One of the most haunting verses of devotional poetry I have ever encountered is in the German theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar’s The Way of the Cross.  In the final station, it is late Friday afternoon, Jesus’ corpse has been taken down from the cross, the body is swathed according to custom, and laid in a tomb … and von Balthasar suggests that a great and festive liturgy of forgetting begins:
 
So already his unquiet image
haunts heads and hearts.
Already the spirit is freed.
Already the Easter question takes shape …
but silently.
For tomorrow is only Holy Saturday.
The day when God is dead,
and the Church holds her breath.
That strange day that separates life and death
in order to join them in a marriage
beyond all human thought.
 
It seems to me that we hold our breath many more days of the year than this one solemn and holy-Saturday.  Our world seems to endlessly churn out events in which we question the existence of a god, or we feel ensnared or helpless or lost.
 
I am drawn the Stations of the Cross.  Not so much as a devotional piety, but as a much-loved communal pilgrimage in which the suffering of a deity mirrors so much of the human pain in our world.  During these holiest of days … art and prayer and politics collide in a narrative of passion, death, and the possibility of something new.  Tyrants and priests, apostles and unbelievers, history and current events, faithfulness and betrayal, partisans and zealots all become characters or themes in a great cosmic drama … all set within a regional struggle for political power, religious belief, and economic control. 
 
This year our exhibition combines the woodblock prints of Sr. Mary Grace Thul, OP (Monastery of Mary the Queen, Girard, Illinois), the wisdom and poetry of Irish poet Pádraig Ó Tuama and Shantideva’s Boddhisattva Vow to explore the universal and interconnected experience of suffering.  As the Buddha reminds us, “Within suffering itself, there is no separation between my suffering and another’s  suffering.”  Thul’s images root us in the gospel narrative, Ó Tuama’s collects anchor us in the human condition and what we believe to be the nature of the deity, and the Mahayana Buddhist philosopher Shantideva teaches the transformative and enlightening experience of entering the suffering of others.
 
Maybe, just maybe, we too can hold our breath and believe that in our current situation there is the possibility of a new life.
 
And so I join my hands and pray
the Buddhas who reside in every quarter:
Kindle now the Dharma’s light
For those who grope, bewildered, in the dark of pain!
 
May I be a guard for those who need protection;
a guide for those on the path;
a boat, a raft, a bridge
for those who wish to cross the flood.

May I be a lamp in the darkness,
a resting place for the weary,
a healing medicine for all who are sick,
a vase of plenty, a tree of miracles.

And for the boundless multitudes of living beings,
may I bring sustenance and awakening -
enduring like the earth and sky
until all beings are freed from sorrow
and all are awakened.
 
Shantideva’s Boddhisatva Vow

Totems are found in all ancient religious traditions. They are generally tall carved abstract figures that tell a sacred story. The figural elements within a totem are often minimalized to include only the physical elements needed for story line of the narrative. Totems seldom exist in isolation. The fullness of their meaning requires a sacred ritual and the skill of a shaman, storyteller, musician, or dancer, to invite them to come alive.
 
Like ancient totems, my work seeks an assembly, storytelling, and ritual action to bring the narrative to life and to allow the same transformative grace of a past event to be made present in the gathered community here and now.  Dies Epiphaniorum reflects the three New Testament stories associated with the Feast of Epiphany: The Wise Men from the East, the Wedding Feast at Cana, and the Baptism of Jesus.
 
The minimalized elements of this totem are three walking crowned figures with eyes that see a star, symbols of death and new life in the waters of the Jordan River, and the wine brought for a feast.  In front of the totem is the seven branched temple menorah represented as the burning bush … epiphanies found in the Hebrew scriptures. The padlocks and the row of skulls reference the spiritual and political decision of the wise men after their encounter with the infant Jesus, and the tragic aftermath of that choice … Herrod’s murder of the holy innocents.  Encounters with the divine often have perilous consequences!
 
The monochrome gray color is intended to suggest a ghost-like, or other worldly presence of the characters in the Epiphany narratives. The color also roots the figures into the liturgical furnishings of the space in an attempt to tie them into the primary symbols of worship ... seating, table, and ambo.
 
The placement of the work in the liturgical space was intentional. All prayers at Thomas Chapel begin around fire.  Generally, this opening ritual occurs at the firepit in the grassy plaza in front of the chapel.  Winter temperatures, inclement weather, high winds, or a local burn-ban can sometimes require the ritual to be moved to the narthex inside where the assembly gathers to light a candle.  While this arrangement works out of necessity, it fails to have a primal ritual power of gathering around a roaring fire.  The intention of the totem Dies Epiphaniorum, as well as the menorah/burning bush, were to better augment a truncated opening rite.
 
The prayers that begin and conclude this reflection were part of this opening rite … along with Isaiah’s proclamation of a year of God’s favor (61: 1-11).
 
