Soul Food For The Word-Weary: Embarking On A Christian Pilgrimage Through Art
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Mosaic from Vault of the Apse with Redeemer, Basilica of San Vitale in Ravenna, Italy. (Wikipedia Commons photo)
(OPINION) “The world is such a mess. We don’t have time for [denominational divisions].”
Philanthropist Roberta Ahmanson, a former journalist, is on an artistic mission at the unlikely Soho Hotel in London. She was there to help promote a film that features her showing off Europe’s religious masterpieces to 30 or so people — many of them Protestants — sitting inside a small theater.
Those we are for whom words have largely eclipsed the power of images to tell our faith story.
We were assembled recently for the screening of the film, “Heading Home: A 21st Century Pilgrimage,” which traces a 4,000-mile journey Ahmanson made over two weeks to some of the most astounding visual landmarks of a world once called “Christendom.”
All were churches inspired by Jerusalem’s fourth-century Basilica of the Holy Sepulchre, where she began the journey. This is the church built over the site of Christ’s crucifixion, and the tomb from which he was resurrected.
Jody Hassett Sanchez, president of Pointy Shoe Productions and former CNN and ABC News producer, directed the film, which takes us from Rome, to Pisa, Bologna, Ravenna, Venice and Aachen (in Germany), before finishing exhausted at London’s Temple Church.
The pilgrims — from a very eclectic background — sweated, suffered and marveled beneath the soaring domes on their ambitious itinerary. They, like me sitting watching the film, evidently had little idea of the masterpieces the original basilica had inspired.
A man in the film called “Street” seemed transfixed.
“Awesome,” he gasped.
It was not an exaggeration.
He, and the audience, learned how theologians and poets like Augustine and Dante had inspired not just texts but these vast structures filled with glittering images.
Artists and architects pushed themselves to fantastic heights of spiritual imagination — not just for the elites, but for popular consumption.
That is evidenced by vast incense censers swung by monks from the rafters of Europe’s cathedrals throughout the Middle Ages to disguise the stench of thousands packed in close proximity into these buildings.
They pressed in, from Italy right across to Spain, to witness the spectacle of divine office under mosaiced roofs gleaming not with steel and glass, but with gold and precious stones.
The drama, and even fun, in the spectacle they came for is reprieved by the film for our time: Fabulous heavens and gruesome hells depicting with scatological relish the damned being expelled through the very rectum of Satan.
Might it catch on?
Roberta, who helped co-author the book “Blind Spot: When Journalists Don’t Get Religion,” has made it her personal cause to re-open jaded eyes to the marvels of this heritage. She now uses her time to correct our cultural amnesia.
Along with her husband Howard, they fund projects — like The Media Project and Religion Unplugged — around the world that can tell this truer story. Roberta is also chair of the TMP board of directors.
Ben Quash. professor of Christianity and the Arts at London’s King’s College, also makes an appearance in “Heading Home.”
Roberta said she has seen “even the most curmudgeonly” moved by having their eyes opened by the impact of this heritage.
For example, Tom Oden who is more familiar to the U.S. than the U.K., was a Methodist minister who did not believe in the Resurrection. He had a “conversion” to Orthodoxy in his 40s, after Roberta encouraged him to read the Church Fathers and travel with her to Cappadocia in Turkey.
She met him in 1993. She said after the screening: “His vision was to create a community based on the Church Fathers, the first 800 years of the church, before the church was divided. Being in Nicea with him, you were travelling with someone who before thought it was all Disneyland.”
Could the past be the future? Western church art was, after all, deeply democratic.
“The poor need beauty, too,” Roberta said.
“Poor wordy little Protestants” — as someone once said — have severed this connection between the church and its visual soul food. Bereft of beauty, Protestant churches have left us to the narcotizing effect of TV and social media, and a daily diet of pap, propaganda and rage.
In the film, we are made to see ourselves again, by looking up — to God; to the amazing vision of those who sought to render New Jerusalem on Earth, flooding their impossibly high domes with light and by inference, hope.
Could new generations and populations be inspired again to aspire to the heights to which those early artists aspired?
If so, we'll surely need to get out more.
Dr. Jenny Taylor is a journalist, writer and researcher in religion. Her doctorate in the study of religions from the School of Oriental and African Studies focused on the impact of Islam on British governance.