St. Mary's Church, Roslyn: Pastor's Page

Dear Friends:

As one who can barely balance a checkbook, I marvel at those who do calculus. Given my ineptness to draw even stick figures, I am amazed by Picasso. As a student whose philosophical insight is, at best, “pedestrian,” I stand in awe of Plato. But have you ever encountered someone whose depth of insight covers so many fields? And even more extraordinarily, can connect them to each other? Today, we call such a person a “Renaissance Man.” One figure who embodies the term is Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519), the Florentine master of painting, science, invention, architecture, and music. In the Mona Lisa, arguably the greatest – and certainly the most famous – painting in history we behold, not simply a technical masterpiece, but an enigma that lends itself to endless interpretation. According to one biographer (Walter Isaacson), today’s image, The Virgin and Child with St. Anne, is “on par” with the Mona Lisa in terms of its “complex and layered” artistic techniques.

Which of these is the most remarkable? Is it the use of sfumato, by which a smoky mist blurs the landscape to evoke a divine atmosphere hovering over the physical world? Or is it the interplay of rock formations, air, and humidity to create subtle shades of color and emotion? The anatomical genius by which a (rather large) young mother rests as comfortably in the lap of St. Anne as does the infant in her own arms? The capacity of physical movement and facial expression to convey delicate psychological and mystical states? Or is it the juxtaposition of “child’s play” (the Baby Jesus tussling with the lamb) and the central event of salvation history (his death on the cross)? The answer is: Why choose? Each is important; each relates to the others and indeed enhances their power.

Leonardo dramatically illustrates what we might call a “catholic” sensibility, as compared with a Protestant one. For some (David Tracy), this involves analogy, i.e., describing one reality (like the ineffable God) in terms of something we can more easily grasp. For others (Avery Dulles), material objects can mediate the divine presence which, strictly speaking, remains utterly transcendent. Over and against this notion stands the Protestant sensibility, which is suspicious of anything that presumes to serve as an image for God; one risks the sin of idolatry.

Granted, such misgivings are legitimate, but I believe we Catholics have an affinity for those concrete realities that communicate God’s grace: the sacraments, sacramentals, pageantry, art, and even the human body itself. St. Ignatius would say that the disciple of Christ must learn to “see God in all things, and all things in God.” This summer, let’s make it our “business” to do just that.

Faithfully,
Fr. Valentine

Dear Friends:

George Bernard Shaw tells us: “You use a glass mirror to see your face; you use works of art to see your soul.” I think this is true. Beautiful things are valuable, not so much because they are “pretty,” but because they distill the features of our experience so that we can make sense of it (at least that’s what John Dewey would say).

One of the many tasks of Christianity is to help people fathom the paradoxical quality of human existence: time and eternity, divinity and humanity, grace and nature, good and evil, life and death, and so on. For many, these dualities are contradictions: one simply cancels out the other. A subtler view holds that some phenomena, like evil, are not so much things (with being of their own) as the absence or malformation of what should exist (good), while other pairs, like time and eternity, or divinity and humanity, can only be compared by way of analogy. (For example, we learn something of the God who is beyond all material things by imagining certain qualities, though without limitation.) Great art helps us grasp, on an intuitive level, a sense of that wonderful juxtaposition. As a music teacher of mine used to say (was he quoting someone?): “Johann Sebastian Bach could look death in the face and write lullabies.”

Pierre Mignard (1612 – 1695) was a French painter who specialized in portraits, mythological images, and religious subjects: particularly those of Our Lady. His beautiful work, The Virgin with the Grapes, exhibited in the Louvre, adorns our bulletin cover this week. Its rich symbolism is at once profound and tranquil, serious yet…”playful.” The Christ Child peers out at us from under the security of his mother’s veil, almost as though he were playing “peek-a-boo” with the viewer (not unlike the image we saw last week). Moreover, we appreciate Our Lady’s care for her child by feeding him. As the Catholic blogger Veronica Mena points out (https://www.catholiccompany.com/getfed/12-religious-paintings-meanings-5758), the more prominent of the fruits featured in the painting are the grapes. Beyond their obvious meaning, the grapes symbolize the Eucharist under the form of wine and, for Catholics, the eternal life we have in Christ. Yet we should also take note of the apples on the table, which may well refer to the sin of our first parents, Adam and Eve, from which Our Lord came to save us. The serious themes of sin and redemption contrast with the innocent beauty of the Mother and Child. Our Catholic imagination encompasses the human experience of both good and evil, and yet the Madonna and her Child reassure us that nothing can prevail over God’s grace and goodness. In a precarious world, the servants of God have nothing to fear.

Faithfully,

Fr. Valentine