ON THE STREET: what you gaze upon, you become

ON THE STREET
"What You Gaze Upon, You Become":
The Iconography of William Hart McNichols

by Christopher Pramuk

Christopher Pramuk is the University Chair of Ignatian Thought and Imagination and an associate professor of theology at Regis University in Denver. His most recent book, The Artist Alive: Explorations in Music, Art and Theology, engages classic works in contemporary music, film, literature, poetry, and religious iconography, as loci of spiritual and theological reflection. A longtime student and scholar of the life and writings of Thomas Merton, he currently serves as Vice President of the International Thomas Merton Society.

William Hart McNichols, detail, The Passion of Matthew Shepard; painting in acrylic on wood; 9.75” x 11.5”. Used with permission of the artist; http://frbillmcnichols-sacredimages.com.

Growing up as a Roman Catholic in the United States, I am far more accustomed to sacred spaces filled with sculptures and stained glass than with icons. These are often described as “windows to the sacred.” Much later in my life, I would grow to experience this mystagogical sense of iconography but, as a younger man, I would have found it difficult to pray before icons. The faces gazing back at me from their gold-leafed surfaces seemed to me strange and exotic, somewhat rigid, not quite people; to my eyes they were too otherworldly, not “realistic,” seeming to come, as it were, from the other side. Later, I would understand that this visual dissonance, so to speak, is precisely the point, that by their very nature icons attempt to do what is logically impossible: to unite the unportrayability and portrayability of God, whose presence is both hidden and manifest in the world, shining, as it were, from within all things.1

To say it in terms of eschatology, that realm of Christian faith and theology most saturated with paradox, with the attunement of opposite tensions, icons presume that another world is possible because the seeds of transformation, of divinization, of participation in the divine Energy, which is Love, are already present in this world, in history, if painfully hidden. Much more than a painting, then, the icon is best described as a theology laid down in lines and colors. Thus icons are not said to be “painted,” but “written,” and the art of writing icons is passed down methodically and prayerfully from teacher to student. As Henri Nouwen writes in his classic meditation on the Russian tradition, icons are not easy to “see” because they “speak more to our inner than to our outer senses. They speak to the heart that searches for God.”2 Prayer before the icon facilitates the recentering of subjectivity from oneself to the divine, no longer related to as an object of self-fulfillment, but rather related to as a Person and Presence.3

Still, the dissonance I felt in viewing icons as a younger Catholic was not so much cognitive or theological as it was cultural and aesthetic. Accustomed to the more “realistic” style of Western religious art, iconography to my eyes seemed to paint over the messiness of life as it really is in favor of highly idealized representations of the human world and of the church. It smelled to me of Gnosticism, a suspicion of matter and the flesh, an escape from history, rather than its illumination.4 I have since come to see that I was mistaken, that my reticence before icons was misplaced. The dilemma could only be resolved when I began to see them not through my own culturally conditioned eyes but rather as they are meant to be seen, as one Orthodox theologian has it, as “the presencing of the divine in and through the material form.”5 This required a fundamental shift in my default manner of seeing, a pedagogy, as it were, of seeing through the eyes of the heart. And to effect this shift, it seems, I needed a teacher.

An Introduction to McNichols’s Art: “The Passion of Matthew Shepard”
I won’t soon forget the first time I saw an icon written by William Hart McNichols, or Fr. Bill, as he is known to many. Though technically the image is not an icon—I would eventually learn of the distinction in his body of work between “icons” and sacred “images”6—the image in question is called The Passion of Matthew Shepard.7 Linking the suffering of queer persons directly with the crucifixion of Christ, the “illumination” that comes over the viewer might take the form of an unsettling question: What have I done for Christ who is still being crucified?

William Hart McNichols, Jesus Christ Extreme Humility; painting in acrylic on wood. 12” x 15”. Used with permission of the artist.

