Category: Our Sunday Visitor

Shifting borders: The remarkable art of Anastassia Cassady

Anastassia Cassady doesn’t have one particular style of painting — and that’s kind of her style.

Cassady, 35, who sometimes goes by her childhood nickname of “Tess,” is a painter, iconographer, mother of three young children, part-time high school art teacher, and something of a hurricane of words and ideas.

“I don’t have a personality disorder!” she said. “But I feel like there’s so much going on in my life, that to sit down and be in the same headspace every day would make me feel like a copy machine.”

Instead, she leans into what she calls her “erratic nature of switching styles.”

Her sister, a photographer and co-owner of an art gallery, says she can always spot Cassady’s work, though, because of her trademark color palette.

“The deep colors, the reds, the golds, that would have been in pysanky and in icons” are in all of Cassady’s works.

Cassady grew up in South Bend, Indiana, in a house heavily influenced by her Ukrainian mother.

“We had icons everywhere, in an age when icons weren’t cool,” she said.

She and her five siblings grew up making pysanky, the intricate, jewel-toned traditional wax-resist Ukrainian Easter eggs, every year.

“All Lent, that was our penance on Fridays: water, bread and pysanky,” she said.

Cassady, an Eastern-rite Catholic who is a parishioner at both the local Ukrainian church and the cathedral in South Bend, has worked hard to instill a sense of Ukrainian heritage in her own children — and also to retain a sense of humor about the faith she learned from her parents. She recalled the evening when her father, a convert, once again tried to corral his kids to say family prayers, waving away their excuses and hollering at them to sit down.

“He played in the NFL; he was a big guy. But he had a soft reading voice, and he would say, ‘And the angel of the Lord declared to Mary –‘”

A sudden burst of flatulence, courtesy of her brother, interrupted the angel’s words. Their father finished the thought: “WOULD YOU SHUT THE H*** UP?”

“He tried so hard to push this piety on us. We ate him alive,” she laughed.

This push and pull between the sacred and the lighthearted seems to be another hallmark of Cassady’s work. A family portrait she painted is something of a puzzle, including dozens of references to various artists. Her watercolor of St. Benedict, one of the illustrations from the 2023 book “Saints: A Family Story,” shows him relatively young, his head mere inches away from the feathers of an incoming raven. Even her icons, which she writes with careful adherence to tradition, have a blithe feel to them.

Fresh it may be, but her work is not careless; it is born of hard-won skill. Cassady teaches her students at Trinity School at Greenlawn, where every student learns art history and studio art, how to master tools and techniques in a methodical way, and how to put them to use with intention, with a thorough foundation of art history.

“It’s not just about ‘expressing themselves,’” she said. “If you want to express yourself, you have to understand the process, the technicalities.”

Cassady wishes some priests, especially those choosing artwork for their parishes, had taken art history in seminary. They have good intentions, but many have never been formed aesthetically.

“People just kind of streamline one style as beautiful. They just want to go back to neoclassical,” she said. But that just won’t work if the building is more suited to cubist art, or art deco.

She will argue with potential clients if she doesn’t like their ideas, and has turned down some large commissions because experience tells her the project as requested would look awful.

Cassady has high standards for herself, as well. One rule she keeps: As long as she’s working on a piece of secular art, she also has to be working on an icon.

Perhaps counterintuitively, Cassady speaks of icon painting as a process in which the artist’s  grip on the reins of control is looser …. Read the rest of my latest for Our Sunday Visitor. 

Faith on S.T.A.G.E.: Lee Hotovy marks 25 years of student theater

Theater director Lee Hotovy was trying to perform “The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe” with her troupe of young actors. Hotovy, who founded S.T.A.G.E. student theater 25 years ago, thought the beloved story of four children discovering Narnia would be perfect for the organization’s mission: to evangelize, educate and entertain.

But it wasn’t going well. She couldn’t make the script work for her group, and every time she made a change, it got more expensive. The problems multiplied, and it just wasn’t going to work. Time to pivot.

