I walked the Metropolitan Museum the other day with a new purpose. My habit is to walk through the collection of art and antiquities so to find healing. I believe beauty heals us. The three “Graces” with interlocked arms from the 2nd century carved in marble is a way to remember balance and harmony. To remember grace restores the soul.
But what if I was thirteen? Walking the Met I tried to imagine what this would look like if I were thirteen. How would I make sense of all the statues and stained glass, the Mayan sculpture and the Egyptian temple? More importantly, how would I see art as Christian?
The Metropolitan Museum has a lot of Christian art. To see it you need to remember Byzantium. The Byzantine Empire, which begins with Constantine in the 4th century, and ends with the Ottomans in the 15th century is where our faith became embellished. Christian art was born in Constantinople in the 4th century. Before Constantine there were no church buildings, no icons, no frescoes or statues depicting the life of Jesus or the acts of the apostles or the death of a martyr.
As you walk in to the ground floor of the main entrance hall, just before you venture into the larger museum, it is helpful to stop by a modest clay tablet from the 4th century with a large “Chi-Rho” carved into its surface. The “Chi-Rho” is an early Christian symbol referencing the first two Greek letters of “Cristos.” Beside the “Chi-Rho” on each side are two more Greek letters: Alpha and Omega. The owner of the clay tablet is proclaiming “Jesus Christ is the beginning and the end.” He was making his faith known.
This is a great place to start if you are thirteen and considering Christian art for the first time. It is because from this point on as you walk through halls of Virgins with babies carved by Italians and Jesus being crucified painted by people from the Netherlands, what you are seeing is the attempt to make the symbol (Chi-Rho) come to life; you are witnessing the word (alpha and omega) take flesh. People are making their faith known.
In April it is our plan to take the confirmation class to the Metropolitan for a walk. This was the reason for my attempt to see the museum with younger eyes. The plan is to have a series of pieces highlighted for them. A kind of mini-collection, ten is my hope. In these ten they will see what is Medieval and Renaissance, Baroque and Early Modern. And then, what I hope they really see is how God disappears. What was the great theme of art will shift from the divine to the mundane. The clarity of the “chi-rho” will be gone when we reach the exterior of the Cathedral of Rouen painted by Monet. The church is a gauzy purple whose medieval spires are a landscape, not a ladder to heaven.
Each person needs to decide, to determine, to find their own surety so as to make his or her faith known. Yet, we need not do it alone. We can find what we believe together, and we can remember we are just one more turn of the wheel of time. I believe Jesus is our alpha and omega. What better way to remember our faith than in the beauty of art, in song, in fellowship. My hope for young people is that they never forget they live in the midst of heaven and earth with the “faithful of every generation past and present.”
