A Thinning Veil

a sermon preached by Rev. Khleber M. Van Zandt V at First Unitarian Church of Alton, Illinois, October 31, 2010,

after a reading from Rev. Richard S. Gilbert:

Why are we so careless with time?

Why do we not sound the music of our hearts?

Why do we not feel the stage beneath our feet?

Is it not time to enjoy the interval?

Is it not time to play our own melody?

Is it not time to act our part?

Life is a brief interval between birth and death.

May we celebrate the interval with joy;

May we sing the song that belongs to us;

May we act as if our very life depended on it.

It does.

Linda and I visited the St. Louis Art Museum earlier this year for a show entitled The Mourners: Tomb Sculptures from the Court of Burgundy. The mourners to whom the title refers are 40 small figures, sculpted in alabaster in the 15^th century by Claus Sluter and his students in Dijon, Burgundy. The figures are part of the elaborate tomb of Jean sans Peur, John the Fearless, who was the Duke of Burgundy from 1404 to 1419. The tomb was originally placed in a monastery in Dijon, but was removed after the French Revolution to the Musee des Beaux-Arts in that town. And now, by agreement among several museums, all the solemn little mourners in this perpetual funeral procession are traveling the world, out and about to see and be seen.

I don’t actually suppose figures in alabaster can see. But if you look closely, you find that they all have eyes, even the ones with their hoods pulled close around their faces - look up under the hoods, and you see little faces in alabaster. Even under the cowls, the faces are sculpted in minute detail and in a realistic style, all expressing emotion in personal ways. Some of the mourners are shown wringing their hands or drying their tears, others appear lost in contemplation, still others hide their faces in the deep folds of their robes. Some of the heads and faces are fully exposed, others in more traditional attitudes of mourning and devotion - heads down, shoulders stooped, hands clasped.

In the press packet that accompanied the opening of the show, the director of the Musee des Beaux-Arts says, “we cannot help but be struck by the emotion they convey as they follow the funeral procession, weeping, praying, singing, lost in thought, giving vent to their grief, or consoling their neighbor. Mourning, (these figures) remind us, is a collective experience, common to all people and all moments in history."

Besides the emotion, I was also struck by other sculptural details. For instance, the long, heavy robes of the figures flow in easy folds, the exterior and interior surfaces of the garments finished in different textures, some of fur. (How one makes rock look like fur, I’m not sure, but there it is.)

These mourners in alabaster are really small miracles of artistic expression, meant originally to pay homage to a particular Duke, but now, showing us through this medium of medieval piety a complex and emotional response to questions of mortality and death. Six hundred years ago, sculpting figures in stone was a proper and pious response when an important person met his maker or when grief needed to be expressed publicly and communally. Not so much anymore.

The Mourners were fascinating, both as artistic accomplishment and as exposition of the response to death half a millennium ago. A more modern exposition accompanied these old mourners, and I must say it was rather more affecting to at least one post-modern visitor - me.

Bill Viola is a contemporary artist who works in video and sound media, and his visual piece, “The Visitation,” was on display at the Art Museum as a counter-point to the Mourners. I can’t show you the video because it still belongs to Mr. Viola, but I would like to try to shaqre with you some of what I experienced there that day.

Linda and I had wandered around the room where the little stone mourners were displayed for quite awhile, and then we stepped out of that medieval world into another world, into another space near the exit to the Mourners display. I don’t remember that it was even marked, it was just a tiny hallway that opened up into a small, dark room - dark walls, dark floor, dark ceiling. After my eyes made the adjustment to the dark, I noticed, on the far wall in the shadows, an area of shimmering light slowly appearing. It was like a dimly-lit curtain being blown by a gentle breeze. In the distance, far away through the curtain, more light gathered. Without shape at first but slowly coming into focus was an oval of light, then something vaguely human - no, not one but two human forms, standing, looking out in my direction, out into the space in which I sat. These figures seemed, not like ghosts, exactly, but like the embodied spirits of people I knew who had gone on to the other side, maybe my mother - and her mother.

With what looked like great hesitation on their part, they began walking - clinging closely to one another - toward the curtain, and they became more and more obviously human as they did so. When they got close, almost close enough to touch, they stopped, like they’d reached a boundary of some kind - the curtain still shimmering between us. After a moment, one figure leaned closer and, as she did, she contacted the curtain, which was actually a curtain of water. It was like sticking your face in a waterfall, with the water splashing aside and parting for your face, and then the rest of her followed, stepping partially through the wall of water where she turned to wait on her companion to follow. The second figure touched the curtain, and it parted for her as well, spraying in all directions but allowing them both to move eventually through to our side of the watery veil.