Hotovy was homeschooling six of her children at the time, and her son suggested a play focusing on boys. Her first idea was to dramatize the life of St. John Bosco, but she quickly realized there was a “John Bosco” right in her backyard. About an hour away from Lincoln, Nebraska, where S.T.A.G.E. is based, was the original Boys Town, founded by Father Edward Flanagan. And that wasn’t the only personal connection. Hotovy’s mother had been a secretary at Boys Town, and her husband’s step-grandfather was one of the original five boys Father Flanagan rescued from the streets.

It felt like God’s will, so she pivoted again. Hotovy holed herself up in a cabin for several days, and somewhat grumpily sat down to write “Flanagan’s Boys: The Story of Boys Town.”

“That initial weekend was a battle of wills between me and God,” she laughed. “I was sort of, ‘Fine, I’ll do it. But you have to provide the Father Flanagan.’”

Hotovy is flexible. Part of her charism is building up kids who don’t have any obvious flair for theater to begin with. Children will join her group so shy that they barely move, but by the time production day comes, they are boldly acting and even singing and dancing before a crowd.

But building confidence is only one of the goals of S.T.A.G.E. Hotovy and her team work hard to produce something entertaining and engaging, with thoughtful dialogue, gripping drama, detailed sets and costumes and, yes, good acting.

God did send a Father Flanagan, and a great one — but not until the very last minute. As Hotovy prepared, she had to keep trusting God would hold up his end.

Relying on God is a lesson Hotovy, 63, has learned many times while producing two to four plays a year for decades. She often prays a novena of surrender to help her remember to hand the whole thing over to him.

It’s a lot. Her organization deals with the typical crises and chaos of any theater group — fumbled lines and missed cues, equipment that malfunctions, or the time when, two hours before Joan of Arc was due on stage, a prop handler accidentally tipped a can of black paint directly over her spotless white costume.

There’s also the added pressure of a specific mission of evangelization. S.T.A.G.E., which stands for Student Theatre and Godly Evangelization, uses drama to teach the faith, to the audience and also to the actors, the stagehands and everyone involved in the program.

Hotovy put on her very first plays in high school, when she and a friend from drama club produced little plays for elementary school kids to enjoy while munching on peanut butter sandwiches.

But in college, she set theater aside and went on to earn a degree in art, pursuing painting and graphic design as a career.

She married and began to raise a family, and some of her kids gravitated toward theater. One of her daughters had a small part in a community production of “Alice in Wonderland,” and Hotovy was disgusted to find that the company had injected sexual content into it, starting with the very first scene.

She thought, “Well, we can do as well as that. Maybe better.”

Read the rest of my latest for Our Sunday Visitor. 

I’m always looking for more Catholic and Catholic-friendly artists, performers, and others involved in the arts (restorers, architects, song writers, choreographers, etc.) to interview for this monthly profile! Please send suggestions to simchafisher at gmail dot com with “artist profile” in the title. Thanks!

John Wayne was scared

It was John Wayne’s birthday last week. You probably missed it, because Americans are not so madly in love with John Wayne, the ultimate masculine American man, as they used to be. I’m a moderate fan, at best; but on his birthday I read something that made me like him a lot more than I used to.

It’s a short excerpt from a book called “Miracle of Molokai,” and describes what happened when the famous actor visited the once-notorious Hawaiian island where victims of leprosy were segregated, and largely left to fend for themselves, for decades.

Here is an account of how Wayne’s appearance went:

As the plane touched down and taxied toward the welcome committee, hundreds of leprosy patients surged enthusiastically across the rope barrier and almost engulfed the plane. Their disease-scarred faces stared up at the little windows, searching for their famous guests.

Their crippled hands were extended and applauding. At last, the door was opened and John Wayne, America’s original man of macho, the strong, silent champion of little people, the fighter who used his fists and guns against incredible odds at Iwo Jima and in the wild, wild West, stepped out to greet them.

One of the residents of the island describes what happened next: “He took one look at all us lepers staring at him, then turn right around, got back into the plane and closed the door. He said he not coming out, seeing the patients, eh? Was scared. So he went back in.”

What a rotten, bitter end to the story that would have been. But that is not how it ended.

