My favorite part of Catholisism is the art. Specifically the saints and the depictions of Hell. If you get a hankering to cruise Goodle image search for Catholic pictures of Hell, look for the toads. They're everywhere! In almost every picture I've seen, there are toads eating people in Hell. And as for the saints... there is one Saint in particular that I can't really stop thinking of. Her name is Saint Lucy. If you look up pictures of her, she often has a pair of eyes on a plate or on the end of stems as flowers. I was pretty grossed out by this the first time I saw it (and that's saying something as we had already gone through most of the saints). Apparently she had a young suitor who told her that he was so entranced by her eyes that he had to marry her (he didn't want her to enter a nunnery). So she scratched our her eyes in fear for his soul. Yeah, you read that right. She scratched out her eyes because she thought the might be the end of this poor boy's soul. I think what weirds me out most about the pictures are that the eyes are LOOKING at you. They're staring you down, as if to say "What are you looking at, punk? I was a sacrifice for the salvation of a soul. What have you done today?"
Brother Hansen has also spent a lot of time discussing how to "read" Catholic churches, cathedrals and such. Things like identifying saints, noticing the progression along the knave of the church (the human journey), and seeing the influence of the kings on art and architecture. It's made me want to go to Europe even more, to see how much I could figure out on my own. Anyways, I was just thinking about it, and since this is my blog, you are the unwitting victims of my train of thought.
3 comments:
O Michelle, this is one of the many things love about you. You see things the way I have seen them before.
I learned a lot of what you're talking about in my study of music and masses written for "the church." The offertory, the kyrie, the agnus dei. It's pretty interesting stuff. Art is a big part of it, but is most interesting to me when it tries to portray truth - but really doesn't.
Then, that's another lesson for another time.
I took a medieval history class a few years ago, and we had a group project where we had to make up a medieval city and do a presentation about it. Our city suffered all the worst of the middle ages, so we decided to name it "Lucia". She seemed like an appropriate saint for a city of disaster.
Do you have Bro. Gerald Hanson for your teacher? I had him for Doctrines of the Gospel when I was there, and he was my favorite religion teacher of all time.
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