This is a monument in Montreal. It's in Montreal. That's why I care
about it so much. You know. The Museum of Fine Arts bought a
church across from itself and use it to show art, and so the beautiful
old church, you know, and then they commissioned a monument to put in
front of the church. And this is the monument. Right. The transformation
is full, right, the broken, empty angel whose wings are falling off,
that has an empty chest, that has no face. You know,
that is half mechanical, half flesh. You don't know what it is.
And these types of statements, they're not They're not arbitrary. Right. It's
like if I take a picture of your mother and I rip it, like,
you know what that means, right? You know, if I show
a disfigured version of someone you love, you know what that means. This
is Jonathan Peje Welcome to the Symbolic World. Well, welcome back for this
panel. We are pleased to welcome Jonathan Pagot, who will be speaking to
us about memory and the role of art and identity. Jonathan Paget is a
professional artist, writer and public speaker who comes to us from Quebec, Canada.
He lectures in universities, conferences, and numerous venues on art and the
symbolic structures that underlie our experience of the world. If you're like me,
you first encountered Jonathan through one of his many engaging YouTube conversations on the symbolic
world. And if you're not already one of his one hundred and seventy seven
thousand YouTube followers, I encourage you to sign up. That number indicates that
the topics we're talking about here today have a broad resonance, as we heard
earlier this morning, not only with people of faith, but people asking questions
about meaning and purpose and how to integrate art and beauty into identity. He's
a skilled icon carver, and as you heard from Aidan earlier this morning,
he's also an artistic entrepreneur because he started the Orthodox Arts journal that's trying to
revive liturgical art today. He gives carving workshops with the Hexameran School of Ecclesial
Arts, which is accredited through Pontefect's University. He's also working on a graphic
novel and I heard last night maybe on some fairy tales. So he is
an artistic, creative entrepreneur. We are delighted to have him. Following his
presentation, there will be a conversation between Jonathan and myself as well as R.
J. Snell, who also hails from Canada and he is here locally
now at the wither Ain Institute, where he's the editor in chief of Public
Discourse. He studied philosophy and taught philosophy for quite a number of years at
Eastern University in the Templeton Honors College. He is widely published on natural law,
ethics, the liberal arts, and a giant now in the Catholic intellectual
tradition. So after we hear from Jonathan, we will then have a conversation
with myself, RJ. And Jonathan. Thank you Jonathan, so for stuff
I like to thank Margarita and David and Aiden. This is a bit of
a tangent, but it's important to understand that I started wanting to thinking that
maybe I could carve icons that could do liturgical art professionally, almost as a
dream, as a prayer, as a hope, you know, maybe about
twenty years ago, about ten years ago. The situation in my life made
it possible that possibly I could maybe do this, maybe at first of my
spare time wasn't sure, trying to figure out how to make it happen.
And David Clayton, who's right here as the very first person to ever write
about me, you know, going to promote my work, just just talk
about what I was doing. And the same with Aiden, you know.
Aiden. For those who are not in the Orthodox world or not in the
world of the turgical art, there are waves of artists, and in some
ways, the waves that came before are the ones who struggled the most and
who made it easier for those that came after. And Aiden is part of
that wave that made it possible for so many of us who are able to
paint icons, to to make that it's credible that we could create liturgical art.
And he was also one of the first people that I wrote when I
was kind of struggling, and he was an icon carver, he was actually
doing it, and I wrote him, sent him some of my carvings,
and his criticism of my work was extremely helpful. Uh. And and just
to kind of common sense about how to go about this was very helpful to
me. So it's a great pleasure to be able to speak with you and
to meet all of you for the first time in person, So I want
to thank you for that. It's one of the it's one of the prime
reason why I came was like, oh I get to meet Aiden and David.
All Right, I'm there, I'm coming. And so what I what
I want to talk to you about today is I want us to maybe start
thinking a little differently about art, or kind of provoke you to think differently
about art. I'm very fortunate that Aiden went before me, because he really
set the stage for for for what I'm going to say. I almost wanted
to, like, when you hear someone speak and he really does a good
job, you almost want to kind of reformulate everything just before starting. But
we're kind of going to go along, and I'm going to try to try
to answer also some of the powerful ways that Aidan presented this his vision of
liturgical art. And so in the modern world we have you know, we
are the fruits of the avant garde, right, we are the fruits of
modern art. And there's a lot of tangents in modern art. But one
of the things that modern art has done, and not just modern art,
but even the Romantics before, you know, even the pre moderns, there's
a sense in which we started to understand art in a few particular ways.
One was to understand art as something like questioning, right what the artist questions,
The artist pokes, the artist provokes and tries to change and tries to
revolutionize the means of seeing, the cultural means. And so we are left
with this idea, you know, the creative artists, who who is trying
to find some new way of representing things, to challenge the old ways of
seeing. And this is a very deep, this is a very deep kind
of underlying assumption that we have have in the manner in which we understand art.
And so you know, of course, the king of this is Max
Duchamp, who really went so far, you know, as to to just
take common objects put them in the gallery, you know, to to play
with identity, you know, to to to question identity itself in his art
production. And and this is the culmination of what it is. And people,
like ma said, Duchamp became in some ways the pioneers for what then
became contemporary art, whether it whether it's pop art, you know, Andy
Warhol, and all the way up to today. The contemporary artists are in
the line of of Macedduchamp. And so you all know Banksy. Now here's
a here's a very powerful, theatric example of of what it is that we
tend to think that art is. And so Banksy had this very theatrical stage.
I'm sorry, it's obviously stage, but you know, hey, they
brought one of his pain things out to sell at auction, and while they
were doing the auction, it started to shred into pieces, you know,
as they were selling it, and everybody just celebrated this thing. And now
the piece is worth way more than it was when it was just a painting,
you know. But this type of gesture is a you know, it's
a prime example. It's a very recent example of how it is that we
understand what it is that we understand art to be, you know, as
this idea of questioning, as provoking, you know, the punk rock,
rock and roll idea of what culture is. And so when I want to
bring you towards is a different perception of art, and it is in some
ways the more universal perception of art. Now, I don't think there isn't
room for the provoking. There isn't room for the fool, the holy fool
who who you know, Make sure you know that the king is in God.
Right, the graffiti artist that reminds you that this this thing doesn't isn't
full in itself. There's a role for that. But because we're so unused
to thinking about art in the very ancient, more traditional way, we almost
have to re to relearn how that is. And so you know, the
word art means well fitted together, right, that that's what the word means.