Works created for the liturgical environment need to find balance within a complex series of limitations: 1) the work must serve (and not interrupt) the ritual action, 2) the work must hold the weight of the mystery/story it represents, and finally, 3) the artist must fade behind the works and actions of the assembly.
 
So … did Dies Epiphaniorum work in the space?  Probably not!  The brutalist nature of my work is hard to hide … and does not readily fade into the background.  The hard steel and sharp edges demand attention.  With that said, I do believe they come close to holding the weight of the sacred stories it tells … but this totem is maybe better suited for another venue.
 
But it was a noble effort.  Thomas Chapel is intended to be a “kunsthalle” … a place for new or experimental works of the creative imagination.  The work and prayer at Thomas Chapel are a safe place for artists to workshop ideas.  We all learn in the experiment.  Thanks be to God!

God of light, today you reveal to all humanity your desire for love and justice.
Your light is strong, your love is near, your justice will prevail.
Draw us beyond the limits which the world imposes,
to the life where your spirit makes all life complete.
 
Opening Prayer/Roman Catholic/Epiphany (adapted)

Sometimes in her studio practice, Pat Dougherty invites an image to emerge spontaneously from the visible grains and patterns in an unpainted sheet of plywood. She then applies washes of paint to bring-out emerging shapes and narratives, and eventually adds her own embellishments to complete the image.  With “Show of Hands”, the plywood offered seven prominent knots that ran horizontally across the top half of the board and a regular pattern of striations that ran vertically.  Dougherty saw the seven standing figures immediately, but it was a combination of serendipity, meditation, a half-century of studio experience, and an openness to the zeitgeist of the current cultural/political moment that a visual sense of a narrative surfaced.
 
The emergent narrative is the moment at the first GOP debate when the moderator asked the seven Republican presidential contenders if they would, by show of hands, still vote for the former president even if he were convicted of a crime.  Six of the figures reply with varying levels of enthusiasm.
 
Dougherty’s image is not intended as an illustration or a snapshot of a moment.  Instead, the artist captures a critical moment in our nation’s moral accounting.  The debaters on the dais are not personalized.  In fact, there is a sameness … or better yet … a nothingness in these contenders to be our nation’s overseer.  All are cut from the same bolt of drab cloth.  Dougherty intentionally adds arms and hands … in a fluorescent chartreuse … to convey the very public credo of six candidates.  These flailing gestures may … or may not … be representative of the individual’s actual moral view because these figures appear animated and controlled by something or someone outside the picture frame.  This is political puppet theater … so it’s sometimes hard to establish sincerity.
 
While Dougherty captures one political party’s moral collapse, the ambiguity of the picture might suggest this moment as a metaphor for our whole nation’s collective ethical conundrum that lies churned-out during these two-year election cycles.  We find ourselves in the same season again … in a routine that is neither generative nor reconciling.  Election day has become a festival day of losers be damned. 
 
We like to say that we believe in separation of church and state … but that has never been true … ever … or anytime.  Politics and religion are the two principal ways that humanity works to structure its life together … impossible to rend asunder.
 
In our post Trumpian dystopia, our hope and our doom seem to hinge around this new season of sorting.  Every two years politics and religion amalgamate … even if our literacy of either may be sorely lacking.  Yet, despite election day’s significance as a pivotal moment in our life together, the day does not have a liturgical commemoration.  There are no lectionary readings, prayers or hymns assigned to this day.  On this day, when the community gathers to participate in the most profound of our public rituals … and a most solemn moment of personal accounting, we are left adrift to publicly (albeit privately) profess our faith … a credo … checking a box to affirm what “I believe”. 
 
This season needs the power of liturgy.  Because the goal of liturgy is not to console.  Liturgy is intentionally disorienting as it seeks to shift the community’s worldview beyond what it observes in the current condition.  Liturgy fosters profound personal and social transformation and moves the community toward works of mercy and justice.  Liturgy is the acting out of the world as it can be … not as it is.  Liturgy is taking part in a mystery that allows the community to think and live anew.  Liturgy is rehearsal for a world as it should be.  Liturgy always begins with a personal accounting/confession (what I have done and what I have failed to do) … and the promise of reconciliation … and ultimately transformation.
 
Abbot Guéranger begins his mystical meditations in L’année Liturgique with the season of Advent … the beginning of the Christian year … a season of hope amid chaos … and the nervous expectation of a new spirit that will usher in an age of love and reconciliation.  The scripture texts, euchologies, hymns and devotional pieties are the richest of the liturgical year.  Every year we are reminded of the chaos that humanity brings upon itself … and the complexities of the divine and human dance toward its deliverance.
 
Liturgy must be relevant to both the evolution of human self-understanding, or maybe more importantly, as a counterbalance to human devolution, or else it risks losing its transformative power in community.
 
I close with an anonymous Prayer for Justice found in Laurence Hull Stookey’s This Day: A Wesleyan Way of Prayer …
 
Gracious God, let your will for us all be known.
Let us all be partners in shaping the future
with a faith that quarrels with the present
for the sake of what yet might be.
Amen.