Lexington, KY - In Kentucky, spring is often a concept rather than a season -
winter to summer in 60 seconds. This year there has been an unusual interval between those two life threatening periods. It was the season of storms. One evening when my wife and I were listening to TV weather advisories with the basement door open, Becky began talking about flowers and what to plant where.
I like flowers and applaud what Becky does with the home place each year, but I'm always puzzled by the amount of attention she gives to the narrow strip of yard between our house and our neighbor's driveway. It's pretty much out of sight to us, our neighbor and anyone passing by. Put the flowers where we can see them, and especially the plants that attract butterflies, I suggest. I don't push this, lest I be recruited for garden duty.
Actually, I do understand her caring for that little patch of earth. Some years ago Ann Thomas, a writer and wife of seminary classmate Phil, made a number of trips to Haiti where they worked with the sisters of the Society of St. Margaret. On the first visit Ann was taken with color: "These creative people decorate their taxis as well as the very shirts on their backs. I climbed the bell tower of the cathedral and found gaily painted window frames where only the pigeons could enjoy them."
And God, of course. Something beautiful for God.
There's a story behind the paintings in the Anglican cathedral in Port-au-Prince. In his 1963 book "Global Odyssey: Visiting the Anglican Churches," Howard A. Johnson wrote about them:
"Haiti, a country incapable, it would seem, of self-government, chronically in crisis, destitute and diseased, came at last to have a low opinion of itself -
one of the worst things that can happen to a nation or a person. Yet there were Haitian artists who tried to express beauty." These artists went to the local Roman Catholic archbishop, as Johnson describes, and showed him their designs, asking permission to paint their vision of the gospel on the Catholic cathedral's walls. He refused, citing the pure 14th-century Gothic design.
Then the artists went to Anglican Bishop Alfred Voegli. "He drew a deep breath. It took courage. 'Go ahead and paint,' he said."
Johnson wrote that Voegli must have wondered, as work progressed, what he had agreed to; as it turned out, it was a "renaissance of Haitian art and a new self-respect among the people of Haiti." Artists came from all over the globe be to look and laud.
"Imagine a whole transept given over to a depiction, Haitian version, of the wedding feast at Cana. The father of the bride, spruced up and transparently happy in a double-breasted suit, sits in a rocking chair, puffing on a cigar and nodding his benediction over the bridal pair and the friends who have come to rejoice. ... All at once it is not Cana of Galilee where this happened, though indeed it did happen there. It is happening now in Port-au-Prince.
"As your eye travels down from the mural it comes to rest on the same people you found within that mural. There they are -
hundreds of them, kneeling -
in Sunday best, spotless white, although many of them, carrying their shoes on their head, have walked half the night down the mountains to get to the cathedral."
The murals, of course, were broken up in the 2010 earthquake. It remains to be seen how much of the art, if any, will be recoverable.
No matter what happens, this is truth, that no work of beauty is ever wasted, even if only the pigeons or the butterflies enjoy it, or even if the beauty lives only in memory.
Just as, we might remember, no act of kindness, no matter how small, is ever wasted. It is also beautiful and pleasing to God.