It's actually close to the word also in Greek techne, which is our
origin of technology. H and even poeesis, which is the origin of our
idea of poetry comes the root of it is something like making. So this
idea of bringing things and putting them together properly towards their purpose, right,
that is the manner in which the ancients understood art. And so you have
a there's an idea, there's a pattern, there's a episteme, there's a
there's a high understanding, and now you want that to land in the world.
And so in order to do that, you have to gather things together,
and you know, bring them together and make the thing visible for us.
Right, And so this is actually very much closer to the way that
the ancients understood what art is. And and funnily enough, like so much
irony in the modern world, in America and in the West, it took
someone who came from Ceylan. So Ananda Kumaraswami, who is up here being
quoted, was when a curator is at Boston Museum at the beginning of the
twentieth century, and he was the one who for the Westerners reminded them,
reminded them that ancient art, that the medieval art, the liturgical art,
but also the art of all cultures is first and foremo most in light of
this. That is art, the art of carpentry, the art of cooking,
the art of wine making, the art but also the art of rhetoric,
the art of poetry, and then the art of painting, the art
of sculpture. That these are all ways in which someone is skillfully capable of
gathering means together towards a purpose, right towards the tailos towards something which is
the reason why the object exists in the first place. And so this is
really a you know, it's a it changes our way of thinking about art,
you know, because not only in the contemporary world, we understand art
as being provocation, as being questioning, as being you know, kind of
poking at the system. We also tend to understand art as something which is
received as a viewer, right, received as a as public. And so
you have a performer and you have a public. You know, you have
a painting and you have a viewer. And this is so ingrained in ours
right, it's the root of entertainment, it's the it's what brings us to
watch our television screens. But there is a far deeper way of understanding art,
in my estimation, that is more about this gathering, because the gathering
that the ancient arts did was not just the gathering of the stuff, but
it's also the gathering of the people. Right, It's also the gathering of
the people around that care for the thing you're doing. But if you make
a good meal and you do it well, obviously it's not just about making
a good meal, right, it's about the people that will come in and
sit with you and enjoy it with you. And that's true for anything,
right. It's true for making a piece of furniture. Right. You don't
just make a piece of furniture because you dream it up in the morning.
You make a piece of furniture to hold clothing, to sit on to participate
in the life of people. And so this ancient vision of art is not
only gathering the stuff, but it also ends up being gathering people into the
purpose that the art is making manifest. Okay, So, and there are
a few people in the twentieth century that actually started to have inklings of that
started to re understand it. For example, interestingly enough, Heidegger in his
questions, can turning technology? You know, because for the ancients there was
no difference, no difference between art and techne. These were the same.
You know. When it says in scripture that that Christ was the son of
a carpenter, what it says is that Christ was the son of a tecton,
the son of an artisan, right, the son of someone who makes
things. And for the agents that there was no difference between. I mean,
there's a difference because obviously making a piece of furniture and making a painting
is not the same skill. But it was all about bringing these things together.
And so Heidegger, in reading the Ancients and reading Aristotle particularly, he
comes to this image where he says that technae technology or art right, is
a mode of unveiling. Right, it's a mode of revealing, because whoever
builds a house or a ship or forges the sacrificial chalice reveals what is to
be brought forth. And so the artist gathers the things together so that all
this would, all these bits of stuff become a boat, become a chalice,
become something which has tello, something which has purpose, Okay, And
so it's very important to understand that. And when we understand that, then
when we look at ancient art, we have a different a different perception.
You. Now. One of the difficulties that we have even looking at ancient
art is, of course that we encounter these things in museums that are septicized,
that are reduced. You come up to a statue that is on a
pedestal with a nice blank wall behind it, and then you just look at
the art. Now, of course, none of that art was made that
way. None of that art was made to be participated with that way.
It's fine, there's nothing wrong with the museum, you know, the especially
since these art, these arts don't have a participative role to play anymore.
It's it's it's wonderful to be able to see them. But the agents in
every culture would have understood the arts mostly this right, in the sense that
this is the building that is the highest point in our city. It's dedicated
to the god that is the patron of our city. And we make these
things that bind us together as a city. So for Athens to exist,
the Parthenon is key, right, It's this gathering together of things, is
gathering together of people, this gathering together of attention. Right. The reason
why these temples were often higher than all the other buildings, so that everywhere
in Athens you could look up and you could see the thing which is binding
you together. You could see this image of your patron God, let's say
that is binding you together. And so this is the This will make you
now again see different things. So if you think, for example, of
folk dancing, then all of a sudden folk dancing takes on a very different
allure. You know, we think the dancing, We think that you know
dancing. And so you go to a performance and you watch ballet. You
sit there and then you watch the ballet. That is somehow high culture,
right. That is the highest form of culture is to be an observer of
people that are doing something with excellence. Now, there's a big difference between
that and something like folk dancing, because what does folk dancing do. Folk
dancing makes you participate, right, Square dancing in the United States for a
long time did something like that forced you to participate, but not just to
participate, right. The traditional clothing, the traditional music, the language of
our culture. And so there's a way in which folk dancing becomes a concentration
of a certain level of identity. That's a good way to understand it.
It's like, I have something in common with these people, and it's actually
the reason why I live with them. It's the reason why we're not just
a bunch of strangers, you know, like in the suburbs, but we
actually live together with reason and with a common identity. And so we have
a way to celebrate that. We have a way to remember that, right,
We have a way to bring all this stuff together. So now the
dance, the costume, the music, all of that becomes art. Becomes
art in the sense that I'm trying to get you to understand. It becomes
this joining together of things, of people, of aspects of reality together so
we can recognize them as an unveiling of unity. It's like, oh,
yeah, we're Bulgarian or whatever, Like we have something in common. We're
a group. And once you understand that, then you know this is the
beauty of what Aiden was bringing out, this notion of liturgy, right,
this idea of liturgical practice where in the church you have all these things that
were made with love and attention by people, and that enter into a dance
together in order to manifest the very reason why we're together in the church.
It's different from this because we're not just celebrating or participating in the reason,
you know, the fact of being this or that group, or this or
that you know, having this or that origin in common. But we are
celebrating the very source of reality itself, right, We are celebrating the reason
why everything exists, right, right, why all things exist is something that
we're celebrating when we come to church and we are in the building and we
have all these these objects, this music, the words, all of this
comes together with the people in order to reveal this and make us participate in
that reality. And so this can help you understand maybe also why because so
these are some of my carvings the understanding this, and there are a few
people in this room that had the same revelation. Understanding this and understanding the
power that art has to bind us towards that which is most important, you
know, is what made us move away from the contemporary art world, is
what made us realize that there's a richness here that people have forgotten. There's
a richness here that is really tapping in to the way the world works.