Fr. Bill dedicated the image, completed in 2000, to the Memory of the 1,470 Gay and Lesbian Youth Who Commit Suicide in the U.S. Each Year And To The Countless Others Who Are Injured Or Murdered.” Theologian John Dadosky, author of a recent theological study of McNichols’s work, called Image to Insight, points out the striking resemblances with Fr. Bill’s earlier icon, Jesus Christ: Extreme Humility (1993).8 Dadosky notes that when the earlier icon was written, it coincided “with the emerging sex abuse crisis in the Church in the early 1990s,” a fact that “contributes to the gravity of the icon.” “Is this icon a symbol of the Church?” he asks. “Of the children abused? Can we hope for new life from this crisis?”9

William Hart McNichols, Francis ‘neath the Bitter Tree; painting in acrylic on wood; 12” x 15”. sed with permission of the artist; http://frbillmcnichols-sacredimages.com.

The Passion of Matthew Shepard has taken on new depths of meaning for me since I have gotten to know Fr. Bill and have learned the outlines of his life story. When he was a young Jesuit in the early 1980s, McNichols was one of a handful of priests in New York City who volunteered to minister to gay men who were dying of AIDS, then an unknown and terrifying new disease. As one would expect, the work took a heavy toll on him emotionally, physically, and spiritually. And it would also find its way into his art. In an especially haunting image from this period, “Francis ‘Neath the Bitter Tree,” St. Francis stands beneath Jesus suspended on the cross, his twisted, crucified body pockmarked with sarcoma lesions. The words inscribed on the board above Jesus’ head identify him as “AIDS leper,” “drug user,” and “homosexual.”10

In 2016, independent filmmaker Christopher Summa released a documentary about Fr. Bill’s life and work, The Boy Who Found Gold. Asked about his art during this period of ministry to the dying, Fr. Bill says, “AIDS had to have a face that was compassionate. Christ had to be there, Mary had to be there—the deaths were so quick, and so fast, I kept trying to do drawings that would put Christ into it.”11 At another point in the film, a journalist asks him if the AIDS crisis holds some lesson for the church. Almost without hesitation, Bill says, “Yes. God is giving the church an opportunity to love him with a different face. Will you love me if I look like this? How much will you love?” Watching archival TV footage from this period, two things strike me: first, just how young he was—he was in his early 30s—and second, his gentleness, a kind of fierce gentleness in the midst of what he calls “life in the eye of the storm.” The picture that emerges of Fr. Bill’s life story in The Boy Who Found Gold becomes itself a kind of icon of compassion and solidarity among the most marginalized peoples of our time.12

I want to return to “The Passion of Matthew Shepard” a moment longer, and notice the blue-white moon which hangs in the cobalt sky just above Shepard’s left shoulder. Some years after we met, Fr. Bill told me that Matthew Shepard’s mother Judy had said in an interview just after his death, “I hope he didn’t die alone.” “I put the moon there,” Bill said, “because I didn’t want him to be alone, to die alone. The moon was a message to his mom that he did not die alone.” He explained to me that the moon in the icon tradition represents Mary, the mother of Jesus. Her love shepherds us to the other side, as it were, “now and at the hour of our death,” much as Fr. Bill did for men dying of AIDS. Decades later he would describe those years as being a “witness or midwife to the Second Birth”13—a strikingly hopeful image for such a painful, death-haunted period of his life. When I gaze on “The Passion of Matthew Shepard” today and I consider the witness of McNichols and many others who work among the world’s most vulnerable populations, I hear the words of Jesuit theologian Jon Sobrino: “God raised a crucified man, and since then there is hope for the crucified.”14 And I believe him.

William Hart McNichols (far left) with his brothers Bob and Steve. The Crucifixion by Fr. Bill at Age 5; crayon on paper. Used with permission of the artist; http://frbillmcnichols-sacredimages.com.

Biographical and Spiritual Roots of McNichols’s Artistic Vocation
The atmosphere of McNichols’ childhood was thick with both politics and religion. Born in Denver in 1949, when Bill was just eight, his father Stephen was elected governor of Colorado; five years later, his uncle was elected mayor of Denver; his grandfather was the city auditor of Denver for twenty-five years. These were no small accomplishments in a state rife with anti-Catholic sentiment. For much of the first half of the century, Colorado politics was controlled by the Ku Klux Klan, which frequently targeted Catholics and Catholic institutions. On the day of McNichols’s ordination to the priesthood—it was forty years ago, May 23, 1979—his father Stephen shared with him the following story from his own childhood.

