Quite fitting to visit today – the “Ultimate Stabat Mater Website.”
Other sources for art-related meditations:
After his conversion to Catholicism in 1959, artist William Congdon [previously], an American expatriate living in Italy, spent the next twenty years of his life painting dozens of Crucifixions. One of them, Crocefisso 45, shows the crucified Christ immersed in near total darkness. His form is barely differentiated from the black background but can just be discerned by the faint band of light that outlines it. Congdon writes that he wanted to portray “a body soaked with pain to the point that one cannot distinguish the body from the pain, almost as though the pain had become a body and not the body a pain.”
Why did Jesus Die? From a Chinese Catholic poster, date unspecified:
Title: To Save the World
Upper Right: Sacrificing his only son in order to manifest his respect and love for Heaven’s command
Lower Right: Giving up one’s office and losing one’s honor sitting in prison revering the Lord for all of one’s life
Upper Left: The consequence of original sin caused God the Provider ([Yehehua] Yi le) to utterly abandon his bodily glory
Lower Left: In order to redeem humans from sin, he prayed until holy blood flowed
Bottom: All the people of the world who receive this teaching rely on the special favor that comes from the blood that flowed on the holy cross, and are able to receive salvation of their souls and rise to Heaven.
More Chinese Christian posters.
Illustration from a 1952 pamphlet on Good Friday found here, on archive.org.
If you have an interest in the history of popular devotions and liturgy, you might take a look at this, another archive.org find:
From Dr. Glenn Arbery, retired president of Wyoming Catholic College – “Wrath and Mercy.”
It is hard to get our minds around it: Christ Himself as man suffers the full wrath for the insult being done to God—that is, to Christ Himself. We can hardly conceive of this self-substitution without imagining that the Father somehow softens his wrath toward the Son. Not so. The mercy of our being passed over lies in the fullness of the Father’s refusal to mitigate His wrath and the Son’s corresponding human refusal to relinquish the cup of suffering.
From a trip to Arizona, twenty years ago (original post written 9 years ago)
What I was looking for was anything I’d written about our visit, on that Arizona trip, to something called the Gallery of the Sun – the studio of late artist Ted De Grazia. You probably don’t know his name, but if you have memories of popular art of the 1960’s, this might strike a chord:
No, not as well-known as the Keane’s Big Eyes, but still, part of the fabric of the era.
We didn’t have it as a destination – I think it was on the way to somewhere else. But we stopped in, and I was surprised by the heavy religious content of the art. De Grazia claimed he was not a traditionally religious man, but the Gallery is dedicated to the great missionary of the Southwest, Fr. Kino,
DeGrazia was inspired by the memorable events in the life and times of Padre Kino, the heroic, historic and immortal priest-colonizer of the Southwestern desert. Since childhood, DeGrazia admired Padre Kino for his education, life of adventure and his respect for Native Americans. DeGrazia traveled to every Kino mission as he lovingly studied the life of his favorite Jesuit priest. The Mission in the Sun is dedicated to his memory.
What struck me with the most force during the visit was De Grazia’s Stations of the Cross. They were painted, according to this article, for the Catholic Student Center at the University of Arizona in Tuscon (my mother’s alma mater…but painted several years after her attendance). I purchased a little bound set of postcards at the time, and still use it.
Yes, it’s pop art of a sort, but some of the stations are, I think, rather powerful. This image is from the Gallery’s Pinterest board, which has representations of all the images, some notes on the inspiration and preliminary sketches:
I think this is my favorite:
Jesus turning to them said, “Daughters of Jerusalem, do not weep for me, but weep for yourselves and for your children. For behold, the days are coming when they will say, ‘Blessed are the barren, and the wombs that never bore, and the breasts that never gave suck!’ Then they will begin to say to the mountains, ‘Fall on us’; and to the hills, ‘Cover us’. For if they do this when the wood is green, what will happen when it is dry?”
Good Friday in Puebla, Mexico, in 2018:
Some related images from my books published by Loyola Press.
Last image in gallery is from the new book, found here.
It has been a while… life has been challenging for the past several years, and I have been forced to change my plans – hopefully in accordance with God’s will rather than my own.
However, I wanted to say “hi” and thank you for your article on The Damnation of Theron Ware, which I bumped into this morning.
Thank you for your thoughtful writing, which always makes me think.