Some New York Thoughts

Isabel and I set out on an adventure to New York last weekend to attend a wedding, and it was quite the shwanky affair, I might add.

Along the way, some thoughts struck me that I will now post largely at random...

New Yorkers form Communion lines in the same manner in which they drive.

French people are the best bet for pointing you in the direction of the nearest museum.

You don't know good sushi until you've had it.

During cocktail hours, do not eat more food than you would expect to be served at dinner.

And now, for the extended cogitation...

While jaunting about the Empire State, Isabel and I decided to cut through the Bronx and go to the Cloisters. It's a satellite to the Metropolitan Museum of Art consisting entirely of medieval artifacts. Indeed, some of the structure itself was relocated Gargoyles-style to the Big Apple...

Driving there was pretty much a nightmare -- it took fifty minutes to go all of twelve miles through highly-congested urban streets -- in the rain (uprooted and cracked trees littered the roads). Nevertheless, all of that was quickly forgotten shortly after scampering through the reconstructed gardens. I'll skip the tourist anecdotes, though, to get to the take home points of the trip.

One revelation that dawned on Isabel and I was the practicality of ostentatious garb. Being more early modernists than we are medievalists, we're used to running into anti-clerical attacks on vestments. When you are confronted with a bejeweled chasuble, cynicism makes it easier to see what the Protestants might have been complaining about (one might be reminded of Monty Python's explanation of how you recognize a king in medieval times). But then we came across a vestment that had an elaborate biblical scene embroidered on its back...and the useful little museum key explained that this was for the congregation to look at while the priest said Mass. Puzzle pieces suddenly seemed to fall into place. The ornament of this particular chasuble was for the instruction of the congregation -- and, perhaps, also to keep their attention focused on the ceremony. Obviously, some medieval Church-goers at some point felt the same thing that modern congregations felt at a liturgy where the priest was turned away from the flock (and towards God) -- only they found a much more elegant solution.

I don't know much about the 20th Century history of vestments. I know that most of what I see today are either very, very plain or effeminately gaudy. I wonder if newly fashioned vestments just before Vatican II resembled their medieval antecedents or their modern descendants. In any event, it seems as though the modern solution to the visual boredom of looking at a man's back was far more crude and barbaric than medieval Europe's. They saw something they didn't like and draped something beautiful over it. We saw something we didn't like and then pretty much smashed it to bits with legalistic reinterpretation of rubrics.

That might be a heavy-handed metaphor...but I think it gets the idea across.

The other major take home point was a newfound ambivalence towards the public display of artifacts. I've always been somewhat sympathetic to complaints about essentially robbing graves and putting the goods (if not the corpses themselves) on a shelf. Plenty of groups exploit this kind of multi-cultural sympathy to the detriment of human knowledge and the embarrassment of their cultures, I'm sure, but there is an unavoidable element of dehumanization that goes on whenever religious artifacts are reduced to educational materials. Perhaps the most striking example of this at the Cloisters is the display of crypt effigies. Essentially the medieval European equivalent of an Egyptian sarcophagus, these were sculptures of deceased persons that rested above their coffins. Along one wall was a flat slab that merely had a two-dimensional figure of a monk scratched out of it.

Take a moment to imagine your favorite living clergyman...now imagine he passes away...and several hundred years later, the top of his coffin is hauled off by archaeologists so it could be propped up on a wall and passed by thousands of disinterested tourists on a daily basis.

It's a bit morbid and depressing, and it brings to mind all sorts of early modern prefaces complaining about how the author didn't want his poems to be published on account of ignorant, drooling masses not giving them the respect it deserved.

These artifacts were meant to preserve the dignity and memory of the dead--and now us moderns tramps about them snapping digital photos and making snide comments about them (if we even acknowledge them at all).

There was also a slight degree of irony when we passed by an empty reliquary in a room surrounded by various devotional items. While the key explained the function of the reliquary, it popped in my head that many of the artifacts might in fact be second class relics. Who would know?

And The Cloisters acknowledges this intellectual uneasiness about tomb robbing. Isabel pointed out some text to me that justified the displays by observing that most of the items were taken from ruins and would have perished if not preserved.

Plus, I could easily imagine some of the more laid back Dominicans I know today having little concern if their tombs were raided and bits hoisted up for public display. After all, whoever that monk was, his effigy has probably evangelized to more people in the five hundred years since he's been dead than he ever met while he was alive.

Comments

[Akh Ari]

Turned _with_ the people toward God, thank you.

I knew a priest once who insisted on sitting in the pews during the readings at Mass. I can only guess that he was trying to remedy a felt lack of solidarity caused by the 100%-opposing-the-congregation style of celebration. There's a better solution to that, though...

[Akh Ari]

I like your comment on the "visual boredom" thing.

At some point I started covering the bare walls of my room with notecards of things I wanted to use my staring-off-into-space time to study. At some point when I was at Mass I realized that the same thing has always been done in Churches, only executed it in a much more beautiful way.

I have noticed that in bare, iconoclastic churches, during a boring homily it is difficult to avoid meditation on random topics. In a beautiful one with good sacred art, a boring homily is often redeemed by a meditation on the Scriptures, saints, or truths of the Faith.

[Peter Terp]

"Turned _with_ the people toward God, thank you."

Indeed. And, of course, we should probably change the verb "turn" to "lead" anyway.

Could you imagine a bunch of sheep complaining that the shepherd never faces them when guiding them through a pasture? Would sheep really want a shepherd facing them while he tried to navigate them along a mountainside? (Do you think that's why it took Moses so long to lead the Israelites through the wilderness...because he was walking backwards and couldn't see where he was going?)

"In a beautiful one with good sacred art, a boring homily is often redeemed by a meditation on the Scriptures, saints, or truths of the Faith."

From my limited understanding of the Eastern Rites, you've succinctly described the reasoning behind the use of countless icons. It's something of a concession that the average workaday worshiper doesn't quite have the same mental focus as a thoroughly trained Zen Buddhist monk.