Christ is risen. Christ will come again.
It’s the reality we believe in. We try hard to exalt in it each year at Easter season. In dark times like this month’s tragedies, it’s not easy to embrace joy and hope and know that there will always be the Light.
Catholics have always used art to help us experience our faith. We’re comfortable with visual aids that interpret the good news of Scripture and the good works of saints when the words don’t seem enough.
A small group of us had a chicken skin experience with the translation of the Bible into art at an April 9 event at the St. Louis School campus.
At Mass just two days earlier, we heard a reading from the book of Revelations — Scripture that I confess I mostly find too obscure to inspire me. We heard the words of the evangelist John describing his vision of the risen Lord, transfigured and proclaiming, “Once I was dead, but now I am alive forever.”
That is the image of Jesus we saw unveiled at the new Clarence T.C. Ching Learning and Technology Center, a mural that was the gift of the Class of 1962.
HCH photo by Darlene Dela Cruz
Local artist Karen Lucas stands in front of her mosaic, “Jesus in Hawaii,” during its unveiling at Saint Louis School, April 9.
“Jesus in Hawaii” is Karen Lucas’ mosaic translation of an oil painting by renowned artist Martin Charlot, who was a member of the class.
Should a passing viewer wonder what’s with the symbol-laden imagery, there’s a small plaque with the first verses of Revelations: “One like the son of man, wearing an ankle-length robe with a gold sash around his chest. The hair of his head was as white as white wool or as snow, and his eyes were like a fiery flame.” And so on.
What Hawaii viewers won’t need interpreted is the setting, with breadfruit leaves, guava trees, ginger and bird of paradise, bright-feathered indigenous birds circled by rainbows. Brilliant colors from Hawaii’s world of nature encircle the radiant risen Lord.
One person at the St. Louis dedication ceremony confided he found it “a pretty trippy” viewpoint of Jesus, but “not in a bad way.” I agreed wholeheartedly.
That’s what I like about us, that we are not limited in how we see God. We are comfortable and comforted to visualize Father, Son and Holy Spirit, and the saints. That’s not true in some other faiths.
One “trippy” feature of the unveiled work of art is the blue stream flowing from the Lord’s mouth.” His words were described as sounding “like rushing water,” explained Charlot, in a telephone interview from his studio in Burbank, Calif.
Charlot said artists through the centuries have given us traditional, meaningful images of the life of Christ, his passion and death.
As a contemporary artist, he chose to give the forward view. “We might be in the moment when Jesus will return. His return is in my thoughts and my prayers. I’m a believer for sure,” Charlot said.
What he hopes is “if the image works into the subconscious of people who see it every time they pass by, that they are reminded of Jesus.”
“When an image is brought into the lives of people, and it’s an image that they see on a regular basis, that art will impact their lives,” Charlot said.
Art has a special power
“I wanted to be true to the spirit of the painting,” said Lucas, whose mosaic art of St. Damien and St. Marianne, St. Francis and the Sacred Heart is to be seen in local churches. “It’s difficult to do an interpretation of another artist’s work,” she said. During the year-long process, she found that the colors available on glass tiles forced variations from hues in the original oil painting.
“The keen thing about being an artist is that you have the whole story there at once,” said Lucas, a University of Hawaii art professor and art therapist with Hospice Hawaii. “Art has a special power … something visual is something you can’t do with writing.
“What I love about the Catholic Church is that the iconography is powerful, from the crudest clay santos made in Mexico to the great masters. Catholics understand the power of the image,” said Lucas, who is not Catholic.
That’s something I was thinking about earlier this year when news coverage of the selection of the new pope would flash to one of the most lavish displays of religious art in history, Michelangelo’s panorama on the Sistine Chapel ceiling. I wondered whether cardinals were contemplating the image of creation, God as a white-bearded patriarch in human form whose divine digit was about to zap Adam’s fingertip, a mere mammal no more but a creature made in the image and likeness of God.
