Opinion

Do two swallows a summer make?

The news of two families, both dear friends, leaving the Catholic Church sent me into a tizzy. Do I need to hit the spiritual alarm bells? The ‘migration’ from one Church to the other is nothing new; the methods though are always reinvented to sound urgent for one’s salvation.

There are two comments I wish to limit myself to. There are those, including some among the Catholic clergy who play down the issue simply as a matter of ‘merely two swallows’. I suspect that their fear of admitting to this ‘trickling exodus’ would expose their own lack of dealing with the spiritual needs of their congregation. Secondly, there is the congregation who demand for quick, short and perhaps entertaining homilies who fallaciously believe they will get something meaty in ten minutes when in reality all that they get is bones stewed in a pot whose meat has long fallen off leading them to be vulnerable to anti- catholic propaganda.

Let me begin with my ilk; all is certainly not well at home. The window of faith to the Church for most Catholics is the Sunday homily which has become the primary point of communicating the faith and the demand is often that that window be shut in ten minutes. The maxim goes that if you should be brief, be bright and be gone.

Even the Holy Father, Pope Francis has once (to be read in context of his entire homily) thrown his weight behind what he called “short and not boring homilies”. While agreeing with the intention of the Holy Father, I respectfully disagree with his words lest some clergyman use them selectively to their advantage.

It is insulting to the congregation to assume that what they truly desire on a Sunday is faith ‘in short’. The reality behind the growing demand for brief homilies stems from boredom that sets in thanks to those members of the clergy who do not prepare themselves. The truth is that a great homilist can be heard for hours on an end even on a busy Sunday.

What adds to the complexity of this issue is that the content of the homily is catechetical, preachy and moralistic. This is not the intention of the Catholic Church. The failure to ‘break the word of God’ and explain the scriptures is what ails the spiritual nourishment of the faithful. Jokes and anecdotes help but they can’t be a substitute for God’s word which clearly needs to be explained by the homilist.

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Art/ Heritage

THE CHRISTMAS CANVAS: ‘The Sistine Madonna’ by Raphael da Urbino (1513)

 O Maiden will you be, the Mother of the Saviour

Your God has chosen you, to give the world His Son

His power will be your shield, His Spirit come upon you

And Mary bowed and said, ‘God’s will be done’

From the Annunciation to the Presentation, to the Passion, Death and Resurrection, it was Mary’s unconditional yes that bore and revealed to us the unconditional love of God. The Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church honours her divine maternity through the feast of the Solemnity of the Blessed Virgin Mary. It is celebrated on the Octave of Christmas on January the 1st. It is therefore befitting today to dwell on a painting depicting the Mother of God (Greek ‘Theotokos’ meaning ‘God bearer’).

Who best can bring to us the soul of this subject than the art of Raphael? Even an amateur art lover can conjure the serene, impeccable, imperturbable, graceful, gentle, noble image of Raphael’s Madonnas. Through this concluding Christmas Canvas let’s contemplate on the last Madonna that Raphael painted titled ‘The Sistine Madonna’.

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Art/ Heritage

THE CHRISTMAS CANVAS: ‘The Presentation at the Temple’ by Ambrogio Lorenzetti (1342)

Ambrogio Lorenzetti (1290 – 1348) was a medieval Italian painter of the Sienese school of art. Inspired by the Byzantine and the Classical genre, he developed a unique and absorbing style of painting. Disembarking from the rigid Gothic, he experimented with different kinds of perspectives, physiognomy and the illusion of depth. His artistic spirit sniffs soul through today’s canvas.

‘The Presentation at the Temple’ visually narrates to us an event from the early years of the life of Christ. The painting is housed at the Uffizi Gallery in Florence. A masterpiece indeed, it was painted for the Chapel of San Crescenzio in the transept of the Cathedral of Siena. The painting illustrates an extra-ordinary interaction of artistic and liturgical details, an encounter between the old and the new.

A presentation ceremony in Jerusalem was accompanied by certain traditional prescriptions. The first: according to the Hebrew law after birthing a son a woman is considered impure for forty days. At the end of this period inorder to get rid of the impurity she has to bring an offering to the temple. The second: Every first born human or animal belongs to God. Thus inorder to win redemption, a clean animal would have to be sacrificed.

In conjunction to the Hebrew rituals, forty days after giving birth, Mary and Joseph brought Jesus to present him to the Lord. As they enter the solemnity of the temple, they are in for a surprise. Among the great coming and going of busy priests and anxious people stand the two elderly and devout Simeon and Anna. Simeon leans forward to hold Christ Child in his arms.

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Art/ Heritage

THE CHRISTMAS CANVAS: ‘The Massacre of the Innocents’ by Peter Paul Rubens

 We are in the city of Antwerp in northern Belgium. It is a prosperous city of money, merchants and trade. In the 17th century, Antwerp was racked by civil war and tremendous tension between the Protestant Dutch and the Catholic crown of King Phillip II of Spain. The violent riots of the Reformation had trickled down to the Low Countries. Antwerp was sacked in 1576 wherein about 70,000 people died.

Jan Rubens was one of the many who fled the city to escape its fury. To him, in the city of Siegen, was born Peter Paul Ruben (1577). Shortly after the father’s death, the family moved back to Antwerp. Raised as a Roman Catholic, Ruben showed great interest in art. He took off to Italy for nearly a decade to imbibe the aura of the Renaissance, the Baroque and classical antiquity. He gathered a rich cultivation for art in the nursery of taste and talent.

Things worked well in his favour. Ruben’s return to Antwerp in 1609 coincided with the ‘Treaty of Antwerp’ that initiated the ‘twelve year truce’ between the warring parties. It trumpeted the entry of a Counter Reformation artist whose work persuaded, instructed, delighted and moved the people. Ruben was a painter of passion, a cultured humanist, a diplomat, an entrepreneur and one of the greatest story tellers in the history of art.

However his Christmas Canvas is not a pleasant site. It smells sinister and murder. The subject is that of the intense massacre of the innocents as ordered by King Herod who was on pins to keep his throne safe. This was after he had heard from the Magi that the prophesized newly born Messiah was to be the King of the Jews. Ruben masterfully associates this to the brutality of the social, political and religious conditions prevailing in Netherlands.

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THE CHRISTMAS CANVAS: ‘The Rest on the Flight to Egypt’ by Luc Olivier Merson (1879)

The first Christmas was far from comfort and tedium. Twelve days had not yet passed and adversity struck. Post the visit of the Magi the angel of the Lord appeared to Joseph in a dream and warned him about the impeding peril. ‘So Joseph got up taking the Child and his Mother with him left that night for Egypt.’ (Matthew 2:14). Fleeing with fear, they barely escaped Herod’s hounding army and a maniac plot of mass murder. 

Journeying, wandering, hoping, praying, they came a long way into the vastness of the open desert. As the wind whistled through the air, the coldness of the deep winter caught up with the pilgrim family. The little donkey shuddered as he plodded onwards with his precious load. Weariness soon weighed them down. They decided to stop and rest for the night.

As darkness poured over the desert, stars drilled down the sky. The wayfarers came across a solitary sphinx and decided to camp by its side. The air was clear. Yet the lonely travellers saw nothing, heard nothing. But something throbbed, something gleamed. It was the stark horizon that beamed for joy on having the Holy Family in its midst that holy night.

The sphinx shared in its cheer. It graciously obliged to serve as a chaise lounge to the Virgin Mary and the Christ child. As the Madonna and child fell asleep within its rest, the Sphinx raised its head blissfully glorifying God. For that night it lost not itself in the shadows of the constant solitary darkness. Christ Child was the source of divine light. 

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