Ordinary Saints

In the summer of 2009 my father passed away unexpectedly from a massive heart attack, dying instantly. Three months later, a week before her 80 birthday my mother passed as well — being freed from her darkest fear — outliving dad. I was left stunned that they had departed without health warnings, without any other preparation for their passing.

As executor of their affairs, I was able to simply get to work in the midst of loss. But after those first few months of task-orientation I was thrown into an emotional darkness that lasted almost a decade. As an artist, my way of moving through grief was to make paintings of my parents. In many ways this afforded me an advantage, a special way of coping with loss. Yet the experience of losing one’s parents is universal and death is “the great leveler.” Though death is inescapable, every culture in human history has looked for and desires continuance of life even if it is only an immortality afforded by art and architecture, poetry, music, literature — cultural artifacts that say, “I was here.” Those paintings of my deceased parents opened a path for me to paint all of my loved ones and friends — and this resulted eventually in the collaborative project Ordinary Saints with the poet Malcolm Guite and composer J.A.C. Redford.

every culture in human history has looked for and desires continuance of life

Some might think that to begin an artist’s statement with death is morbid or negative. But the Latin memento mori (“remember you must die”) is the ancient Christian call to hold your life with a loose grip. It summarizes the humble posture of one who commits to a life of spiritual discipline, humility, and service. Memento mori is the proper posture for human beings aware of their smallness in grand scheme of things. “For dust thou art and unto dust shalt thou return” says the Lord. And this smallness and fragility is the whole point of the Ordinary Saints collaboration.

Malcolm, Jac, and I have joined in this attempt to render, in paint, poetry, and music a glimpse of the glory of our mortal faces when turned toward God...faces that point toward the one Face we all must seek. The late novel by C. S. Lewis, Till We Have Faces, explores this ancient theme of facing ourselves, facing the other, and ultimately facing our Creator — seeking the Face of God. In Lewis’s story the protagonist, Orual, confronts the perennial problem of human duplicity (being “two-faced”) along with her own inability to let down her guard in trust and love. It is a story about the most basic human situation: our need to know and be known without fear. In short, it is a story about identity and the very basis of selfhood and relationship.

In this era of identity-confusion we three artists have taken a posture of mutual submission to one another’s work. We are seeking the Face of God in the faces of those we know — and in one another. As Malcolm says in the title poem for our project:

We are seeking the Face of God in the faces of those we know — and in one another

Our hope from the beginning of our work together has been that Ordinary Saints would help viewers and listeners get a little closer to letting down their guard—removing the mask that both conceals and reveals our deep need to be known — and to enable our audience to move a step closer to knowing that the eternal face of love can be glimpsed in the faces of both strangers and those closest to us — the ones we think we know. Our lives depend upon this vulnerability. Without it we live in isolation, cut off from intimacy and true community—which we need even more than sleep and food.

May the One who formed us and gave us faces, unveil the Face that frees us to love and trust again.

— Bruce Herman

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