speak of a birth into a different life of celestial glory. The irony and connection is powerful and motivates us even today in our post-industrial age as we rush around to find gifts, go to parties, and celebrate the capitalist orgy that Christmas has also become. To make my point a bit more I would like to refer to a carol from Catalonia that the great cellist Pablo Casals used to love to perform. It says: 1. Upon this holy night,In this hymn Christ is related to nature. Birds sing his glory, as if he were a phenomenon of the natural world like they, only greater and transcendent. But this idea also twists. Even the creatures, like the lowly sparrows, recognize Christ, the infant child, as the master of the world. He is small like they. But he promises great things, a release from sin and all suffering. To many, especially rural peoples, suffering is part of the ordinary world. It is related to sin and misfortune. Illness, hailstones, drought, and flood just strike when they will and people live with their results. We in our developed world can hope to live without suffering. We can try to drive it away, so that our motto becomes to have fun, or to be happy. But here the infant Christ promises a release from all the crises and difficulties of existence for his followers. That is an immensely powerful idea to locate in the infant Christ. However, the Catalonians created this image with a melancholy melody, quite unlike the major keyed, happy carols of the English world. It draws at the heart and invokes the very issues that Christ promises to liberate us from; at the same time it is suffused with the emotions of life and that hope born in it. But there is another Jesus, the one the theologian Gustavo Gutierrez sees as a radical. This Jesus upsets the ordinary order of life as well as the simple verities of religion. This is the very human Jesus of the New Testament who struggles with the ways religion connects with secular power to create inequality and injustice. In many ways the other images of Jesus are easy to absorb and observe, since they support the ordinary order of existence. This latter Jesus is a bit more demanding. Because it is so human, instead of transcendent, it requires more of us to accept it as it criticizes even our existence, than the more nurturing and promising transcendent images of Jesus, whether a baby, on the cross, or in the heavens. To avoid him people often engage in theological contortions to void the simple implications of his words. This is the Jesus who spoke of the shameful Samaritans in a positive way. It is the Jesus who did not shun the harlot, nor the ill, nor the sinners. It is the Jesus who drove the money changers from the temple and the Jesus who said it is not what goes in that makes one unclean, but that which cometh out. He upset the laws of Kosher and the behavioral demands of Rabbinic Judaism. He called the rabbis whitened sepulchers and hypocrites, because they focused so much on the fine points of the law and the certain number of commandments that they lost the spirit. While, Rabbi Gamaliel had said "Love the lord thy God and love thy neighbor as they self, on this hang all the law and the prophets," Jesus pushed that already simplified and demanding phrase further. He spoke of a God who knew all the feathers on a sparrow's back. He loved the poor and the peacemaker. This God ordered people to not only love their neighbors but to love those who deceitfully use them. As a result Father Gutierrez argues that Jesus' words are particularly relevant and challenging for those who others would revile on the basis of religion the poor, the Samaritans, and other disparaged minorities such as today's' Gays Lesbians Bisexuals and Transgender people. Perhaps these words from Matthew are applicable. "Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness' sake, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven." Perhaps it would be good for the Reverend Phelps and others who feel they have the Lord in their pocket, including many Latter-day Saints, to reread these words. It is not good to persecute others for the sake of righteousness, or even just of feeling that you are right and that you know God's will. You may condemn them to hell, but Jesus says "theirs is the kingdom of heaven." It changes the sense of the monument Phelps wants to place all over the Untied States condemning Matthew Shepherd to hell. Jesus the man seems to escape over and over the little boxes we design for him to make him safe for us and to turn them against us. He continues in Matthew: Blessed are ye, when men shall revile you, and persecute you, and say all manner of evil against you, falsely, for my name's sake. Rejoice and be exceeding glad: for great is your reward in heaven: for so persecuted they the prophets which were before you. Ye are the salt of the earth: But if the salt has lost its savor, wherewith shall it be salted? It is thenceforth good for nothing, but to be cast out and trod under foot of men. Ye are the light of the world. A city that is set on a hill cannot be hid. Neither do men light a candle, and put it under a bushel, but on a candlestick; and it giveth light unto all that are in the house. Let your light so shine before men, that they may see your good works, and glorify your father which is in heaven.The image of Christ on the cross, that Zurbaran painted for a monastery in Spain in 1627, takes on new meaning for me today. The artist painted a loving, almost erotic image of Jesus. Eros is not bad. It is divine. Were it not for Gay artists and thinkers (and I have no idea what Zurbaran's sexuality was) the worlds of art and of faith would be much impoverished. Gays have brought light, even the light of Christ, into the world through their lives and work. But even more, Jesus was crucified because he challenged the presumed order of the world. He pointed out its inequities, its problems, the gap between what it claimed and what it did. He was crucified because he refused to fit into the normative, religious, order of Jerusalem at the mid point of time. At this time of the year, when we light candles and bright lights, to remember the light that the pagans wanted to keep alive so it would grow in the sky, and the Christian light of the world that brings salvation, we also recognize and remember people like gays, lesbians, bisexuals and transgendered people many in the world despise, but who bring light to it. Let Gay light so shine...for your glory and that of God.
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