One night, when Stephen’s father, Bill’s grandfather, was in his first campaign for public office, the Klan burned a cross in front of the family home. They lived not far from the state capitol. Stephen was inside the house with his cousins and his grandmother. As the cross burned, she gathered all the kids to the window. “Do you see those people?” she said. “They are cowards. Don’t ever be afraid of people who don’t have the courage to come out from behind masks.”15 The fact that his father chose to tell him this story on the day of his ordination is significant to Fr. Bill. I might venture to say that it has shaped the way he moves in the world as an artist, as a priest, and as a celibate gay man, publicly out of the closet for almost forty years. In communion with God and with the church, McNichols has sought prayerfully to be obedient to his vocation while not hiding behind masks. And that has made a lot of folks very uncomfortable. It has also been for him a tremendous struggle. As he recently said to me, “Some people want to be subversive, they try to be subversive. For gay people, just being born, just being alive, is already subversive. I’ve spent my whole life trying not to be subversive, trying to fit in.”

If being “subversive” means to threaten, overturn, or tear down the tradition, then McNichols’s life and art can hardly be described as subversive. As even a superficial study of his corpus makes clear, the artist himself disappears behind a great litany of saints, the illuminated faces of the prophets and martyrs of the Christian mystical tradition and well beyond. In almost every sense, McNichols’s life and work is profoundly “traditional,” even theologically conservative, at the creative meeting point between Western and Eastern Christianity. If by subversive, on the other hand, we mean radical, interruptive, challenging in the way that the mystics, prophets, and saints shatter our complacency, then his work is rightly called subversive.

As a child, Bill’s love of art was nourished by a Catholic parochial school education in Denver. “In my own life, especially in childhood, art was the primary way I was introduced to the two thousand years of Christianity.”16 Though he endured years of bullying through grade school and high school, art, and humor, became ways to express, and mask, his suffering. It was during his teenage years, among the Jesuits at Regis High School in Denver, that McNichols would find his lifelong home, and refuge, in the atmosphere of Ignatian spirituality.

From the age of nineteen I was brought into the life of the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius of Loyola, which consists of four weeks of prayer and meditation on the life of Christ. The retreat culminates with a glorious burst of light, which launches the retreatant into a life of ministry of ‘finding God in all things.’ Once these words settle in your heart, they never leave you. They become the way you live in the world with its great variety of people, as well as the Creation, both damaged and abundant.1

Here, I think, is the key to McNichols’s twin vocation as an artist and priest. The artist lives, we might say, in the darkly liminal space between the third and fourth weeks of the Spiritual Exercises. Though people are still being crucified across the world, an Ignatian sensibility perceives that another world is yet possible because God, in Christ, has planted in concrete history the seeds of resurrection hope, of history’s transformation. The humanity of Jesus whom we encounter in the gospels refracts that same glorious “burst of light” in all of us. Echoing the inner dynamism of the Exercises, McNichols sums up his philosophy of art in six words: “What you gaze upon, you become.”

William Hart McNichols, Saint Ignatius the Pilgrim; painting in acrylic on wood; 12” x 15”. Used with permission of the artist; http://frbillmcnichols-sacredimages.com.

“You gaze on the icon,” he says, “but it gazes on you too. We need to gaze on truly conversational, truly loving images, images that will return our love.”18 Implicit here is a liberating realization, a call to participate fully in the dance of divine and human agency. We are not beholden to “reality” as mediated by the prevailing culture. Like a pebble thrown into a pond, the pattern of Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection has produced an amazing “cloud of witnesses” whose stories galvanize hope, and from whom others can learn what it means to be fully human. Indeed, much like his teacher, the famed Franciscan iconographer Robert Lentz, the sheer diversity of subjects across McNichols’s corpus is staggering. It proclaims, as Ignatius himself had to learn, that there are no cookie-cutter saints; there is no single perfect way to be authentically human, to be holy, to embody the divine.

To gaze on “images that return our love,” then, far from binding us immovably to some Dead Thing of the Past Called the Church, is for many a subversive spiritual practice, a disciplined “spiritual exercise” that aims to get the heart into its best, most human, shape. Each must discover our own particular gifts, and for every pilgrim and every community the path will be unique. The icon, then, always turns back upon the viewer. If images tell stories, and those stories attach themselves to our hearts, what kind of images and life stories do we choose to inhabit? Are they helping us become the people God calls us to be?