As they came through the water and reached our side, I remember them looking at each other as if to make sure that the other had come through the wall well enough. Then, after they had checked on each other, ever so slowly they began to turn and look out from where they stood toward us. As they looked, their emotions obviously ran the gamut - excitement in being here (apparently) again, thrilled to be able to see what they were seeing and to experience what they were experiencing. Intense joy as if seeing someone dear to your heart whom you thought you’d never, ever see again. Elation as if you could hear the music and see the dancers and you were about to be freed from the bonds that kept you from joining in the dance.

But something else, too, began to show in their countenances. A wistfulness and realization that they could no longer join in, that they no longer belonged on this side. A recognition that the dance that is so all-consuming necessarily involves pain and loss and confusion and fear. And finally, a comprehension that they no longer needed to accept such pain and loss and confusion and fear for themselves. They had their place, and it wasn’t here, and as painful as it was to let go of this world and let go of this life and let go of us and turn around and go back through the wall of water, the thin veil that separates their world and ours, they did. They started back away from us, splashing through the curtain, and continuing to walk away and fade into the distance, back into a shimmering oval of dim light, and then out of sight once again.

I was crying. Linda was crying. After a moment, people started to move in the space around us and leave the room. So we stood and walked away.

Linda and I visited Pompeii a couple of weeks ago. You may remember that Pompeii was a thriving city on the Italian peninsula that was buried in the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 C.E. It has been in the process of excavation for decades now; there’s much more to go, but enough of the town center and major buildings and private homes have been uncovered to give one a sense of the size and the dynamism of the city when it was alive. It’s bigger than we ever thought it might be, and we walked and walked for hours and hours on cobblestone streets through ruins galore. When we thought we couldn’t go much further, we found some interesting steps down into an orchard where olive trees stood in rows behind a fence. In one corner of the orchard was a modern structure, a metal roof, walls of glass, and a concrete floor with a few objects laid out on display.

I remember seeing these objects in a magazine, maybe a National Geographic, years ago when I was small. They were intriguing to me then, but not like they were now, right before my eyes.

As you can see, they are human forms, faceless, but human - plaster casts, actually. As archeologists excavated this orchard and other places around Pompeii, they would encounter these odd voids in the compressed ash. Someone had the brilliant idea to fill the voids with plaster, and lo and behold, the voids were places where people had died, probably in the blast of heat from the initial eruption or perhaps in the rain of ash that followed, and as their bodies lay where they had died, their impressions were left in the ash before they dissipated and returned to the earth.

It was quiet in that orchard, and peaceful away from the crush of tourists. The sun was shining and then dipping behind huge tufts of white cloud; birds were singing in the warm autumn air. Standing there, being with those forms was as near a spiritual experience as I had in all of Italy. And I wanted to remember that moment with those people, whoever they had been so long ago.

As I quietly snapped photos to remember the moment by, I realized I was seeing something in the viewfinder that was unexpected. I was taking pictures of the plaster casts, but there was something else there in the frames: Shadows where they shouldn’t have been. Light shifting above the forms. But these people had been dead since the year 79! There can’t be any spirits left here, can there?

Oh, well, now I see. These are just reflections in the glass of the other, living people who have come to view the bodies with us. See, I knew there would be an easy explanation: of course we know rationally and scientifically that whatever we think we see beyond the veil is but a reflection of our own fears and longings.

Still. Those plaster casts drew a response from somewhere deep within me. I had to tell myself, those are not people, only plaster in the form of people. And still.

The shadows and light I see in the pictures are illusions. They’re only reflections, I had to tell myself. And still.

There’s something about these plaster forms of people, young and old, who died alone or together, obviously suffering or seemingly peaceful, that reaches out to me. There’s something about sharing a beautiful fall day in a beautiful Pompeian orchard with lives that were extinguished two millennia ago that says to me, “Live while you can. None of this is forever.”

I saw something similar in Bill Viola’s video ‘Visitation’: there’s something oddly comforting about watching the forms and faces of two who’ve already crossed over take a step back towards this world only to realize the folly of such a thing and turn and leave again.

A similar message in that perpetual funeral procession of little sculpted mourners from 15^th-century Burgundy: we all mourn the brevity of this existence - always have, always will. Yes, we mourn for our loved ones. Yes, we mourn also for ourselves. But mourning is not the last word.

Today is Halloween and in our culture that means we’ll be inundated by bizarre and sometimes cheesy images of the macabre. The holiday that began as an attempt to help us overcome our fear of the thin veil and our dread of death itself has now become a massive consumer industry selling costumes and candy and fake front-yard cemeteries. But facing our finitude requires more than one holiday a year. Responding to questions of mortality requires more interior reflection than simply deciding which Styrofoam headstone to display on your lawn.

A mature response to the certainty of death requires more of us: it requires that we become conscious of the brevity of our time here; it requires that we recognize that, for today, we can sing our song and play our part; and it requires that we realize, right now, that we can hear the music and see the dancers and join in the dance.

Tell your loved ones that you love them, and give them a hug while you can.

In Richard Gilbert words from our reading this morning: