Dispatch 5 from the Seminary

by Susan Barnes

Every January, between the fall and spring semesters, the usual rhythm of classes at the Episcopal Theological Seminary of the Southwest gives way. Each student chooses a single course for an intensive period of study that month. In addition to traditional academic courses, there are such offerings as a workshop in centering prayer, and fieldwork assignments with social-service agencies, or with multicultural parish ministries in other states. This is a tremendously fruitful time, and even though it may involve very hard work, we all seem to come back from it refreshed by the change of pace and the new perspectives we gain on the role of ministry in our own lives and those of others.

This January, Durstan McDonald, Dean of the seminary, asked me to team-teach with him a course in Rome-yes, in Rome. He knew that during my doctoral studies in art history I had lived in Rome for two years, and that I was eager to share my love for the place with my fellow students. We decided to offer a course of ten days on the subject of Christian Art and Spirituality in Rome. We limited the group to fifteen, so we could move around the city together in public transport and on foot without too much confusion.

In some ways I was well prepared for this assignment. While working at the Dallas Museum of Art I had led groups of members to Italy, Sicily, and France. Those were luxury-accommodation trips (except in Sicily, where for several nights we sacrificed style for the privilege of staying adjacent to ancient temple complexes). On the DMA trips we sought out masterpieces of all subjects, periods, media, and cultures-in cities and the countryside, in museums and private collections. Once, after becoming a committed Christian, I had led a small group of Christian friends for several days in Rome, looking at the art and architecture of the city as they had been shaped by Christianity from about 300 to 1700.

When Dean McDonald and I first agreed on the course a year ago, I thought that prior trip would be the blueprint for this one and drew up the itinerary accordingly. We would begin in the fourth century-in the catacombs and the churches built by Constantine after he made Christianity the religion of the Roman Empire-and continue more or less chronologically through the brilliant work of Gian Lorenzo Bernini, who between about 1625 and 1675 had overseen the decoration of St. Peter's, and designed several major urban areas, including St. Peter's Piazza.

To prepare, the class were reading articles on spirituality in early Christian, medieval, and Counter-Reformation times. I read as much as I could about the history of Christian Rome (Richard Krautheimer's Rome: Profile of a City, 312-1308 is extraordinary, by the way, the product of decades of research and reflection). We concentrated on churches, taking advantage of the unique opportunity Rome offers to see religious art in the places it was made for. (Museums inevitably remove an art work from its original context, and from the meaning that context conveys.)

As the time to go drew near, I began to change my mind-not about the sites, but about the way to approach them. Our subject was Art and Spirituality, after all. The emphasis needed to be on the latter. When I was an art historian (and determinedly rejecting religion), I visited churches as if they were museums and felt no constraint about lecturing there, if there were no service in progress. I had gone in and out of churches to see a single altarpiece or ensemble, judging them purely as art works, not works of faith. Some of the churches of Rome are masterpieces of architecture themselves, and many contain masterpieces of painting and sculpture. But the course at hand was not an art history course-quite the contrary. It was, first off, the opportunity for us to visit and to pray in places where Christians had worshipped for hundreds of years, where they had given form to their evolving understanding of the Triune God, and where they had experienced and expressed their spirituality. Art history was just one tool to inform our visits.

Dean McDonald's purpose-to foster an enduring experience for each student-guided me. My job was not to mediate people's experiences, but to help them move around Rome to wonderful places, so that they could have their own spiritual encounters. In the end, the group went to every place that was proposed and that time allowed. My background remarks were minimal, more about history than art, and delivered beforehand. We traveled together, but we visited the churches as individual pilgrims. Male and female, single and married, ranging in age from twenty-three to seventy plus, we came with a wide variety of backgrounds and experiences. Each of us was on our own spiritual journey. Each of us had preoccupations that shaped our encounters with the holy in the places we visited. Most every day we gathered before dinner to pray together and to share our impressions.

After thirty years as a museum professional (and-alas-something of an art snob), I was blessed to rethink many things. I already knew that the faithful find holiness in images that are not notable artistically. On this trip I saw how well people who aren't burdened with the structures and prejudices of art history can find spiritual power and meaning in places that the guidebooks never note. It was also freeing and enlightening to hear my colleagues' fresh responses to the things they saw and felt through their own gifts. One who is a deeply talented musician saw each church as a liturgical theater waiting to be animated with instruments and voices. Another woman, a sensitive graphic artist, revealed to us the complex layers of symbolism in mosaic decorations. A highly intuitive young man found interesting people and drew them out in conversation wherever he went. How poor our experience would have been if it had been only about art.

Of course, many of the art masterpieces were spiritually affective, too. Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel ceiling and Last Judgment are unparalleled in religious power. One of the most challenging and moving works for several of us was Caravaggio's Doubting Thomas, on loan in a temporary exhibition. And, looking through spiritual eyes, I saw Bernini's St. Theresa in Ecstasy anew-as a delicate and deeply nuanced interpretation of the saint's own writings, not as the worldly, titillating tableau that my agnostic self had imagined.

When I came to seminary two and a half years ago, I pretended I had closed the door on art history. In the meanwhile I have understood that closing doors is God's business, not mine. Whether this was the first of many trips to Rome with colleagues, or one of a kind, matters not. In part through my colleagues' eyes, God has given me new, more meaningful ways to see art works that I thought I knew before. God has shown me how well these works speak for themselves to sensitive people who encounter them. And God has taught me something about the sanctity that accrues in places where millions of faithful people have worshipped for centuries.

A former curator and arts administrator, seminarian Susan Barnes is co-author of a forthcoming catalogue raisonné of the paintings of Anthony van Dyck, from Yale University Press.