Hi friends,
As an adult, I’ve had this thing happen to me where every January I spend about two weeks thinking I’m getting sick because I’m tired and sluggish and foggy. And then I remember that I feel this way every January because it’s cold (relatively speaking, here in Texas) and dark and gray more often than not. This January I realized what was going on more quickly than I usually do, and I’ve tried to lean into it, not doing much of anything at all. I’ve kept my calendar as clear as possible, pushed off anything on my to-do list that can wait until the spring, and spent time playing checkers with my kids and knitting little mittens for their little hands and sleeping more than usual. I hope that you’ve been able to take a little winter rest too.
“The gloom of the world is but a shadow. Behind it, yet within our reach is joy. There is radiance and courage in the darkness could we but see; and to see, we have only to look.” – Fra Angelico
The feast day of Fra Angelico, that exquisite painter of the early Renaissance, falls on February 18th. He was born Guido di Pietro in the late 14th century, but we know very little about his life before 1417, when he entered a Dominican convent and became a friar. We do know from this record that, by this point, he was already known as a painter. He spent time painting frescoes and altarpieces for various convents and monasteries in Italy, and in 1436, he, along with a number of other Dominican friars, moved to the newly built convent of San Marco in Florence. Here he set about the task of decorating the monastery (a talent of his), painting frescoes for the cloister, chapter house, and entrances to the friars’ cells. It is at this monastery that some of his most famous art lives: his Annunciation, his Crucifixion, Noli me tangere. There’s a story that Pope Nicholas V offered him an archbishopric that he refused out of humility. I don’t know if the story is true, but it tracks with what we know about his personality. It seemed that Fra Angelico wanted to pray and wanted to paint and wasn’t much interested in anything else.
I’ve always loved Fra Angelico’s art, and so it was a delightful surprise for me to find out recently that he was beatified by Pope John Paul II in 1984. (For those of you who aren’t Catholic, beatification is an official recognition by the Church that the beatified person is in heaven and has the ability to intercede on behalf of people who pray to that person. It’s often a step on the way to canonization as a saint.) Considering Fra Angelico’s life, it makes sense to me that he would be beatified. He was a deeply sincere artist; he believed in what he painted. It’s said that he always tried to live without anxious thoughts so as to keep his mind on Christ as he labored at his art, that he never picked up a brush without first offering a prayer, that he could not paint a crucifixion without weeping. I think it’s also a point in his favor that he wanted little to do with holding power in the institutional Church. (A quote attributed to him: “I can paint pictures, but I cannot rule men.”) The name we gave him, Fra Angelico, translates as “angelic friar.” And even beyond all of his devout and gentle personality, his art is wondrous, containing, as Pope John Paul II said, “an almost divine beauty.”
I read a book recently about art and theology that I haven’t stopped thinking about. It’s by a smart and perceptive theologian named Cecilia Gonzalez-Andrieu, and it’s called Bridge to Wonder: Art as a Gospel of Beauty. In the book, she discusses the concept of asombro:
“One of the many possible ways to translate the word ‘wonder’ into Spanish is asombro. When someone is asombrado, there is an understanding that something has acted upon them and that there has been a response, they have become wonder-filled beings. The word gives no clue as to the positivity or negativity of the encounter, which could have produced genuine fear, a moment of profound questioning, or the feeling of utter surprise or overwhelming delight. What is clear is that the encounter precipitates an awakening response and that the moment of asombro/wonder can have a variety of results, depending on what is encountered and how the human person or persons involved in the encounter react. At its most basic, wonder stops what is routine and causes asombro. When we become asombrados we are no longer able to cling to the illusion of control and omnipotence. We have been made small and take on the characteristics (in ourselves) of our awe-filled response.”
Richard Rohr wrote something similar (somewhere, I could not for the life of me find the quote), about how wonder is the beginning of religious devotion. Wonder is the moment when you want to take off your proverbial sandals, to kneel and kiss the ground, to bow in the presence of the holy. It’s the moment when the routine is stopped and something new is seen. This, for me, is so much of what religion is about. Religion without asombro is just rules.
My family and I recently started attending mass at a different parish here in Austin. There were several catalysts for this change, but one of them was a desire not just for more beauty, but for any beauty. It’s not so much that our previous parish had bad art; it’s more that there was very little art at all. And it took me some time to admit to myself that the ordinariness of the space bothered me. To say “I want to go to a prettier church” sounds shallow. But the first time we went to mass at what quickly became our new parish, my 7-year-old walked into the sanctuary and whispered “wowww” under his breath. My 8-year-old, usually fidgety during mass, spent the entire hour craning his head, captivated by the art. We walked into this church, and I saw my children become little asombrados, and I remembered why beauty matters. Beauty saves because it is a visible form of the good. Beauty is so important because it leads to adoration of the mystery of God. As Gonzalez-Andrieu writes, “I am convinced that this is how beauty works: while no human experience can disclose what the mystery of God is, experiences that brim with beauty (or point poignantly to beauty’s absence) can suddenly make us aware of the enticing mystery enveloping us. We are caught in its midst, and wonder is the only appropriate attitude.”
I love the artist saints – the blessed men and women like Fra Angelico – because they use beauty to point us to the numinous. They lift the veil of the ordinary world to show us the extraordinary. It feels almost magical to me, the making of asombro, and when I think about Fra Angelico, I think about tarot’s Magician. In the book, it was difficult for me to explain what the Magician does because what the Magician does is, by definition, inexplicable. (fun fact: there are a few cards that I completely scrapped and rewrote weeks before my manuscript was due; the Magician was one of them) For me, the Magician represents asombro. He points us to the wonder and the magic and the poetry of God, what is difficult to explain but also what pulls us in. Like Fra Angelico, who painted things that make us fall to our knees and remember why we believe in God, the Magician points us to a realization that there is an invisible world just beyond the visible. There is, as Fra Angelico says, light just beyond the shadow. In this way, the role of the artist and the role of tarot’s Magician are one and the same. They show us that which we cannot see on our own, creating a bridge to wonder.
Lovely piece! I especially love this: "Beauty saves because it is a visible form of the good." This is the truth of the Incarnation. What a reminder, thank you!