The Artist at Home 5 comments

By Jessica Mesman Griffith

We live in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains, on a pitted gravel road near a stable and a dilapidated dairy barn. We live in a cloud of red dust; it’s a losing battle keeping shoes and rugs and furniture clean. Sometimes I’m overcome by a fit of housekeeping, and I scrub the floors and the baseboards and the doors and porches. I clear the weeds out of the herb beds and plant bright seasonal flowers in pots and set them on the front steps. I sweep the cobwebs out of all the corners. But it’s futile—nature is voracious and will have reclaimed her authority by the time I hang the broom on the hook.

This is the most beautiful place I’ve ever lived, and I recognize its virtues, but all the same the wildness of it unnerves me—the volume of insects, rodents, and snakes, the massive stands of trees, the deer and horses nosing through the burnished grass. Maybe it’s just that I’m a city girl. But I’ve never related to those who feel most connected to God in nature. The natural world may be by turns thrilling and soothing, but either way its excess makes me feel terribly small and improbable, and any personal connection with God nearly as impossible as keeping the house clean.

Lately I have longed for another kind of extravagance. When we lived in South Bend and Pittsburgh—not exactly landmarks of natural beauty, though they have their charms—I could wander a few blocks and find a dark, empty church, doors open, ceilings arched and cavernous, altarpieces, stained glass, and paintings from all over the world forgotten in their long years of service, reliquaries and tabernacle sparkling in the dim light, a single candle burning at all hours to indicate the presence of something greater still.

In South Bend there were two such churches in our neighborhood, directly across from each other: St. Patrick’s and St. Hedwig’s. Their seeming redundancy speaks to what I’m after here. It’s hard to imagine a time when two ornate Catholic churches so near each other would have been necessary. Maybe there never was such a time, and necessary isn’t the right word. Each church was a unique expression of the communities who worshipped there, the Irish and the Polish immigrants of South Bend. Each building testifies to a particular set of beliefs, traditions, and desires; each speaks in a different voice but to the same God, a personal God who can receive our worship and respond to our need.

I remembered those churches during Thanksgiving week, when I visited an artist in her Chicago home and studio. From the outside it could have been any Chicago bungalow, especially at dusk in the dreary rain, but beyond the threshold it was radiant with particularity, every aspect tended by the artist’s eye.

She collects stained glass, icons, paintings, sculptures, tiles, textiles, marionettes, china teacups, and while none of it is randomly displayed, neither does it seem fussy or calculated. There’s a naturalness in the arrangement that makes the house seem alive with her presence and direction. In this context, even an item of minor significance, religious or otherwise, might take on a kind of mystery and dignity.

In her home, I felt the same sort of interior kindling, that quickening of heart and breath that I felt sitting in St. Hedwig’s during the Easter Vigil. Maybe it’s the same sort of rush that someone else would feel only on a mountaintop, or in the desert, or on a long quiet walk in the woods.

Back at home, when compelled toward order and cleanliness, desperately scrubbing and sweeping, trying to push back the chaos always lurking on the edges of life, I’ve been trying in vain to surround myself with sterility, with order. But that’s no more inspiring to me than the excess I’m beating back. Maybe the antidote to my swooning under the weight of creation is in those forgotten churches, and in the artist’s studio—in the counter-opulence of what the human artist, responding to the world in belief and wonder, can create.