Pieta
A pastor at my church used this sculpture to give imagery to an otherwise difficult spiritual concept.
The artist, Michelangelo, is said to have stated “In every block of marble I see a statue as plain as though it stood before me, shaped and perfect in attitude and action. I have only to hew away the rough walls that imprison the lovely apparition to reveal it to the other eyes as mine see it.”
While those sitting in the sanctuary during the Ash Wednesday service sat looking at this image, he went on to talk about the similarities all of us have between the marble and the sculptor. Having grown up in the church, this potter/clay metaphor is not at all new. The Bible uses it, and subsequently, so do the teachers. It was different for me this time, although I am not yet entirely sure why. However, the following musing are what I have circulating in my head.
The depiction of the mother to son relationship that had to have existed for the 30+ years of Jesus’ earthly life is quite astounding. As a mother, myself, of two sons, the idea of holding their tortured, bloodied, dead bodies in my arms is unfathomable. It is easy to skip over this humanity in the story as it is told every Easter. The simplified, more palatable images typically shown hope to convey a spiritual sadness over the depravity of our human state. They leave out the gut-wrenching pain a mother is experiencing as she watches her perfect son being ripped apart. She is forced to be a bystander, accepting that she is unable to do anything to stop it. For the vast majority, this simplified portrayal is appropriate. Just dipping our toes into the waters of understanding self-sacrifice is often all we can handle, especially when balancing this concept with Easter bunnies and jelly-beans.
Secondly, the sheer magnitude of this original work in incomprehensible. The combination of the intricate detail together with the properties of marble and the very basic hand tools Michelangelo used to create this seems humanely impossible. Not only did he have to envision the sculpture, a creative feat in itself, he then had to make his hands do what his brain saw, through an impossibly hard medium. Talent—is quite an understatement.
Finally, and this has taken hold of me in a way I cannot relinquish, the metaphor of the teaching. This is the one that teaches that we are all in the hands of a sculptor. I can only attribute this grip to one phrase the pastor used. He said, in paraphrase, “The sculptor has to chip away all of the parts that are not the final product. Sometimes, we are sure that the parts of us that have been chipped away were essentials parts to what we will eventually become. Yet there they lay, discarded on the ground”. In that moment, as soon as he said those words, I was immediately aware that THAT was exactly what I believed. All of the essential parts of what I thought I needed to become who I thought I should be were lying discarded on the ground, mocking me from under my feet.
The disillusionment of life—as it is played from life as it was imagined—can be dismantling. I have consistently lived believing that life imagined and life played out are a direct correlation to our ownership of responsibilities, ambitions and work ethic. If these all align than the life imagined is the life played out.
Though there is some truth to this idea, there are constantly disruptors that prevent the manifestation of our ideal lives. Deaths, births, job losses, finances, disease and heartbreak to name a few. Many of these unavoidable life detours can ravage us and spit us out, leaving just shells of what we once were. Those are the moments that we are convinced that those parts of us that seemed essential to our magnificence are tossed to the ground as scraps.
The beauty of this promise that the pastor was teaching is that we are wrong. What a welcome error. It is in this error that we find hope. The discards were always meant to be a part of the process. Without them, we remain a forgettable rock.
References: https://www.michelangelo-gallery.com/michelangelo-quotes.aspx