Instead, the other American manly man on board, actor James Arness, who played Matt Dillon on “Gunsmoke,” apparently had a little talk with Wayne. I don’t know what he told him, but after a few minutes of suspense, while the crowd waited in silent confusion, the door of the plane opened again and the two men stepped out. The crowd cheered, and Wayne walked up to the microphone and said something extraordinary.

“I came to give you courage,” he said, “but I took one look at what the disease has done to you and I knew I couldn’t do it. I wanted to go right back home. I was scared, but my buddy here, James Arness, talked to me and helped me get my wobbly legs out the door and down the ramp. I’m sorry I was scared and I wish you well.”

It’s one of the best things I’ve ever heard. He acknowledged what happened and why, he gave credit to the man who set him straight, and he apologized for the offense he caused.

I don’t want to make more of this story than is really there. John Wayne was not an especially virtuous man in general, that I’m aware of, and he certainly didn’t claim to be some kind of model Christian.

But when we hear a story of a widely admired man who comes down from on high to bring strength to the lepers — well, you tell me who springs to mind!

(It’s Jesus.)

The problem seems to have been that John Wayne, in this story, thought he was Jesus, who could bring about healing just by virtue of who he was. It turns out he was actually one of the lepers, one of the victims, one of the ones who was afraid and in need of being strengthened.

But here’s the neat part. … … Read the rest of my latest for Our Sunday Visitor. 

Image by Hugo van Gelderen / Anefo, CC BY-SA 3.0 NL, via Wikimedia Commons

Finding the sweet spot: Courtney Eschbach-Wells on singing at Mass

Courtney Eschbach-Wells has a “do not play” list for her funeral. Eschbach-Wells, 44, is not facing the grim reaper just yet, but as a lawyer, she likes to have her affairs in order. She’s also of Slavic descent, so she’s “morbid by nature,” she said.

Most importantly, she is a Catholic cantor, and over the last 20 years singing at St. Joseph’s Cathedral in the Diocese of Manchester, New Hampshire, she’s had abundant time to form strong opinions about hymns.

Eschbach-Wells, who has a clear, bright soprano voice, can’t remember a time when she didn’t sing.

“It’s as natural as breathing for me,” she said.

She sings in her garden, she sings to her chickens and her bees, she sang to her baby (now 14), she sings while commuting to work as a bill drafter for the New Hampshire General Court, and she tries not to distract her co-workers at the State House by singing at her desk.

She also has some strong opinions about that age-old question: why (other) Catholics don’t sing.

“We’re not a singing culture,” she said. “We don’t have a sporting culture where we sing; we don’t have a going-out culture where we sing.”

The one exception is karaoke, but that’s mainly something to do with a group of friends who have had too much to drink. Americans simply don’t readily sing in groups with people they don’t know, and that includes at Mass.

The popular recorded music people hear every day is so highly produced, it’s intimidating, Eschbach-Wells said, and makes them think they can’t sing unless they sound like that.

“But a good choir does not need a ton of Taylor Swifts. It just needs people who can try, and who can try to learn.”

That doesn’t mean any liturgical music will do.

“You’re trying to find that sweet spot where the choir serves two functions: song leadership, singing the hymn so you have voices to follow; and also providing something where, at certain points in the Mass, your active participation can be just listening. So the music works two ways,” she said.

And music does work, in a way that nothing else can.

“Music takes you out of yourself. It reaches a different part of your brain,” Eschbach-Wells said. For her, it’s old English hymns that hit the mark.

“There’s something about it that always plucks that perfect chord in my heart, like when you hit a tennis ball with a racket in just the right spot: ‘Ahhh, yeah, that’s it,” she said.

But the words of the hymn are important, too. Hymns are a wonderful way to learn Scripture; and sometimes they can hit an unsuspecting ear with surprising sharpness…. Read the rest of my latest for Our Sunday Visitor. 

This profile first appeared in OSV Magazine. Photos by Michael Richards.

Beauty in every body: The portraits of Igor Babailov

To paint a portrait, you first have to fall in love. This is what Igor Babailov believes, and he should know. The Russian-born artist, who’s made his home in the United States for 35 years, has painted hundreds of portraits, from George W. Bush to Nelson Mandela, from Patriarch Kirill of Russia to Akira Kurosawa to Hillary Clinton, and not one but three popes — John Paul II, Benedict XVI and Francis.

