Symbolism: The Glory of Escutcheoned Doors, Mark Patrick Hederman, Veritas, Dublin, 2007 – a review.
(The Furrow, November 2007, pp.635-637)
I got off to a happy start with Symbolism: the glory of escutcheoned doors: there, on p.3, was one of my favourite quotations, one from Elizabeth Barrett Browning. It was a serendipitous choice, and set the tone for what followed.
The book is a collection of essays, linked by the theme of symbolism, grouped under three headings: biography (including autobiography); art, and liturgy.
Part One, on biography, contains reflections from the author’s childhood which include a remarkable experience with his computer and the internet. Annapurnas of the mind is a really good story.
There is a thread of humour running through the book, especially in this first part. I found myself laughing with Hederman as he evoked memories of his past, and nodding in agreement as something struck a responsive chord with me. This was an easy and enjoyable read. But his humour makes valuable points, as when, with tongue in cheek, he describes an objective assessment as ‘a picture of the world from nobody’s point of view’. (p.25)
While reminiscing, he keeps his focus: ‘We have been educated out of myth and magic’. (p.41) We live in a world de-sensitized to symbols. From the time of the Enlightenment, with its focus on rationality, scientific method, and mathematical precision, we have lost a sense of poetry, the imagination, the non-rational, and have been the losers for it. But the book is not a moan about lost times: Hederman welcomes Harry Potter, saying that J. K. Rowling ‘is doing more for imagination than any other single force in our thoroughly bleak and business-like century’. (p.40) ‘Symbols…. are there to show us a vastness and a possibility way beyond the compass of our mental capacities. They constitute a language, they present a structure, they offer an understanding which we must renounce our limited mindset to engage’. (p.95) Jesus knew this; he taught in parables, he used paradoxes, and drew pictures in people’s imagination: ‘See the lilies of the field…’ For the author, there is a path out of the loss of “the heart” – it is liturgy. If art expresses life, liberates and gives meaning to it, that, too, is a side-effect of liturgy.
Part Two looks at art and artists, especially Holbein and van Gogh. I found the two chapters on the latter very illuminating. While van Gogh left the church of his childhood, he did not turn his back on the Christian faith, continuing to find in it the inspiration of his art, writing, just two years before his death, that he saw Jesus as ‘the supreme artist, more of an artist than all the others, disdaining marble and clay and colour, working in the living flesh’. (p.85) Perhaps he was a prototype of Bonhöffer in his “religionless Christianity”, or, in a different way, of Patrick Kavanagh. In this vein, Hederman comments perceptively about our society that ‘neither mythology nor religion are capable of moving the people of our contemporary world. That is why, in times when both politics and religion are found wanting, we have to rely on artists’. (p.55) Van Gogh’s paintings, he says, ‘are liturgies which unfold the mystery of God’s presence in our day-to-day world, more powerfully, perhaps, than any written word can do. Learning to be in the presence of such artworks is akin to learning how liturgy can move us towards life’. (p.87) In this context, his interpretation of van Gogh’s A Pair of Shoes is illuminating.
The chapter on icons opened them up for me. I knew they were meant to be more than merely religious paintings in a particular style, but I did not know what more. It was refreshing, while also unsettling, to read that ‘… it is the icon that is beholding you, not the other way round…. In the icon we do not see God as an object to be contemplated, but as a subject contemplating us as viewers’. (p.114) And the realization, for the first time, that icons are unframed, and why, was also a wake-up. Icons ‘… are not meant to create pious sentiments and/or psychological moods in the viewer; they are meant to be the most immediate (without media) communication: windows into another world’. (p.115)
Part Three, on liturgy, has some very quotable quotes that jumped out at me from the pages. I liked especially Boris Pasternak: ‘You rose from the dead on the day you were born, but you didn’t realize it.’ (p.138) Hederman adds that resurrection means we rise from the dead today and every day, not just at the last day. (pp.137-8) ‘Resurrection means standing up and moving heavenward’. (p.138)
‘The work of the people in liturgy is to process shared experience through the normative narratives, images, metaphors and symbols of that community’. (p.141) Yes, but we are a long way from that, aren’t we?
‘Ex opere operato…. means that God will not renege on this promise to be there, no matter how deficient the presence may be at the other side of the equation, namely our side. Whatever else happens, God will be there’. (p.146) I liked that a lot.
‘The liturgy is not a book that we read, a ceremony that we perform, an illustration of some principle that we believe in; it is a deed that we do and one which makes immediately present the time and space of God’s redeeming act…’ (p.154) Eucharist is a verb more than a noun.
Perhaps something on the role of silence and contemplation in the liturgy as an opening to the non-rational would have been welcome, but maybe that is the work of another day.
I enjoyed this original book; I found it refreshing and challenging. It opened up escutcheoned doors for me that I hadn’t known were there, perhaps because ‘Through a chink too wide there comes in no wonder’. (Patrick Kavanagh) Hederman invites the reader to go beyond the role of spectator observing the thought and work of others in finding or fashioning symbols that give meaning and motivation. He encourages personal entry into the process: ‘the most important symbol of all is you yourself as an active part in a greater whole’, (p.7) and, ‘Each of us must find our own symbols and our own mythology’. (p.49) ‘We are architects of our future selves, of our own future. We can become whatever we choose to become. This does not just happen, it is done’. (p.158) One does not need to go across the mountains or over the sea to find such symbols: ‘any element, or thing, or person, in our world can be the bread and wine which is transformed into this body and blood’. (p.91) Many of us find our sacred space in nature, and our epiphanies in peak experiences such as a moment of reconciliation. Rather than demythologize the world, including the scriptures, perhaps we should remythologize ourselves. ‘Our whole life is a “remembering” of ourselves. This means that it takes us a whole lifetime to catch up with ourselves, to grow into the reality we have become by that mystery’. (p.145) This is a call to awareness, especially self-awareness, an awakening to the power of the symbol to go beyond the word and the concept, into a realization of the presence of God in the here and now.