Oh how much I’d been looking forward to this, after five weeks in Los Angeles with nary a chance to make it to my favorite place in town. You can have the Arclight, Gladstone’s, Venice Beach, and the Promenade; go ahead, take LACMA and Griffith Observatory while you’re at it.

Just give me The Getty Center, that’s all I ask; in fact, just give me the North Pavilion at The Getty Center, with its singular devotion to illuminated manuscripts in a country that by and large considers the “lettering arts” an oxymoron. You can have South, East, and West.

And give it to me on a quiet Friday evening at sundown after a week of road rage in the valley below, when its travertine courtyard seems to be suffused with the same ingredients once used by the scribes and illuminators of yesteryear.

That was the plan at least, with only days left before my flight home, and with it my last chance to see the Imagining Christ exhibit at The Getty.

But we know what happens to the greatest laid plans, and there I was in bumper-to-bumper traffic just to enter the parking garage. “On a Friday night?!” I shouted at the windshield twenty minutes into the wait. “In L.A.? Shouldn’t these people be at a premiere or something?”

Turns out they were there for “Fridays off the 405,” which upon exiting the tram I discovered was a once-a-month club scene in the middle of the courtyard, replete with a deejay and cash bar to ruin the peace, and standing floodlights to wash out the travertine.

Alright, you can have the North Pavilion, too, once a month on Friday nights.

Into the exhibit I went, though, this being my one and only chance. The other great thing about manuscript exhibits at The Getty, besides their singularity, is their manageability. All I had at this point was forty-five minutes to closing time, but I could do it in forty with a quick shot to the bookstore before the trip back down to my car.

So around the room I went, taking in the exquisite samples from prayer books of the Medieval and Renaissance faithful, a people whose comparative lack of access to the Bible that we enjoy today left them largely dependent on such illuminations and their accompanying text “to participate, through art and prayer, in Christ’s suffering and salvation.” (A little more lack of access in our day might not be such a bad thing.)

And imagine Christ they did, from circumcision to crucifixion, from disembodied hands and feet floating mid-air around his wounded heart to his underground rescue of a gray-haired Adam in Hades. Here, Simon Bening’s “The Mass of St. Gregory,” depicting Gregory the Great’s vision of Christ at the communion table after a parishioner openly challenged him on the reality of transubstantiation; there, Mesrop of Khizan’s “Saint John the Evangelist,” which renders the Logos as a blue bolt from heaven targeting the exile’s mouth as the jagged edges of his cave on Patmos form a kind of undulating halo.

Yet more enjoyable than any of the images and the breathtaking lettering was the simple realization that struck me in the gallery as its walls were thumping softly with the music outside: the parade that rained on my plans for an evening of serenity was all the more fitting an occasion in which to imagine Christ.

For this was exactly the kind of circumstance he must have found himself in again and again: his flight to a quiet and perhaps favorite place ends with hordes of desperate people on his every trail. In my case the ruined respite is a form of being spoiled; but in his case it must have been a form of suffering in its own right, and one that merits our imaginative consideration as much as the more majestic or bloody motifs do. Pardon the pun, but really…the poor guy.

Then I came home to New York and learned belatedly that The Getty has issued a flock of goats to clear the surrounding hills of their highly flammable brush. Imagine that.