“I have to fall in love with the person I paint, otherwise it will never happen. It has to come from my heart,” Babailov said.

The artist, who is also a teacher and speaker, remembers unveiling Francis’ portrait to the pope, who listened attentively as he explained, through an interpreter, the composition of the work and all the details he had included.

“His eyes lit up when I pointed at the children,” Babailov said. “He loved children.” Francis pointed toward his own heart and murmured that he was touched.

The portrait is titled “The Holy Cross” and shows Francis standing under the Holy Family. Behind him, a faint rainbow traces a bridge between Hagia Sophia and the dome of St. Peter’s, which is lit from inside, with a line of pilgrims making their way toward the door. The composition of the entire piece is essentially cross-shaped, with Pope Francis at the center, covering his silver pectoral cross with his hands in a gentle, protective gesture, and looking heavenward with his characteristic placid smile.

Below him we see Francis in two vignettes emblematic of his papacy: in one, sheltering and embracing poor children, and in the other, about to press his lips to the newly washed foot of a dark-skinned person in a wheelchair.

“A portrait is not just a visual likeness; it’s the story of who the person is. That’s why I incorporated him washing feet. That was him in his heart. That was his nature,” Babailov said.

In fact, visiting prisoners — although he was too ill to wash feet, as in former years — was one of the last things Francis did. On Holy Thursday, he visited inmates at Regina Coeli prison in Rome; on Easter Monday, he died.

Photography vs. portraiture

It’s a tricky business, faithfully portraying a real human being with a complex life and legacy. But Babailov insists that a thoughtful painting is better than a photograph for preserving someone’s likeness for future generations.

“For some reason, we trust the camera. But a camera is a cold-blooded machine,” he said. It flattens everything, and it can’t make any decisions about what is and is not important in an image. An artist can make these distinctions and can organize a work to draw the eye first to what is most meaningful.

“Everything is important to a camera,” Babailov said. “But an artist can select.”

Babailov said that, although the three popes whose portraits he painted were very different, they all had in common a palpable sense of holiness. Not so with everyone who sits for one of his portraits! Babailov has accepted commissions for all sorts of people.

Although he spends hours gazing into the face of his subject — trying, in a sense, to read their souls — he never feels the need to edit out anything he sees or to flatter his subject.

“That never, ever, ever comes to my mind. Just the opposite: I see beauty in everyone,” he said. “That may sound strange. People have contradictions. But as a portrait painter, I have to fall in love with the person I paint.”

Trained to observe the human form

He is in love, in fact, with the human body itself, from the inside out. Babailov, whose father was a painter and whose mother was a teacher, painted his first portrait at the age of 4….Read the rest of my latest for Our Sunday Visitor. 

Why a cross?

Periodically, some wise guy will say, “Oh, and if Jesus had been shot by a firing squad, would you Christians wear a little golden gun around your neck? If he had been electrocuted, would you hang a decorative electric chair on the wall of your church?”

Maybe we would. What-ifs are not the same as theology, so I don’t know how it would have played out. All I know is how it did play out. It was a cross that Jesus died on. And that was not just an accident of history. 

Look at the shape of the cross: It extends up, down, left, and right, and approximately in the center, at the intersection of it all, is the heart of the dying man.

What is down? The soldiers, the rabble, the clergy, the grieving women, the few disciples who didn’t run away. The stony ground, blood-soaked soil and the whole heavy earth, burdened with its load of the living and the dead. 

What is up? The heavens, the Father who said not long before that he is well pleased with his Son. Up is where Jesus cast his eyes to ask the Father why he had abandoned him, and up is where he commended his spirit just before he died. 

What is left? The criminal who looks at Jesus and says, “Aren’t you supposed to be God? Then go ahead and get us out of this mess!” Essentially: You come here and do what I want, and do it right now (Lk 23:39).

What is right? The criminal who knows who he is and why he is where he is, but also knows who Jesus is, and how wrong it is that they are on the same level. He doesn’t ask or tell Jesus to go anywhere, and he doesn’t assume Jesus should do anything. He knows, though, where Jesus will go, and he asks to be remembered when he gets there (Lk 23:40-43).