William Hart McNichols, San Jose En El Rio Grande; painting in acrylic on wood; 24” x 24”. Used with permission of the artist; http://frbillmcnichols-sacredimages.com.

“We See Jesus in the Children of Iraq”: A Mysticism of Open Eyes
The icon San Jose en el Rio Grande speaks powerfully to me, if for very different reasons. Written for the parishioners of St. Joseph on the Rio Grande Catholic Church in Albuquerque, where he has served for almost a decade—though no longer a Jesuit he retains faculties under the bishop of Santa Fe—the icon borrows from Fr. Bill’s love affair with the American Southwest and its Indian and Hispanic peoples. Notice the figures in the foreground—Joseph and Jesus, the placement of Joseph’s hands, the folds and colors of his cloak—then the river, the flaming scrub brush, the Sandias mountains, and again, the moon, which represents Mary. “In essence,” says McNichols of the icon, “the whole Holy Family is there.” Fr. Bill recalls that when he was creating this icon, “The drawing was finished and I began to transfer the image to the clay board . . . when I noticed the [Child’s] halo was partially beneath Joseph’s outer garment. I wanted to change it immediately,” he says, “but then I thought . . . Joseph is guarding the Child’s Light which is not ready to be fully shown, as in this image He is about seven or eight years old. . . . So, I left it the way it had been given to me.”19

As I ponder these enigmatic words—“I left it the way it had been given to me”—I see my two sons, Isaiah, twenty-one, and Henry, now ten, the former largely set free, the latter still beneath my cloak, his light “not ready to be fully shown.” Of course the Rio Grande River remains at once a symbol of hope and a perilously dangerous entry point for refugees, people identified wholesale by the president of the United States as “rapists,” “murderers,” “terrorists,” and “thugs.” To identify the Holy Family directly with these would certainly stand to unsettle, interrupt, and even accuse the complacency of many Christians in America today. What would it mean to subject ourselves to the presence of God, the demands of a prophetic faith, in these? Before such an icon, the invocation that “what you gaze upon, you become” invites an identification few of us may be prepared to embrace.

In his Christmas address of 2017, “Urbi et Orbi,” “To the City (of Rome) and to the World,” Pope Francis—not incidentally, the first-ever Jesuit pope—identifies the refugees of the world directly with the Child Jesus and the Holy Family.

We see Jesus in the faces of Syrian children still marked by the war that, in these years, has caused such bloodshed in that country. . . . We see Jesus in the children of Iraq, wounded and torn by the conflicts that country has experienced in the last fifteen years, and in the children of Yemen, where there is an ongoing conflict that has been largely forgotten. . . . We see Jesus in the many children forced to leave their countries to travel alone in inhuman conditions and who become an easy target for human traffickers. . . . Jesus knows well the pain of not being welcomed and how hard it is not to have a place to lay one’s head. May our hearts not be closed as they were in the homes of Bethlehem.20

If it is possible to see the Child Jesus in the children of Iraq, it is also possible to see Mary in the mothers of Palestine, South Sudan, Afghanistan, and Saudi Arabia.21 She can be heard in the mournful cries of the mothers of Chicago and Newtown, Cleveland and Philadelphia, mothers across America who have lost their children to senseless gun violence.22 Indeed, one can hear her crying out today from “the rocks themselves” (Luke 19:40), the planet’s very skin now being deforested and fracked to death, exhausting the limits of Earth’s ancient resources.23

Of course many Christians will rebel against any such “political” readings of the gospel. And much like Pope Francis, McNichols has his share of very vocal critics.24 Is he guilty of politicizing the gospel? Does McNichols stray too far in his celebration of holy women and men not recognized in the official canon of saints, including many non-Christians? Or has Western Christianity for too long perpetuated a kind of Gnosticism, detaching Jesus from history, from the poor, from the greater portion of (non white) humanity, from the soils and trees and waters?

