My God! A portrait
I see that you only do God and naked women.” was the good doctor’s half-joking critique of his body of works. And looking back on everything it seemed to the sculptor the doctor was exactly right.
But the remark got him to asking if God and naked women are polar opposites or, indeed, only two facets of a single thing. Is God present in the fact of a naked woman? He would first have to imagine a naked woman and then get himself behind the eros of her, the irrefutable fact of his capacity to desire. Not an easy task but not impossible either. He simply remembers the sea-difference between desire and love.
Yes, God is also there. A good sculptor may try to carve God into the flesh and bones, the loins, of naked human anatomy, whatever its gender. Whether others can see it at all is of course another thing entirely. But then he had always been taught that every piece of good art is also a mirror.
The mirror shows the looker first before it can show anything else. And so it is that the person who sees the God sees it because the God was already inside him or her. If not the real God, then at least the real picture of Him or Her as the case may be. As fairly recent linguististic theories claim: if you have not the words to describe something, that something is inaccessible to you.
And so the question: What does God look like?
The sculptor has of course done countless portraits of God. As many as he has done naked women. Immediately, he recalls his God is more often than not cast inside the Catholic mould. He recalls his many faces of Jesus. Or Yesu, as his Argentenian-Jesuit friend always puts it. Yesu at the last supper. Yesu as baby, man, crucified, and then risen.
He recalls how he had to summon inside him a strong feeling of love before he could even do the first stroke, how even before that he had to seek forgiveness for all his sins and then keep personal account of the intrinsic limitations of his capacity and his craft. For how can anyone contain into a piece of wood or hammer in copper or words this mystery which must by its very definition encompass the length and breadth of time and space?
In the end, he must confess that his achievements will not be measured only in faith but also in love. Given the human limits for both, he knows the best he can do will only be a failed attempt. But then he is only doing art where even the worst failures may in the run of time become the most beautiful.
Yet, after so many attempts the sculptor decides now, this morning, that he is far from coming upon a true portrait of God. And partly the reason is the fact he has worked from literature, the body of religious tract, which are far too distant from him.
He is better off asking himself: How does God appear now, this morning, here where he sits in front of his ipad typing these words? How would he describe God? How could he reach It? Those words that would bring him as close to God as he had ever come? What should he do? Should he pray? Reach out his hands?
In the course of thinking this way, he discovers finally why he might have done the jesuit’s head the way he did for his recent work “Jesuit Encounters an Angel”. In the sculpture, the jesuit’s head is a spherical void seemingly to reflect the yawning emptiness of the universe.
God like all ideas is spirit. To get at any idea, one must first find a way to construct the void where the idea can enter. To find the words to write, the writer must first of all empty his or her mind of everything starting with all concepts of self, his desires, his set plans. Once opened this way, he or she needs only to have the patience to wait for the words to come. They will not come unless the void is there first, sacred, silent, and beautiful in emptiness.
And then it might slowly fill with words that could describe and perhaps even answer the most beautiful questions of all. What does God look like? What is God’s will this morning? How do I perfectly obey?
And so into the void he writes: “I see that you only do God and naked women”….