On Palm Sunday, different people read the various speaking parts of the Passion; but really, everyone who is alive today is either the good thief or the bad thief. Suffering isn’t something we may or may not have to deal with; it’s inevitable. Sooner or later, we will find ourselves immobilized on one kind of cross or another, punished and rejected by someone or something in the world. Maybe we’ll suffer at the hands of an enemy, maybe at the hands of someone we love. Maybe we’re in pain because of our own bodies, or maybe because of our own decisions. But we will all find ourselves there: on the cross, suffering, helpless and looking at Jesus. 

Then we will have the choice. We can look at Jesus and tell him where to go and what to do, how to be God.

Or we can look at him and say, “I know who you are, and I know where you are going. Don’t forget me.” 

It’s not wrong to ask for things. It’s not wrong to tell God specifically what we want to happen, or to ask him to relieve our sufferings, whether we deserve them or not. But it is futile to tell him what he must do for us. How insane does the bad thief look, stuck like a bug to a wooden cross and still somehow thinking he has some kind of power?

The other thief was just as immobilized, just as doomed, just as powerless, but from that spot, what he chose to say to God was: “I know who you are. Remember me.” He trusted that God would rescue him — in the way that God thought best, in the time that God knew was right.

That sounds so glib. If you are reading this in the midst of some horrible, painful trial, and you read the words, “trust in the Lord” or, “God’s timing is perfect,” I wouldn’t blame you for getting mad…. Read the rest of my latest for Our Sunday Visitor. 

Image: The Crucifixion by Andrea Mantegna (1459) (Public Domain) 

Everyone gets an inheritance; everyone gets a choice

What was the prodigal son’s actual sin?

That question popped into my head as I heard the Gospel reading that I’ve heard countless times. The obvious answers — essentially, sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll — seemed unpersuasive this time. Is this really just a story saying that if you go and do the really common bad things that people tend to do, then God will still forgive you?

Well, yes! It’s definitely that. Jesus, in telling this parable, was showing the Pharisees and scribes that he hung around with sinners because he wants to forgive them and be reconciled with them.

But here’s something odd: The prodigal son says that he has sinned against God and against his father. Obviously, fornicating and getting drunk are sins against the Ten Commandments, and thus sins against God. But what sin has he committed against his father?

The sin of squandering. What an evocative word. His father had something good, and he gave it to his son as a gift so he could use it for some particular purpose. But, instead, he squandered it. That’s worth looking at because it also sheds light on the part of the story that troubles many people: the father’s attitude toward his other, obedient son.

So what’s so terrible about squandering an inheritance?

First, it’s clearly terrible for the son himself. He burns through his money and ends up humiliated and starving. It was a bad plan, and it bit him in the butt.

It was also bad for the father. He very likely wanted to help set his son up with a homestead of his own so his wealth would flourish and grow. A young man with a sizable inheritance could easily marry, likely have children of his own, and bring joy and delight to his father.

His sin was also bad for the community. By squandering his inheritance, he refused to enrich the land or make jobs for the next generation. I know how tediously modern that sounds — “His great sin was that he failed to engage in community development!” — but it’s true! Things haven’t changed that much. When you get something good, you’re not supposed to waste it. You’re supposed to use it to help yourself, show respect to the person who gave it to you, and help other people. That’s what good things are FOR.

But on every count, the prodigal son did the opposite. 

When we are assessing our lives (a very good practice during Lent!), it may or may not be helpful to ask ourselves, “Am I sinning?” It will probably be fruitful, though, to look at what good things God has given us, and to ask ourselves what we are doing with it. Are we using that inheritance well? Or are we squandering it?

An obvious example of an inheritance is money. If we have it, are we spending it on dumb or bad stuff that hurts ourselves and other people? That’s squandering. But using it to help other people would be using it for its intended purpose.

There are less obvious examples. Gifts of time, energy and health are all things we can either squander or use well. Even our personalities can be an inheritance. If we have been given the gift of a quick wit and sharp sense of humor, what do we use that for? For being nasty to other people and humiliating them? That’s squandering it. For making people laugh and helping them take life lightly? That’s putting it to good use.