It's not just it's not just something that is a nice picture or that is
a nice object that I can look at and enjoy. But it's more than
that, right it is. It is a form of a deep form of
participation in the way that we exist together and actually in the way that reality
reveals itself to us. And so, of course there's still a lot of
that today. We often don't think about it, but there's still a lot
of this idea of art as participation, of art as celebration. And usually
the remainders of that is, of course civic art, the public spaces or
the you know, the go to Washington DC. Why would you go to
Washington, d C. It's not like you can talk to the president or
anything. You go there to liturgically participate in the common origin that binds you
together as a nation, you know, And so why would you go and
look at a statue of this dead guy, and you know, I'm gonna
be really I'm gonna push you. But it's like there's a little bit of
veneration. There's a little bit of I want to stand there and look at
the image of someone that I recognize as having that participating in the reason why
I'm here, Like it, I look at this image and I know that
one of the reasons why the United States exists as a country that is one,
is because of this person. Okay, And so it is liturgical.
You cannot you won't be able to avoid liturgical. If you try to break
it down and you try to avoid liturgical, you're gonna end up in Graceland
and you'll be looking at Elvis's shoes like you just cannot avoid it, right,
Or you'll be dressing up as Obi Wan Kenobi with your lightsaber, right
that you cannot avoid this. This is something that is deeply human, and
the most cynical anti religious person will unironically dress up as Obi Wan with his
lightsaber and will go to comic Con and will just be so excited to enter
liturgically into the story of Star Wars. Okay, So I just I just
hope you can kind of see how inevitable this is, you know, And
in this image you actually see that the artists tried to portray this in the
very image itself. You know, in the seat that Abraham is sitting on,
there are the fas cads. They are this ancient Roman symbol of binding
unity, right, all these sticks that are bound together in order to manifest
unity. And so the artists clearly understood that not only is this person and
ask and one of the reasons why that unity exists, but also at a
secondary level, the people who come there, who read the inscriptions in the
stone, who look at this statue, are re enacting, are participating to
some extent in that story and in that identity. Okay, Now this also
means that we have to be very attentive. We have to be very attentive
when that starts to shatter, when it starts to break, you know.
And and I don't want to say any statement for or against whatever, but
it's important to understand that when those liturgical things, when they get taken down,
there's a world that is changing, right, There's a memory that is
changing, there's an identity that is changing, and you can't avoid that.
You know, the Christians took down the Roman God's statues and when they did
that, it meant something very profound. It meant the world is no longer
the same, The thing that binds us together is no longer the same as
what it was before. There's a deep transformation which is afoot when you start
to see this happen, and so it's important to pay attention and to It's
not my job to deal with that, but it's important to understand what is
happening. And so this this, of course, you know, and this
aiden I want to talk about this one last time, so one more time.
This this, this is also important to understand that art that is civic
and that is celebration, that is participating in identity, necessarily has to have
certain forms. Right, if you take an art that is there to question,
to poke, right to rip at the identity of something, and you
put it up in a public space and you put it up as a civic
monument, you are entering very dangerous a very dangerous place. And the difficulty
we have and I'm saying this because there's a lot of that that happened in
churches in the past fifty years, and it wasn't done on purpose. It
was done with people who were looking at the modern art around them and not
totally sometimes understanding visually what the art was doing, not completely gathering into themselves.
The implications of showing broken people, of showing you know, things that
are cut, things that are things that are shredded, and then just putting
that up in public spaces, in the church, you know, just wanting
to kind of be modern and not realizing that there there are these are very
organic, They're not arbitrary. Right. It's like if I take a picture
of your mother and I rip it, like, you know what that means.
You know, if I show a disfigured version of some one you love,
you know what that means. And so the fact that we just kind
of forgot that and we've accepted these weird things. And so this is this
is a monument in Montreal. It's in Montreal. That's why I care about
it so much. By David Admed. You know, the Museum of Fine
Arts bought a church across from itself and used it to show art, and
so the beautiful old church, uh, you know, and then they commissioned
a monument to put in front of the church, and this is the monument,
and so right, the transformation is is full. Right, the broken,
empty angel whose wings are falling off, that has an empty chest,
that has no face. Uh, you know, that is half mechanical,
half made, half flesh. You don't know what it is. And these
types of statements, they're not they're not arbitrary. And so you know,
what you're seeing in some ways is the is the the evisceration of the church,
which was now transformed into something else. I wish they would have done
it differently. They could have, but they could have done it differently,
but that's the way that they decided to go at it, possibly for reasons.
And so this, of course is I showed you an image of the
Parthenon to kind of tease you a bit, or to poke you myself.
I'm sorry. You know, there's a way in which there's a problem with
this. There is a problem with this thing. You know. The gods
fight amongst each other, right, the identities fight amongst each other all these
cultures, they also lead to conflict and war, and so how do we
deal with that problem? Right? The questioning of identity, the poking at
the system is not always completely illegitimate because identity leads to conflict. It just
does. That is that's part of the problem. And what you see in
Scripture is you see the beginning of a of a of a transformation of the
problem. There's a there is a very deep relationship between art and identity in
the negative sense in the in the Bible, and one which God transforms into
something beautiful and positive and glorious. But it's important to understand it because we
have to be cautious about the way we enter into identity, and especially as
people start to poke at identity, we sometimes want to just react and say
it's like, no, you know, I am this or I have I
have this identity. We have to be very careful. And so in Scripture,
the development the development of the arts follow one thing. They follow the
murder of Able, and so Cain kills Abel and then Cain is chased away
from God. On on his body is placed the mark which excludes him from
the presence of God, we could say, and then that mark leads Caine,
and that exclusion leads Cain to develop civilization, to develop. The first
thing he does is he builds the city. The first city is built by
Cain himself, and then his descendants are the origin of music, the origin
of metallurgy, the origin of tent making. And so you see in the
descendants of Cain this this strange thing. Why why is it that it's in
the descendants of Cain that this happens? And there are corollaries to this actually
in other cultures. You know, Hephiestos, for example, is a it's
almost like is almost like a cane figure. Right, he is thrown out
of Olympus for some impropriety and he lands in Hades, and that it's in
Hades that now he develops the skill to make the beautifully forged objects, the
weapons, the things that the gods prize in terms of in terms of techne
and in terms of art, right, the capacity to to make things.
