Friday, November 6, 2015

The beauty of the oft unseen love in our lives

My mom told me a few years ago that my grandfather, referring to Swaggert, had said, "If God can love an asshole like him, then I guess I'm not too far gone." He wasn't a Christian, my grandfather. At least he didn't have an altar-call conversion like I did, nor was he slain in the Spirit. But he must've felt himself hollowed-out when he heard Swaggart preach--cratered, like a demolition charge had gone off inside him.
Nobody I knew at the time believed in Swaggart. He was a joke, a hypocrite. A burned-out Pentecostal preacher. My grandfather knew all this, of course. He watched the news.
But Swaggart's words that day became a sacrament for him--presence where there seemed only absence. They stilled him somehow, and showed him his own holy, human worth. They gave him his life back.
Alistair MacLoed once wrote that "we are all better when we're loved"--loved by those present in our lives and those now gone; loved by those we see and those we do not. It's easy to know the first, to glimpse such care in smiling faces. But it's hard to see the latter: difficult to imagine what's not apparent. (How can I know my grandfather's joy when he never smiled in pictures?) That is why we need sacraments, and art: to give us the beauty of the oft unseen love in our lives.
I realize now that I've been trying to piece together what is not whole: in some fragmented way to make whole what is broken, to control it, to account for my encounter with (and through) Castellino's art. In the end, all I have is enough light to glimpse this mystery somehow present in the demolished rooms that are my grandfather's life now long gone.
And discovering this mystery is joy--joy written with light and words, Castellino's art and my memories cupped in those images, these words.
--Samuel Thomas Martin, Candy and Copenhagen, "Image Journal" (No. 86, 2015).