Or maybe we’re naturally confident and charming, and we find it easy to persuade and influence others. Some people use this gift to get their way, and finagle themselves into situations they haven’t really earned and can’t really manage. That’s squandering. But some people use the gift of charisma well, buoying up everyone around them, bringing out their best and leading them down good paths.

You get the idea. Whatever it is you have in life, whatever strengths you possess, whatever talents you can claim, whatever skills and abilities you have, these are your inheritance. You can accept God’s help to get yourself set up in a thriving life that makes him proud and benefits everyone. Or you can stuff whatever gifts you have in your pocket, run far away from your father’s land and squander it all. And you see where that second choice lands you. Sooner or later, you’ll be wishing you had it as good as a pig.

So what about the elder son? In the story, he didn’t run through his inheritance. He obeyed his father and did his work, and when his loser brother comes crawling back, he’s indignant at how thrilled their father is. The elder son comes across, at first, as innocent and justified.

But listen to how Jesus tells it…. Read the rest of my latest for Our Sunday Visitor. 

Image: The Return of the Prodigal Son by Maestro dell’Annuncio ai Pastori, National Museum of Capodimonte (Naples) via Wikimedia (Creative Commons) 

Missionaries for Music: Ashuelot Concerts brings global talent to rural New England

Louisa Stonehill faced a row of kindergarteners. Their eyes were closed, their necks craned forward, and each one was doing his best to feel the music she played on her violin — with their ears, and also with their faces, their jaws, their chests.

“I can feel it,” one girl said, her eyes still closed.

That is what Louisa and her pianist husband Nicholas Burns came for. They are a kind of missionary, evangelists for music, answering a call.

The couple, founders of Ashuelt Concerts, moved to New Hampshire from Greenwich, London, in 2016, with two suitcases, a 2-year-old and no real plan.

Nine years later, they’ve built a thriving international chamber music concert series, playing 18 concerts a year, bringing world-class performers to tiny New England stages — and, even more remarkably, to area schools. The couple, along with a revolving roster of musicians, will travel to any school within 45 minutes of their base in Keene, New Hampshire, to introduce kids to classical music.

Nick and Louisa, the parents of two boys, ages 7 and 10, reach something like 5,000 children a year, many of whom might never otherwise encounter classical music, much less in a concert played live and up close just for them.

“We literally put a 5-year-old from a rural area a few feet away from one of the best musicians in the world, playing one of most valuable, famous instruments in the world,” Nick said.

A visceral response

Nick and Louisa make a point of not condescending to kids. They play movements from larger pieces, from seven to ten minutes each. It’s a big ask for little kids, but they help the children understand what they are hearing.

Sometimes they wonder if they’re expecting too much. Louisa recalls a “horrendous” musical passage by Shostakovich that evokes prisoners forced to dance before their own graves. They didn’t share that detail with the kids, but the music made its point. How did it land?

“They went absolutely bananas,” Nick said. They said it was like a horror movie, and they loved it. 

He added, “We’ve been shocked to our core –“

“– at how viscerally the children respond,” Louisa finished. “We don’t dumb it down. We give it to them real.” 

Real, live music brings out an emotional, vibrational delight like nothing else.

Along with the music, the couple delivers lessons kids will need to know no matter where life takes them. 

Lessons, for instance, about talent. While some people take to instruments more readily than others, talent alone is not sufficient.

“Talent is the product of learning, practice and discipline, and the act of humility and the act of being honest,” Nick said. 

The kids are skeptical, but Nick and Louisa insist: Three weeks before the concert, they couldn’t play the piece. They practiced, they slowed themselves down and they had faith they would prevail. And once you have put in the work to learn something, it’s inside you for good, Louisa said.

“It’s really freaky. You can literally not have played a piece for a year or two, and when you open it up again, it will just take you a second to find that pathway in your brain.”

In faith as in music

Here is where the couple’s Catholic faith asserts itself, even though they do not speak overtly about religion.