And so why why is that? It has to do with the with the
problem It just has to do with the problem of inside and outside. It
has to do with the problem of identity, because once when civilization starts,
war starts. It's an inevitable part of building a wall around your city.
If you build a wall around your city means there's some people that are inside
and there's some people that are outside, and those people that are outside,
you know, they're looking inside. Maybe they want what you've got, And
now you've got to defend your walls against the people outside. And it creates
it's an acceleration of the fall itself. Right, That's what happens. When
Adam and Eve take the fruit for themselves and are see themselves as naked,
they immediately see the other as a threat. Right right away. What happens,
Adam blames Eve, you know, Eve blames the serpent. It's right
away me you you know, you're the bad guy. It's not my fault.
There's there's just this immediate opposition which happens. And this, this opposition
is just a just a part of civilization and it ends up being a part
of technology and of human making, one which is difficult to deal with.
Now. What what happens in in the in the Bible is that God takes
that and transforms it powerfully. Right, he does exactly. Aiden had such
a beautiful image taking it from Saint Ephraim saying, right, the fruit of
the knowledge of good and evil. Think about it this way, the fruit
of opposition, of opposition between two things, right, if taken for you
yourself becomes Yeah, it becomes that it becomes, it becomes opposition. Now,
if you are given the fruit, then it becomes. It can become
life itself in the sense that it becomes the capacity to distinguish. The capacity
to distinguish is not wrong, but it has to be. Let's say,
hey, it has to come from Heaven. Is the good? Is the
best way to understand. It has to come from above. And what you
see in the worry of the tabernacle is exactly that God reveals to Moses the
pattern of the tabernacle. The tabernacle is the memory of Eden. That is
what it is. The tabernacle is based on the image of the garden of
Eden. It is the idea of the candelabra that's there. And you also
have the cherub that are guarding the arc guarding the tabernacle. And so there's
a direct relationship between the participation in the in this space and a return to
Paradise, a return to Eden. And it is you could say it's something
like memory perfecting itself slowly. Memory being because memory is two things, right.
Memory is distance from something right, and memory is also direction towards something.
When I even the word like we remember, it's like we bring multiplicity
back in to its tailors when we remember. And so when you remember God,
when you remember the heart, all these these these expressions that we use
in Christian thinking, that is, that is what you're doing. You know
you're going to see that obviously, all this will lead up, you know,
to communion ultimately as this perfect you could say perfect memory. H but
this is already what's happening here in the in the tabernacle. And so if
you read, if you read Ectodus, you'll see it's not just the Tabernacle,
it's the Passover, it's all these things which are Remember Remember remember what
happened, Remember your origin, Remember where you come from. Remember what binds
you together. Why are you Israel? Because I Am the God of Abraham,
Jacob, Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. That is why you are Israel.
You are bound both by Especially this revelation is powerful because God is saying,
I am the God of Heaven, I'm the source of everything. I
am supreme, but I'm also the God of your Father's. One comes out
after the other in some you know, in an important way. I am
that I am, but I'm also the God of your Father's. I am
the place where you recognize your origin to be in Abraham, right, And
so it's that so the participation in the ritual of the Tabernacle, the remembrance
have passedover, the remembrance of these feasts was always to remember where you come
from, remember where you know, where where you are, and that becomes
a way to participate in it, or to participate in something which is kind
of beyond the beyond the beyond the now now like or just the commonality of
everyday life. And so now this this this this question again, right,
this is the problem, right, this is this is the problem that I'm
talking about, is that techne unity identity often leads to this. It leads
to Babbel, you know. And this is of course the ultimate image of
the city gone wrong, right, this city that tries to contain everything,
the city that tries to take the fruit for itself, that tries to make
a name for itself and not receive the name from above, not receive the
revelation from above, but make a name. We're going to make a name
for ourselves, right, we hear that in common parlance. But this is
of course what leads to Babbel, and the kind of the complete distortion of
art into this pride is the best way to understand it. What I want
to show you that this idea of memory and of celebration and of remembering is
one which even though we have this kind of modern art there, it's always
there. It's always kind of it's this underlying current. You're going to see
it, if you pay attention, you'll see it. And so everybody you
know this is he's the famous artist, Jackson Pollack is the famous artist.
You know he he it's process. It's it's all about process. It's not
about the thing it's about it's about this expressivity. It's about a kind of
ordered chaos. It's about this this explosion of color, end of end of
of art. Uh. And he's the avante art, right, He's the
one who's pushing the boundaries, right, who's at the edge. But while
this was happening, and even the teacher of this person is this person Thomas
Hart Benton. And in the United States you have this whole current called regionalism
that a lot of people don't know about. For some reason, that was
a desire to, you know, with the crumbs that are left to celebrate
something about our lives to celebrate the worker, to celebrate you know, the
stories, the difficulties that people went through. And so there was this design.
And you can see that this type of art, this type of art,
and the other is a completely different nature. They're just not in the
same world. They're talking about things very differently, not just visually in terms
of subject, but also in terms of purpose, right, in terms of
purpose. And so regionalism is the type of art that you will find in
the nineteen thirties in civic art in the United States because it had something,
It had the right way of celebrating, of remembering the things that the sacrifices
of our of our forebears, and and putting them there for us to be
able to to see them. Okay, now you know this is I want
to show you how difficult it becomes. Is that, uh, you have
some a similar situation happening in Europe and in Russia, and there it goes.
The other way that it went with Pollock is that you have this push
in Russia, this push towards supremacism and constructivism to kind of break the way
that people used to see the world, to really push it to its edge.
You see, you know, The craziest example is, of course,
in in Futurism, Italian futurism. Bocconi is a was one of the members
of the futurists movement in Italy, where it's it was really explicit like art
is violence, art is destruction. Art is this this this push that we
need to break everything to be able to move into the future, you know,
but that that that can't hold. It's almost like you pull the pendulum
so far are and then when it snaps, then it goes into this which
is also modern art, right, this is modern art. That that's modern
art there. Uh And there was obviously a version of this in in in
uh in Germany as well. Uh. And so how do we how do
we deal with that? Because that's a problem. I hope you agree that's
a problem. This is a problem, right, It's like why the Stalin
the you know, Stalin the hero. So, so how do we avoid
participative art that wants to remember, that wants to make us connect to our
origins, connect to our participates, to our to our world, to our
to our commonality without propaganda? How do we do it? Right? Because
the modern artists that we're breaking everything, some of them had the right intuition
about the problem of propaganda. Right, And we have to understand that this
is not a new question. You know, Plato knew that in the Republic.
