Читать книгу Blessed - Jerusha Matsen Neal - Страница 6

In the cathedral of Uppsala in Sweden there is a statue of Mary. She stands in the aisle by the apse, where visitors walk, and is so remarkably lifelike that many do not realize that she is a work of art. Nothing about her is meant to stand out. Her height is only average and her clothes nondescript: blue coat, warm scarf, sensible shoes. If you passed her in the street, you might forget her within moments, or she might remind you of a hundred other women you have met. This is precisely what artist Anders Widoff intended to create: a Mary so ordinary that we might identify with her, mistake her completely, or wonder at her commonplace disguise among us. Yet it is her placement in the cathedral and the title of the work—Mary (The Return)—that makes us think twice. Widoff sets her facing the large Vasa Chapel, formerly the Lady Chapel, drawing attention to the fact that after the Reformation, churches in Sweden removed all statues of Mary and renamed her chapels for Swedish kings. Mary all but disappeared from the church. Now she has returned, as both a visitor and a witness. Her intent gaze, looking into the space where she once was, invites us to rethink her place in the Christian story, and in ours.

What you hold in your hand is another work of art, and in this too, Mary returns. She is a chain-smoking single mother, living on the edge. She is a bereft young soldier, raising her dead lover’s baby. She is an estranged daughter returning to bury the father she has not seen in years. She is an exhausted pastor of a tired out, all-but-dead congregation. In each of these women, Mary returns to the church, gazing fiercely into a space where she once might have been or may be still—and we, with her. And like the figure of Mary in the Uppsala Cathedral, it isn’t so much the breathtaking ordinariness of the women that strikes us as their placement, right smack in the middle of our sacred texts and spaces and conversations. Mary in Scripture is one thing; Mary in common life is quite another. It is a peculiarly combustible combination, one that blocks the aisle and interrupts worship. What exactly do they want, these women? Are they visitors to our church, who might go away again? Or are they witnesses with a story to tell? And what does any of this have to do with us and our life with God?

Great art always provokes such questions, and with this book Jerusha Matsen Neal has created great art. I do not use the term lightly: these pieces are nothing short of brilliant. Matsen Neal is a superb wordsmith and luminous performer. She writes from a place of deep compassion and uncompromising honesty—a terrifying combination, if as Paul says, the author has no love, and the reader is left to burn and clang alone. But Matsen Neal will never hand us over like that. She has great love: for her characters, for us, for God, and for the church, God’s body in this world. It is what gives her portraits of these women such incredible richness. It is what makes us laugh and weep with recognition as their stories unfold. And it is what inspires us to pick up the crumbs of possibility she drops along the way, to follow them and keep following. Everything true the church has ever said, everything beautiful it has ever created, begins with a trail of crumbs and a body broken into great art.

Read these pieces. Put them into the hands of your young people. Let them break open into performances in your sanctuaries and hard conversations in your homes. They are not position statements or lessons in orthodoxy, nor are they puzzles to be solved; that is never the way of art. But they may start something you never knew was ready to begin. They may interpret something you never knew was obscured. They may say something you never knew was true or even yours to say. That is what great art does, and that is the gift Jerusha Matsen Neal has given the church.

What we do next is our gift to God.

Anna Carter Florence

Columbia Theological Seminary

Holy Week, 2012