“Everything we talk about has parallels with the faith. It’s a living embodiment of our faith,” Nick said.

They both emphasized how vital it is, in faith as in performance, to begin with humility, to accept how little you know and not to get ahead of yourself.

Another parallel: It’s normal to go through a stage of questioning, of rebelling against rules that seem senseless and discipline that feels tiresome. But this stage is worth conquering, because through the discipline of practice, something amazing comes about. You learn to become a vessel for something greater than yourself.

“When you stand up on stage and you’ve got a big audience and they’re all staring at you in expectation, you have to put yourself to one side. It’s not about you anymore. It’s about communicating this great piece of art,” Nick said.

Louisa, an adult convert, describes the almost mystical experience of sharing with kindergarteners the voices of long-dead musicians.

“You’re connecting these two souls in such a unique and special way. You’re bringing these composers down from the heavens, almost, into their arms,” she said.

Great musicians and Catholics share a sense of humility, self-awareness and a generosity of spirit, Nick said. And both groups recognize the flash of genius as a gift, something they’ve been blessed with from outside oneself.

Called to a new community

But even with these overlaps, the “aggressive secularity” of London’s chamber music scene was one of the things that drove the couple away. How did they land in New Hampshire?

Read the rest of my latest for Our Sunday Visitor. 

Photo courtesy Ashuelot Concerts

All seasons have their purpose: The eremetic art of Margaret Rose Realy

Margaret Rose Realy isn’t really an artist, she insists, even though her paintings of flowers, clouds and the Sacred Heart hang in houses all over the world. She isn’t a natural author, either, even though she’s written four books: “A Garden of Visible Prayer,” “A Catholic Gardener’s Spiritual Almanac,” “A Garden Catechism,” and “Planting with Prayer.” 

“The only reason I did it is because God asked me to,” she said. 

Listening to God is one of the few things Realy, 70, will admit to being skilled at. She is, in some ways, a professional: She’s a Benedictine oblate, associated with a local monastery in Michigan, who has lived an eremitic life marked by silence, solitude and prayer for many years. Realy follows the rule of St. Benedict, which she calls “a gentle rule.” 

The silver-haired, soft-spoken woman whose chronic health struggles have made it harder and harder for her to move seems like mildness personified. She is a master gardener and says that working among flowers has brought her closer to God. Her gardens are a form of “gentle evangelization.”

But do not mistake Realy for a sentimentalist. Her docile manner veils a soul on fire with passion, courage and fierce trust.

Realy speaks quietly of her physical pain, and just as quietly of her harrowing personal history of abuse and neglect; and she speaks of her desire to see her abusers again in heaven. 

“I can’t wait to know who God really meant them to be, who they were supposed to be,” she said. “I still want to love them, and I still want to know that love, and give it.”

 

Beauty and grace are like seeds that God has planted in even the darkest and most tormented souls, she said. It takes a terribly strong conviction to refuse forgiveness from God.

“I don’t think hell is as full as we might like to think it is.”

Again, do not mistake Realy for a pushover. Many of her paintings are sweet and simple depictions of the beauty of nature. But some, like her Sacred Heart series, are a disciplined exploration of something she didn’t understand and didn’t want to face. 

“I was highly repulsed by some of the older Sacred Heart images, this graphic, gory mass. It was beyond my ability to connect to it,” she said.

The images were so gruesome, they pushed her away from Jesus. So she pushed back. She prayed, pressing the Lord for an explanation of this distressing devotional. He told her to paint. 

She obediently began to depict the Sacred Heart, but “bound up in nature,” intertwined not only with thorns but with vines and buds. 

“I was drawing the Sacred Heart in a way that wasn’t frightening. Drawing closer to what it means to have a heart so sacred (that) our Lord was willing to let it stop beating,” she said. “It was drawing closer to the heart of Jesus for me, who has experienced much violence in my life.”

Realy’s post-traumatic stress disorder used to make the sight of a crucifix intolerable. Now she embraces it. That turn marks the time when she began to converse with the Lord “casually, personally.” 

She does say the Rosary and other formal prayers. But she also simply speaks God. 

“And I listen, of course,” she said. Using something like the Gestalt “empty chair” technique, she is ready to hear answers that aren’t verbal. 