Plato knew already the problem of art, the problem of poetry, the
problem of rhetoric, the problem of artistically putting together things because they can be
used to manipulate your your your idea, they can use they can be used
to make you care for things that maybe you wouldn't care about, right,
they can they can be used to make you think something is important that maybe
you shouldn't think is important. Right. That's ultimately for us, that becomes
advertisement. It's like advertisement is all celebration, Advertisement is all participation. But
that's not what we want, right. We don't want something that is so
shallow and so and so manipulative. And so how do we do it?
How do we deal with this? And I think that I think that Christians,
you know, as they came into place and as the language of the
art in the Church started to establish itself, I think they found what I
think is the best solution. And it's one which is not arbitrary to Christianity,
but is rather at the very source of the particularities of what Christianity is.
As images started to appear in the Christian Church and started to take shape,
it took several centuries. It took a while for this to kind of
gel and to crystallize, you know, by the tenth century, by the
eleventh century, you could say that there were two basic images of Christ,
two central images of Christ. And one is the one we could call the
Pentocrator, which is Christ here shown with the book. And this is it's
an eschatological image. It's a Christ as he will appear in glory. It's
Christ as he will show himself to us when all has been revealed and all
has been brought together in the finality. Right, it's not just about future.
It's something that can pierce in now. It's something that you can experience
now. But there is a sense in which is beyond the it's beyond the
mere historical, something which is piercing through from the other side, piercing through
from that final moment. And then the other image that becomes central, you
know, especially there is a sense in which one becomes more central in the
east, one becomes more central in the west. But it's a little over
exaggerated, but then you have the cross, and so you know, we
have to every time you look at a crucifix, like, don't forget how
weird that is, Like, don't forget that. You know, you have
this thing above the kinistasis or above the altar in front of you, that
is the image of a dead person. And it's and it's crazy. But
it's an interesting just just I'm gonna be utilitarian. It's an interesting idea.
It's like, wait a minute, at the top, the thing that's the
most celebrated is actually the thing that gives itself. Oh, the thing at
the top, that think that's actually most celebrated is the thing that empties itself.
Huh okay, well that's different from the king, right, that's different
from Athena or Zeus that goes around raping everybody. It's like, it's quite
different, right, it's quite different. You know, there's there's a different
vision. It's the same for this idea of Christ, the eschatological Christ.
It's like, no, no, don't think you've got it right, don't
think you've mastered it. It's coming, it's coming over the horizon. Right,
call for it, ask for it, Ask Christ, Come Lord Jesus.
But don't think that you you got it right, like that you're the
one. And so these two powerful images they they're they're like I said,
it's not arbitrary. It's something about the very nature of the of the of
the Christian faith which makes these images the central images and bring the possibility to
celebrate, to remember, to worship, you know, at least giving the
possibility of alleviating the problems of pride and the problems of identity. Doesn't mean
the Christians were always able to do it, you know, your history obviously
not. But there's a difference between there's a qualitative difference between that and the
you know, the the then the Augustus, the son of God, who
is all powerful and is literally a manifestation of a divine principle in the world,
and that can rule over you, you know, with his with his
fist, or some other Roman emperor or some other ancient Egyptian pharaoh that had
right of life or death over everybody in their kingdom. There's a there's a
there's a big difference between the two. So what what what that will give
in terms of culture, what what type of images it will provoke? Can
be very interesting to think about this way, and so this is this is
this is a type of image that you'll see in many medieval churches, Orthodox
churches. And what it is. It is the rich powerful person, in
this case, a rich aristocrat in Constantinople, sometimes the Emperor himself, sometimes
the king himself prostrating himself before the true Emperor, the true King. And
what is he doing. He's offering the church, but the church the building,
that is, he's offering the art. He's offering the arts to Christ.
That's what's going on there. It's like I paid for this church,
I hired a bunch of architects, a bunch of artisans to make this beautiful
church, and I'm offering it to Christ. And so the summit is again
eschatological. This image of Christ is the Christ. He's sitting on his golden
throne. He has returned. He is the Christ. It fills up the
entire cosmos, that fills up the entire world. This is what the art
is being offered to. And then then you'll notice that in a let's say
several there are different images that manifest that. This is an image called the
hetimasia, which is this image of the prepared throne and so it's an image
of the throne which is prepared for the final revelation of Christ. And so
you know, it's a beautiful image of this offering up right. It's like
gathered these elements together. There's the book, there's the throne. There's this
throne of the emperor, which is prepared for this final moment. And so
that is what we do aiden this morning. You know, beautifully talked about
the the Eucharist in a way that like might scandalize some of you because he
came right up to it and I'm gonna push you over the edge, he
said. He said, Eucharist is art. The gifts are art. Were
made them. We made the bread, we made the wine, and then
we offer it up to become the very blood and body of Christ. You
know, it's like that's a really powerful image. You know, in some
moments during the Byzantine period, it was the emperor who would come up to
the door of the of the Iconostasis of the of the Templon and would bring
the bread to to to hand over to the priests or the bishop who would
take it and then consecrate it. It's like, here's my kingdom, here's
all these things gathered. Right, here's all these things that are our works,
our efforts, all this stuff that we do, all these activities that
we do, and we're offering up to become the body of Christ. And
so that's a very powerful image. And then that again, and then the
the eucharists obviously it has many there's there's beyond symbolism in the Eucharist, but
one of the aspects is that emptying as well. That's there in the Eucharist.
Right. The Eucharist is both is both the eschatological Christ and also the
Christ that empties himself and gives his body and his blood for to fill us
up and so speed up really fast. And so this is one of Aiden's
ascension. And so if you if you think, if you start to think
that way, then you're you're going to start to notice that a lot of
the images, especially in the Orthodox tradition, that's the tradition that I know,
have a very strange eschatological element, you know in them. And so
this image of ascension is obviously an image of the ascension. I mean,
it's the moment that Christ rose, but it also is eschatological in its very
form, right, it's revealing to you the structure of the world. The
divine Logos is above in heaven, you know, and he's either going off
or coming down. You're not sure. This could be like the return of
Christ in a very strange way. And then down below is the footstool of
the throne. The Mother of God is there underneath him. And then you
have the Church which is gathered. And how do you know it's eschatological because
Saint Paul is there? Why is Saint Paul there? This is not just
a snapshot. This is trying to bring you into that moment where the entire
church is gathered in the in the in the past or in the one who
rules overall things and so. And then you have some images with which have
aspects of kenosis and of emptying and so. An example again is in the
image of the Nativity, where Christ is represented as a child who is already
in the tomb, who's already you know, contained in this. You know,
it's weird for people again, that sort of Jesus is so weird.
