Sherry W at Intentional Disciples has a thought-provoking post on a subject that has interested me for a long time – Hispanic religious art, especially folk art.
Christianity, of course, is the quintessentially incarnational religion. We worship a God who was born of a woman, who was circumcised, who got hungry and thirsty and so ate and drank, who knelt down and washed his friends' feet, who bled and died. Mexican crucifixes portray this very tangible, very human God more strikingly, perhaps, than any other religious art I can think of. They can be unsettling. In fact, they can be downright disgusting. And that is a good thing. Long before Mel Gibson shocked the world by reminding it that crucifixions were quite an unpleasant business, Spanish and indigenous artists were doing the same thing for Catholics of the newly colonized Americas – people whose daily lives made them far more familiar with the reality of physical violence and pain than most of us will ever be. And that is a truth worth reminding ourselves of from time to time. Christ suffered not just by our anesthetized 21st-century standards, but by any standards. His Passion, as depicted in the rough, graphic style of Spanish colonialism, could provoke tears of compassion not only from missionary priests, but also from conquistadors, many of whom had seen men killed; and from their Indian converts, many of whom were suffering terribly themselves.
In Values in a Time of Upheaval, Pope Benedict says: “The face of Jesus is the face of God. That is what God looks like. Jesus, who suffered for us and forgave his enemies while dying on the cross, shows us how God is.” I try to think in those terms every time I see a crucifix -- “That is what God looks like.” In her post, Sherry W imagines the worshippers in those little colonial churches of New Spain hundreds of years ago, and she asks an intriguing, unanswerable question: Did they -- poor and uncatechized and absorbed as they were with questions of simple survival -- did they know that God loved them? Looking at their crucifixes, I think they did.
As long as we're on the subject of Hispanic religious folk art, let me show off one of my prized possessions. Sherry W likes ex-votos and so do I. Here's one that hangs in my den. It recounts the miraculous healing, following prayers to the Virgin of Juquila, of a merchant who became gravely ill after he sat on a scorpion. Faith doesn't get any more real-life than that.
Memorare, O piissima Virgo Maria....
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