To be sure, like other forms of religious art, liturgy, and worship, iconography can and has often been used in ways that uphold the existing political and ecclesial order. For better and often for worse, religion and religious culture is often wedded inextricably to the prevailing political-economic powers of society.25 Indeed, within the structures of a capitalist consumer society such as the United States, it is no simple matter to identify the role of art and the artist’s vocation in American society, not least the Christian artist. As the history of iconoclastic movements in the church and an enduring suspicion of religious art within secular culture ought to make clear, the line between icon and idol is sometimes precariously thin, even if not especially to the sympathetic viewer. The Christian must be wary whenever religious imagery is marshalled in support of the ideology of the prevailing political and economic powers; the Christian artist must be doubly wary.26

Nearly a hundred years ago, the philosophers of the Frankfurt School drew a critical distinction between authentic art and culture, or the “culture industry,” a distinction which remains helpful today. In simplified terms, for the critical theorists of the Frankfurt School, authentic art “is something that’s elevating and challenges the existing order, whereas culture is precisely the opposite. Culture, or the culture industry, uses art in a conservative way, which is to say it uses art to uphold the existing order.”27 It is in this context, I suggest, that McNichols’s art is authentically Christian, powerfully Catholic, and subversive in the best sense of the word.

In ways analogous to Pope Francis, Fr. Bill’s interpretation of the biblical and Christian mystical tradition reflects a powerful “mysticism of open eyes,”28 reminding the viewer that childlike wonder, rooted in contemplation of the gospels and the lives of the martyrs and saints, is no Gnostic or aesthetic escape from reality. The stories he tells through his images and icons are “subversive” and “dangerous” insofar as they seek especially, as Metz has it, to make visible “all invisible and inconvenient suffering, and—convenient or not—pays attention to it and takes responsibility for it, for the sake of a God who is a friend to human beings.”29 No doubt the creation of such images will always be threatening to the powers and principalities, and a vital source of hope for the “little” and “poor” across the world today.30

Returning to San Jose en el Rio Grande, I offer a last thought on Joseph’s cloak. One of the ancient names of God in the Jewish tradition is “Shekhinah,” from the Hebrew “Shakan,” which means “to be present or dwell as in a tabernacle, sanctuary, or tent.” The Shekhinah emerges in rabbinic literature as “an image of the female aspect of God caring for her people in exile.”31 One of the few paintings in McNichols’s catalog that has no images but only letters or words is a painting called The Name of God Shekinah,32 inspired by Rabbi Leah Novick’s book, On the Wings of the Shekhinah. Fr. Bill has placed the Hebrew letters of the Name in white gold leaf on blue “to represent the white clouds, in which She often manifests Herself, against the blue sky,”33 as Dadosky explains.

To my eyes, Joseph’s protective cloak is like the Shekhinah, and perhaps like the wind blowing off the Sea of Galilee, many years later, reassuring both the child and the adult Jesus that God draws near in the midst of the gathering storm. Jesus dwells palpably, as it were, in the encompassing presence of God, and because he feels safely held (or cloaked) by his Father, he can say with assurance to others, “Do not be afraid.” Gazing on the face of Joseph, the storm in my own fatherly heart is calmed. The cloak encircles me in its embrace. Here is the kind of presence I would like to embody for my sons and daughters, today, and long after I am gone.

"Bringing Nativity into the Apocalypse": The Artist as Theologian
I conclude with what may be McNichols’s most famous icon, described by one of his Jesuit mentors as his greatest masterpiece, Mary Most Holy Mother of All Nations. Dadosky recalls that when he first began to explore Fr. Bill’s icons, “I was struck by how much of his work was devoted to the divine feminine. [And] I became convinced that much of Western Christianity suffers from this lack.” Dadosky describes the feminine aspect of God as “a gaping wound” and “one of the most neglected dimensions” of Western religious life, even while many Christians remain “unaware of the ramifications of its absence in our collective psyche.”34 The icon, we might say, puts a face on the Mother Love of God—God who weeps for the suffering of all peoples and holds the suffering Earth to her breast. “I like to think of it,” says Dadosky, “as [the sacred feminine] preserving our planet from the negative consequences of climate change.”35

William Hart McNichols, Mary Most Holy Mother Of All Nations; painting in acrylic on wood; 22” x 48”. Used with permission of the artist; http://frbillmcnichols-sacredimages.com.

