Maybe it is inevitable that any attempt to portray sacred imagery intersects with an examination of the self. A maker of such images should be worthy to create them and if not, what stain is transferred to the image unintended, perhaps undetected – but transferred, all the same. The question of worthiness can’t be avoided as the mysteries themselves, deal directly with the health and well-being of the human soul. They are an unavoidable reminder of the frailty of human nature.
A meditation on each set of mysteries invites us to find communion with them, a connection that asks us to think beyond the surface. What is being said, who is saying it and what is the meaning behind their actions, all give us artifacts to contemplate and piece together. But that movement orients us toward the transcendent and the light of the transcendent can illuminate many flaws and regrets. These mysteries have a personal quality, they cannot be seen properly without an understanding that ultimately, they encompass the individual and everything beyond. We are not separate from them.
In one of my old photo albums, there is a set of rosary cards designed to focus the devout on these mysteries. They are brightly colored, a marked contrast to the old photos within. I can’t help but wonder what these mysteries meant to the people in this album, how many of their quiet prayers still echo through time? The faces in those old Polaroids seem out of focus and distant behind the worn, cracked emulsion. The physical manifestation of my fading recollections, these portals to another time and dimension. I wonder what secrets they carried with them. So many of them have long since left to meet what lies beyond the temporal vale – their secrets at last revealed.
One picture always gives me pause, an image of my grandfather, a simple carpenter who was born and died in Western Iowa. His look in that image always struck me as forlorn, washed in the light of that setting sun. I see in his expression a man who contemplated similar questions. The deeply etched lines in his antique face tell me so.
In the image, he looks beyond the sun, to a place where the infinite and perfect meet and I find in that a kinship beyond the familial. He must have seen like every reflective man, the fullness of his human failings. But the perfect must intersect with the imperfect or else the very definition of perfect is unknown, its intentions unfulfilled. His boundless love could not be expressed. His lessons could not be learned. I find in this a part of an answer and through my grandfather’s eyes I see the sort of reluctant acceptance that we must be present in the face of the Creator of all being, even in our sad and imperfect state.
The understanding that we are fallible has always been the burden of man, but the promise that we can be made perfect is His divine gift. So, I begin this work in the state I find myself today but perhaps through the simple progression of meditation on story and the application of paint on linen, I’ll find myself in a better place through my own discoveries, my own reluctant acceptance.
I say goodbye to that old man, leaving him to his setting sun and return the album to its place on the shelf. In the quiet, I am reminded of his death at exactly the age I am now. I wonder what it must be like, to encounter the infinite at long last? And where is that inflection point between what we must know and the time we have left?
For Willis Gordon Comfort