You won’t find that in other-than-Catholic worship spaces. The image and likeness of God, I mean.
The Jewish people take the First Commandment literally and seriously, no graven images.
It’s also in Islam’s scriptures; idols are an aberration.
Most Protestants churches will have no more than a cross, minus the statue of Christ crucified. It’s a legacy of the 16th century Reformation when statues were discarded.
Orthodox Christians, closest to Catholics in history and worship, have lots of images, but they are required to be, well, orthodox. Jesus, Mary, the saints, are depicted in icons, an art form that is thousand of years old. Creative expression is not a facet. If you look at the gilded images in the sanctuary of our local Greek Orthodox and Coptic Christian churches, they are exactly what you’d see anywhere else in the world, no matter if made last year, last century, last millennium.
If I sound disrespectful of that, I shouldn’t. One of the most profound encounters I’ve had with sacred art was in a chill vault at the Glenstal Abbey in Ireland. A few of us privileged to spend time in the Benedictine guest house were shown some ancient pieces of iconography. A dark visaged face with Mediterranean features and deep-set, compassionate eyes rendered the viewers silent and teary. The painting on wood, more than 1,000 years old, was the copy of a copy of an icon of the face of Jesus. We knew that the original unnamed artist lived so many years closer to the time when people actually beheld His face.
You will find no representation of God in a synagogue, said Rabbi Itchel Krasnjansky of Chabad of Hawaii. “The commandments prohibit graven images,” he said, recalling that God gave the commands to the Israelites at a time when they escaped from Egypt where people worshiped the idols they made of stone and gold.
God has no form
“God is a spirit, has no form, has dimensions beyond our experience,” the rabbi said. “As for religious images for the purpose of art, for some that is questionable. Art, for example a sculpture, would be kept incomplete.”
Saleem Ahmed, an author of books on Islam, said the Quran forbids the worship of idols and that is interpreted as a ban on imagery, outside as well in mosques. Not only is there no such thing as a painting or statue depicting Allah, or God, but the stricture against images is interpreted by fundamentalists as no art showing the prophet Muhammed, to whom the Quran was revealed, according to Muslim belief.
“There are some existing pictures by Turkish and Persian artists of the prophet, but you would never find such in a mosque,” Ahmed said. “Over the past 100 years, Muslims have become increasingly narrow-minded.”
The viewpoint has been displayed with violent demonstrations in reaction to news media editorial cartoons depicting Muhammed.
Religious art can be found in Episcopal churches, but it’s not so likely in the United Church of Christ denomination, the first brand of Christianity brought to Hawaii by New England Congregationalist missionaries in the early 19th Century.
“Keeping images out of sanctuaries has its roots in the radical rejection of idols and imagery, and the idea of focus on the scriptures” during the Reformation in the 1500s, said the Rev. Teruo Kawata, retired Hawaii pastor.
“But you will find recognition that art is a deeply meaningful expression of faith.”
We are familiar with great classical art from Europe with religious themes, Kawata said. “But it is not a solely western tradition. The Chinese have their own beautiful renditions of Jesus, with their culture and traditions reflected in the setting and clothing, and so do the Japanese.”
The Rev. David Hirano, interim pastor at Central Union Church, pointed to the stained glass windows of Nuuanu Congregational Church, as an example of how modern day Protestants have moved on from the Puritan abhorrence for religious art. The Nuuanu valley church marked its 1985 centennial by commissioning Japanese artist Sadao Watanabe to do four stained glass panels. The artist showed the Last Supper with Japanese features, sake and fish on the table. He also depicted the Ascension, Jesus with the little children and the Bethlehem manger scene.
“They’re a real treasure,” Hirano said.
Sunday would be a good time for a treasure hunt at your own church. We are surrounded by so many images, stations of the cross, windows, the few statues that haven’t been danced out the doors. We take them for granted. We should give them another chance to reveal the face of God to us.