It's just so bizarre. We're so used to it, we stopped thinking about
it. Like, why was Christ laying in the food troth for animals?
Right? Why because he's he's going to the bottom, right, he's going
to do it. He's going to do it when he dies, but he's
already doing it now. He's going to the very bottom of the world,
the very place where animals eat, right to the to the foundation of all
things. And so you have this canotic element as well, all right,
and so and then all of this is of course leading to the final image,
right, and this is the final image which restore the story from the
beginning. We have to understand the Heavenly Jerusalem as the final restoration, even
of you could say Cain, not say Cain is saved. I don't know,
God knows that. But it's the restoration of the very first moment of
that sin, that sin of murder that led to civilization, is being transfigured,
is being filled, you know, in the image of the heavenly Jerusalem
which comes down. And if you read it, if you read the text,
it's very powerful. Right says I did not see a temple in the
city, because the Lord of God Almighty and the Lamb are its temple.
The city does not need the sun or the moon to shine on it,
for the glory of God gives it light. And the lamp is its lamp.
And this is where it's related to what I'm telling you about, in
terms of how do we make our identities proper, how do we make our
rejoicing, our celebrations proper. It says the nation will walk by its light,
and the kings of the earth will bring their splendor into it. So
what do the kings do? They offer their glory to God. They bring
their glory into service of the heavenly Jerusalem. On no day will its gates
ever be shut, for there will be no night there. The glory and
honor of the nations will be brought into it. And again a repetition of
that very theme, which is all our identities, all these little identities that
we have, if we live them properly, we live them in service,
We live them in giving them up towards the true King. And so there's
nothing wrong with being American or Canadian, our French, or whatever identity that
you participate. It doesn't have it. You can also be like part of
a soccer team or a football team, or part of of something that you
recognize as being you, something that you participate in that gives you a sense
of meaning and a sense of purpose. All those things can really be filled
if they are ultimately, you know, directed towards the heavenly Jerusalem, towards
the highest good, towards towards the highest Image. And in this image,
again surprisingly enough, you have these two images represented quite powerfully in this particular
image, which is you see the Christ, You see Christ in glory,
Christ as the King, Christ as the ruler of all, the one who
fills the world with his power and his judgment. And then on him is
the Lamb, which is the sacrifice. And those two together are what these
two images I talked about, this eschatological and canotic image coming together as being
what Christianity proposes as a possible solution to art, to identity, to the
way we participate in the world. So thank you everybody to your coming.
Thank you Jonathan. I have to say that was fantastic. I was cheering
there as you got to the end. And I want to give the first
question to RJ. But don't worry. I decided I'll kind of summarize a
little bit of what I heard from Jonathan to get us going. When I'm
teaching a great text or have students listen to a great guest lecture. I
often try to pull out some key scenes and I wanted to do that here.
I was doing that myself as I was listening and we were having a
conversation yesterday about thinking visually. I often kind of teach visually. Okay,
how did I organize what Jonathan said? And I wanted to highlight some really
key terms. And the mic is not on so good? Okay? Is
the mic lot now great? Okay? Sorry, especially for those of you
on live stream. What I would like to do to start us off is
to pull out what I heard were some really key themes from Jonathan, and
if we don't get through them all today, we also, I mean this
morning, we also have the breakout sessions with him later. But what I
thought the very first thing you said really struck me, and I have like
this schema that I have right on the one hand, there's idea as performance
or identity as participation. I also heard you say we can think of art
as tearing down or gathering. We can think of how we interact with the
material world and art as something that's a manipulation or a celebration. Art can
have an impact on our common life by promoting division, or union. We
can think that what goes into art is purely arbitrary or there's form. Then
we can think about our relationship to the material world as one of possessing or
offering. And then I thought you pulled it together so beautifully because after kind
of laying out those tensions around the place of art and identity and culture,
you then offered a vision. You know, eight in this morning kept talking
about art as offering a vision, and you offered an incredible, beautiful vision
of what art could be because you brought in the transcendent, you brought in
God. You started with the Cross, and you talked about worship and the
eschatological and the Eucharist, and you essentially allowed us to see that the proposal
of Christianity is that the heavenly Jerusalem can be made known through form and through
worship and through art and then flow back out in a healing river to a
culture that has suffered a lot of division and manipulation and tearing down and in
a way of forgetting of who we are as human person. So that's what
I took away from your talk. Jonathan, does that sound would you own
that most of it? I would say no, no, you didn't miss
anything. I just didn't say I would say I would say that. I
would say that, at least in our situation. I don't like the heavenly
Jerusalem is eschatological, right, so in some ways it can't be completely known
by human forms. Now it can be, you can be it can bring
you closer, right, and so you can be brought into an inkling and
into an anticipation and into a a let's say, a smell of what is
the final revelation, And in some ways it has to do so, you
know, I didn't go as deep into the notion of memory, but that's
the best way to understand it. It's like, uh, you know,
we think we only remember things in the past, but actually no, we
also remember the future. Uh. And that's that's a moment when we're remembering
the future. You know, we're we're actually remembering in the in the future.
And you do it all the time. By the way, it's not
weird. It's not like this weird magical thing I'm saying. You know,
every time you build something, you're remembering the future because you haven't made your
thing yet, and so you're you're looking into the in the into the future,
and you're remembering towards that point, and the and the heavenly Jerusalem is
the ultimate version of that. Right, Thank you. I'll just say there's
a there's a term already and not yet. That's the kind of anticipation.
Yeah, I turned it on. Thanks so much for your talk, Margeriti,
thank you for the invitation, Thanks to all of you for being here.
I apologize from an eyepatch. I'm not cosplaying pirate whatever. My seven
year old thing recovering from eye surgery. Marguerite had asked me to think about
some of the questions of art and Jonathan's talk as they relate to the political
common good, of how we might think of the work of the artist,
contributing or failing to contribute in some ways from your own talk to the ability
to have a shared common political life. So we see this, I think
in many ways in your discussion of the gathering together. The folk dance brings
a common good of the dance. The temple, which is raised high above
the city, gives a source of unity and direction to the people, so
that there's a kind of common good. But I'd like to explore a little
bit some of the challenges that I think we face at the contemporary moment and
wonder if Art's up to the task in some ways of needing to do what
we need to do. So first, if we think about some of the
challenges facing us in the political common good, I think it's not the case
that everyone goes to Washington, DC and venerates at the Jefferson and Lincoln memorials.