‘What am I supposed to do now?’

Her faith began to grow many years before she took up a paintbrush, in a physically active season of her life, full of backpacking and canoeing. The beauty of the natural world drew her to the Lord, and she returned the favor by throwing herself wholeheartedly into gardening and teaching others how to do it. 

But her physical challenges began to mount, until a debilitating bout of pain and inflammation landed her in bed for five days. When she got back on her feet, she headed to adoration to hash things out with God. 

“I sat down in a pew, and said, ‘Lord, you made me a gardener.’ I was crying, ‘I can’t do this anymore. You know I can’t do this. What am I supposed to do now?’… Read the rest of my latest for Our Sunday Visitor.

Transmitting light: Stained glass and painting by Patrice Schelkun

The thing about stained glass is that the artist doesn’t know how it will look until it’s installed.

“There’s an element of surprise along the whole process,” said Patrice Schelkun, who works in glass and also in paint.

When Schelkun works on stained glass, she pieces her windows together on a huge table and solders it tight, planning out every element, every color, every piece of glass. She must choose between clear or opalescent glass, and sometimes she adds more than one layer to create a sense of depth.

But it’s not until it’s completely done and held up to the light for the first time that she really knows how it came out.

Schelkun likes to add texture and detail to her glass pieces with paint, and this, too, yields unpredictable results. The paint, which is made of pigment mixed with finely ground glass, is applied with oil or water and fused to the glass surface in a kiln, eight hours at a time. Sometimes five or more layers of paint are applied, and fired in between each application. Sometimes the paint changes, and sometimes the color of the glass shifts in the kiln.

Or sometimes a piece turns out as designed, but then it’s not displayed for greatest effect. This was the case with “Adorned,” a panel with a sun-dappled face peering out from a crush of jewel-toned chrysanthemums. The piece was designed to be hung in direct light, but it was displayed too high up in an exhibit in Chicago, and the light didn’t shine through as Schelkun intended. When she retrieved that piece, she opted to install it on a light box, to display it at its best.

But sometimes this variability inherent in glasswork is an asset. Natural light, in particular, brings out the potential of glass to shift in appearance.

“It’s almost like the window is alive,” Schelkun said. “It’s the same thing if you’re walking by a window. It changes as you walk past it. It projects colors onto the floor. It’s kind of a living thing.”

Schelkun, 65, now concentrates more on oil painting and portraiture than she does on glass, but she wasn’t always an artist of any kind. She studied science but soon put that aside to raise her children. The family bought a house in Pennsylvania in the ’90s, and Schelkun got to work decorating it. She began in her oldest daughter’s room, which she festooned with a mural of flowers and bunnies, turning it into a little secret garden.

Friends who saw her work said she was good, good enough to start a business. She began decorating homes, and then businesses, and then a church.

A church bathroom, that is. The pastor gave her free rein to redo the ugly little room in the vestibule.

“I did a stone wall and a little niche, and he was like, ‘Whoa,’” Schelkun said. She was welcomed onto the committee for the parish’s building project and worked on choosing colors and furnishings.

At the same time, she started to study drawing and painting in earnest, taking private classes with artists when she could spare the time. She also took a class on stained glass at a local community college.

“I knew nothing about stained glass. Basically [the class] was teaching you how to cut glass and piece it together, and I said, ‘No, I want to paint on glass,’” she said. “My first love was painting.”

But there is something about glass, and its potential to capture, transmit and refract light in different ways. Her studio, Immanence Fine Art, shows works in both paint and stained glass. What they all have in common is an emphasis on light.

“Immanence is evidence of the divine throughout the material world. We can interact with God’s presence through the beautiful things we see in nature, and the way light strikes things. That’s evidence of God, to me,” Schelkun said.

When she paints portraits, she often composes them with strong lighting from one side, but even more often with “rim light,” light that bleeds out from behind the subject.

“If someone is standing in front of a sunset, the light halos around their head,” she said. “It’s the light I’m attracted to.”

She has seen firsthand how the light can attract other people, too….Read the rest of my latest artist profile in Our Sunday Visitor.