If anything, it may be quite the opposite. So some months ago,
in margueritea mention that I may be part of this panel, I watched
some of your videos, and this week I thought I better watch some of
them again. I was watching very serious videos about symbolic realism. But then
because of the wickedness of the powers of the algorithms on YouTube, there was
on the side a conversation about the inverted pentagram talk about you, So of
course I had to watch about the inverted pentagram. And in your conversation you
mentioned how the pentagram, the right side up pentagram has a source of unity
at the head, and then you have the top of the triangle, and
then you have the four differences brought into unity. The inverted pentagram is quite
the opposite. The inverted pentagram is trying to in some sense bring unity at
the bottom out of the many eplurbus unum from the many one. But it
doesn't work. And you make in that talk a very interesting suggestion, which
is you suggest that in our own cultural moment, not having a source of
unity, we're trying instead to fragment by going to the margins those who were
previously the oppressed or the marginalized, the subaltern. Their experiences are privileged,
and there's not a veneration for unity. In fact, a whole lot of
our culture looks like the angel in front of the church in Montreal. Prime
Minister Trudeau recently said that the nation of Canada has no identity at all.
It's a post identity nation. It's the inverted pentagram. That's why I moved
to the United States, where it is also eplerbus unham though but not working.
So that's when the political reality seems very difficult. Two. The power
of the arts to do this. Many years ago, the Welsh poet David
Jones wrote his epic poem Anathemata. It's his attempt to recreate British identity through
art, and it fails miserably. No one understands any of the references to
or Theorian legends. And in fact, the introduction to the poem begins with
his notion of the break, which is that because there is no cultural memory,
there can be no art. He says, the poet is dead.
The poet can't make reference to wood and assume that the citizen will think of
the cross or the tree of life. There'll be no reference at all.
You can't refer to water there is, There'll be nothing there to refer to.
Even some of the images that you refer to here, I wonder about
their power. So you show us the reference of Tubulcane. The image of
Tubulcane that you showed us is from the Spanish chapel in Santa Maria Novella.
Those of us in my own school call that fresco the triumph of Saint Thomas
Aquinas. But Tubulcane is in the very bottom right of the piece. There
is a narrative unity prior to the works of Cain. If you think of
the piece at the top, we have the Holy Spirit descending upon the upper
room or this. Ciples are gathered around our lady, and she's immediately above
Thomas Aquinas, who is the source of synthesis. It's a Dominican propaganda piece.
Across the wall is the Dominicans dressed as dogs, attacking and tearing apart
the heretics. Thomas is above a variees Arius and Nester and all of that.
Theology and Holy Spirit provides the backstory for the arts and sciences, and
tubal Caine is on the very bottom and the very rights, and the ordering
of the arts and sciences is from the least important to the most important.
So does art really it's actually it's it's the it's the left. He's not
on the right. It's because from the point of view of from our perspective,
yeah, it's always the point of view of the people in the icon
will help you understand which side he's on. The very next, and then,
very briefly, the tabernacle that you refer to. Lord Rabbi Jonathan Sachs
used to use the image of the tabernacle in a very interesting way. He
would say, the story of creation in Genesis one is very short. The
story of the creation of the Tabernacle is very long. It goes on and
on, and his take was, it's very easy for God to make a
home for us and very difficult for us to make a home for God,
but that the story of the Tabernacle was in some ways the story of the
formation of the Hebrews themselves as they made it. But then he would also
remind the reader, but of course there had been a story before of God
making the people. So what is it that we're remembering now if the break
is so severe? And are the arts really up to the task? No,
I don't think. I don't think the arts are up to the task.
And it's if you think of it in the political realm, there's no
way, there's no it's not possible that you know, there's a you can
really understand it if you want to understand what's going on. You can understand
a culture in what it celebrates. If you want to know where a culture
is, just look at what it celebrates, and then you will see what's
going on in that culture. And right, we could say in some ways
that if you think of a traditional church, of like a medieval Gothic church,
you had the altar in the center, and then you had the nave
and the narthex, and then outside you have the gargoyles and the weirdness,
and it's actually you know where you looked at the manuscripts yesterday, and in
late medieval manuscripts they had that very structure in the manuscript itself, where in
the middle of the manuscript you had even a sacred image, and then on
the outside and on the margins you had even sometimes quite lewde and you know,
vulgar or humorous or kind of crazy images of mixtures of different animals and
all this stuff. And so you know, there's a sense in which our
whole culture right now is like worshiping the carnival. The best way to understand
it, it's like like we're worshiping the gargoyles, like all the idiosyncrasy,
all the strangeness, and but it's important to understand that the carnival has a
role or the carnival isn't bad. The carnival is good. We need the
carnival. Porum is like a celebration in the Bible, like and we have
we have marti Gras, we have carnival in the Orthodox tradition. Right,
so there's nothing, there's nothing wrong with carnival. It's always about its place,
right, and there's nothing And the gargoyles are fine if they're in the
proper place. Now, if we flip it and then we take the gargoys
and you put them on the altar, right, then you have they have
the problem of the abomination. Right, you have this, and all of
a sudden it becomes like a scandal to have that. Uh. And so
our culture, through many many iterations, has come to a point where there
is this like worship of Carnival is the only way to say it in terms
of entertainment, in terms of of this kind of upside down and swirling culture,
all of that is is what what Carnival is. Think about it,
just like a giant Carnival wheel. Just woo, you're going around with like
with with clown music playing like that's that that's what we celebrate. So uh,
I don't think politically it is possible to deal with that, because politically
the solution to that is not a great one because politically it's like, all
right, well, now we're gonna just bring the knife down and you know,
the end of Carnival is lent, right, remember that, And so
it's like we're gonna fast now. And so that's a dangerous it's like a
dangerous move. When I showed you Alenski and the Russian constructivist and the Russian
artists. The same thing was happening in Germany. Things were chaosic, dada
and all this weird stuff, and then the knife came down and what you
have after that is a kind of authoritarian reaction to the carnival. And honestly,
I don't think politically it's a solution. That's why I think the solution
is a is a religious one. There's no other solution. The solution is
to turn our hearts towards God, to become saints, to become to become
the thing that we're talking about, to live it out in our families,
to live it out in the world around us, and to know that that
you know, that remnant, whatever however it looks, you know it will
ride the arc, through the through the wars. Uh. And to me
that is really uh, you know. And I and I'm not against political
action. I think political action is fine, but I but I don't think
that I really don't think the solution ultimately is there. Thank you, Jonathan.
I wanted to just you know, continue with this conversation if you could
perhaps say a little bit more about following on our Jay's question about the civic
So the so the solution is not a political solution, it's a turning us
back to God. But then could you talk us through what that just what
that would look like, right if we turned back to God? And then
that's yeah, well, because I think the implication was that if we turn
back to God, it'll have an influence on the civics. Okay, So
I'm fine, I'm fine to talk about that. One of the problems we're
facing right now, especially call you in America. I'm Canadian. It's it's
weirder, but it's different. That is that one of the problems we have
is that if we don't have the top place, which is held by the
divine logos, all we have are idols. And so one of the things
that's happening is that we expect, we expect the founders of your nation.
We expect the important people that have led to important historical transformations to be God.
That's what we expect because because the problem that's happening is people are seeing
their sin and then they're freaking out, like their sinners destroy the statue,
right, And that's that's the problem. That's what happens, Like when things
fall into the political sphere. That's what happens, right, those statues of
Stalin and of Lenin, they are gods for all intents and purposes. They
are the highest point of attention. And so this is the this is the
problem. Now if if I think the Medievals had a really inch had an
interesting way of seeing it. You know, they had this whole tradition they
called the Nine Worthies where they would celebrate the people, the ancients of the
past, and there were there were a certain amount that were like from the
Old Testament, and then there was pagans, and there was people in their
own age, and you know when they celebrated Alexander, they would say,
this is why we celebrate Alexander, and these are his sins, right,
this is why we celebrate this person, and these are his sins. But
it's like, yeah, that's it, that's that's what it means to be
human. But that is also because our highest point of attention was beyond those
people, and it wasn't a kind of worship of the political leader. It
was something which moved beyond it. So could I as see you maybe a
follow up to that, Jonathan. You know, we had a conversation on
YouTube a while ago about Mary the Mother of God. And I've been teaching
a class on a cumenical devotion to Mary here at Princeton Theological Seminary. And
I taught that class because there seemed to be a renewed interest among my Protestant
students to think about mayor Mary in revelation, Mary in scripture. And then
I had a local artist who's here with us today, wanna belche whose art
is in the room, come give a presentation on prototypes of Mary and art,
and boy, the students were just fascinated by the images. And so
as I've taught this class, I've actually begun to wonder if maybe you know
we said you just said a moment ago, the answer isn't purely political.
I wonder if part of the enduring attraction of Mary the Mother of God is
that it connects the liturgical and the charismatic, the church and the home,
and that maybe what liturgical art can do, and proper veneration, including veneration
for Mary the Mother of God, it can make the faith that you're talking
about personal and from the home then can outflow the grace to build community.
Right, I mean, I think sometimes people want to build community with a
strategy. Anyone ever been to a community building strategy session? Yeah, I
mean you all laugh, Right, community has got to be built person and
by person. And I think somehow I'm just conjecturing her that Mary the Mother
of God represents that that personal person to person, that what happens in Sunday
worship has got to be taken into the home, into the place of the
messiness of home life with pain and suffering, but also celebration and joy,
and from the church to the home and then back out into society. So
is that my question, I guess, is Mary the Mother of God?
And I know, I think I think for sure the Mother of God is
important, especially even because she is in some ways that body, right,
she she's that place where it comes together in the sense that she's that gathering
you know, you saw in the image of Ascension. It's well, it's
beautifully represented where she stands in the center and and all the all the disciples
gather around her. You know, it's like she's this mother that is kind
of gathering them inside. And so she she is, of course an image
of the church, like the culmination of the of the church. On earth,
you could say, I don't know how to say it in the right
place way. But and then then also she she's also been very much the
great protector of cities, by the way, because she is also an image
of the city, or the common or the coming together people. And so
you know, when when the barbarians would come to the gates of Constantinople,
they would take the icon of the Mother of God and they would parade on
the walls with that icon, and there are many examples of you know,
them just turning back, or all kinds of miraculous stories. Uh. And
then of course the the image of the protection of the Veil, which some
of you might have seen, where there's a kind of a version of that
in Catholic art too. You see the Mother of God standing above the church
and she's holding a veil which protects, you know, the common, protects
the unity. In the Catholic tradition, you have this image of her with
her with her coat like her investment open, and then all the people that
are gathered inside her. And so I think that it's that definitely there is
something in order to embody and in order to to be able to understand the
common and the places where we can recognize each other and recognize each other as
participating in something that binds us. That her example and her guidance is you.
I'm keen to keep us on time. So if RJ has a brief
question, he can go Otherwise I'll wind it down. Well, she used
the patroness of the American Yeah. Well, and I'll just say, I
mean, I began this morning, you know, and I talked to you
about how when I visited my mother's home village in Cuba, that the villagers
came out and after forty years they had preserved the memory of the people that
I had lived there before, and the stained glass windows with the Blessed Mother
and roses. Not only had the church been desecrated, the rose garden that
my mother remembered was gone. Right if we don't protect our churches and our
sacred art, people stopped planting roses, you know. And then after time,
you know what else happened. They stopped working. Because if we tell
people that they're only made to work and they're not made to garden, and
they're not me to worship, people in Cuba stopped working. And I asked
myself, these people have preserved for forty years, these windows. What have
I preserved for forty years? You know? The only thing I could think
of that I've not thrown away in all my moves. Well, two things.
Photographs of family members I have preserved and an icon of the Mother of
God that I got when my best friend got married in Cyprus. And I've
taken that icon and I've kissed it, I've slept with it when I was
scared or upset, and it comes with me on every single trip. Photographs
of my family and an icon of the Mother of God help me connect remember
past, present and future, help keep me grounded to those mysteries that happen
in the sacred liturgy, and remind me, as you know, Aiden Talk
says, if it's so easy to live up to our vocation as human beings,
I often want to, you know, pull back and just kind of
put the covers over my head. But when I have that icon with me,
and I have the memory of the people who've gone before me, I
remember that my life has a purpose and that I'm participating in something and I'm
not doing it alone. Thank you, Jonathan