In her meditation on Mary Most Holy Mother of All Nations, the poet and spiritual writer Mirabai Starr, one of the most sensitive interpreters of McNichols’s work, writes:

Holy Mother of all people,
erase the lines we have drawn to separate us, nation from nation,
tribe against tribe.
Melt our frozen hearts, so that we can love again.
Filled with the Holy Spirit
who flows in your wake,
how can we possibly make war
against our brothers and sisters?
Safe in your embrace,
how could we hold onto any concept of “other”?
Blessed One,
we join our voice with yours,
that your message of peace and justice
may penetrate the troubled minds of all leaders:
Let the children of all the countries of the world be one!36

Starr underscores the “apocalyptic” or revelatory power of icons in our time to open urgently, if gently, the eyes of the heart. “In the book of Revelation, [as] Fr. Bill points out, the dragon goes after the pregnant woman to eat her child. We are all her children, he says. And, in the lineage of the prophets, we are bringing nativity into the apocalypse. . . . Fr. Bill’s icons are beacons in the darkness, beckoning us home to love.”37 To “engage with Fr. Bill’s offerings is a subversive act,” says Starr. “It quietly overthrows the patriarchy and gently reinstates the feminine values of mercy and connection.”

The core theological insight is not that God is male or female, nor that gender is bound by biology to culturally inscribed “masculine” or “feminine” characteristics. Rather, as Sandra Schneiders argued some thirty years ago, the “gaping wound” that is the suppression of the female face of God can only be healed by a kind of “therapy of the imagination.”38 While feminist theologians have long sought to restore the divine feminine in our collective and ecclesial consciousness, McNichols’s work has done so as well, for some fifty years, if from a very different direction. He has, as it were, “put a face” on the divine feminine with his icons of Mary, and with his “sophianic icons,” or images of Divine Sophia.39 We are seeing “the last gasp of the dark side of masculinity,” says Fr. Bill. “We are moving beyond viewing the struggle strictly as between the masculine and the feminine, to seeing the struggle as between light and darkness. Both sexes can be equally light or dark.”40 The last point is crucial, it seems to me, in any retrieval of the feminine divine, and recalls the poet Rilke, who speaks of a “great motherhood over all, as common longing,” and who observes that “even in the man there is motherhood.”41

The task of the poet, the prophet, the contemplative, says Rowan Williams, is to interrogate the repetition of “old words for God, safe words for God, lazy words for God, useful words for God.”42 In like manner, the prophetic visual artist will interrogate the complacent repetition of old images, safe images, lazy images, useful images, of God. Theologian Wendy Wright drives home the point, in her masterful study of the role of images and imagination in Christian spirituality down through the ages:

Images—visual, verbal, spatial and so forth—are not only the products of our imagination but they give form and content to our imaginations. Repeated focus, as in practices of meditation or contemplative gazing on religious images, facilitates this transformative process. The visual contemplative or meditative arts cultivated in the great religious traditions are vastly different from ordinary sight. Indeed, they are uniquely designed to deconstruct habituated imaginative constructs and allow visual imagery to reconstruct a new imaginative lens through which reality is interpreted and possible worlds perceived. . . .

Images engage the whole person. They excite emotion and encourage empathy. They vivify the will by arousing desire and inspiring imagination. They inform the intellect by giving access to realms of being not immediately visible. Thus they tease the viewer into conceptualizing a world that does not yet exist, and into longing for a world that is differently constructed than the one in which he or she lives. Images shape the human imagination as well as reflect it.43

As with so many complex intellectuals, poets, and artists in the life of the church, the categorical labels, which would fix a person on one side or the other of an absolutized binary, do not hold in the case of McNichols. His work, we might say, “contains multitudes,”44 dramatizing the theologies of Hans Urs von Balthasar and Gustavo Gutierrez in equal measure, and indeed, celebrating the lives of many unsung witnesses both within and beyond the boundaries of Christianity. Thus McNichols stands both squarely within and outside the margins of a church that hasn’t always welcomed him, giving new form and new content to the radical capaciousness of a life lived prayerfully before God, in service to the church and the entire human community, in astonishingly beautiful, if frequently unsettling, ways.

Perhaps this is what it means to “bring nativity into the apocalypse.” Both in life and in art, McNichols has stood quietly at the threshold, in the midst of evident chaos, midwifing our encounter with these “possible worlds” of God’s own desire and imagination. Although I was initially resistant to icons, the eyes of my heart have been opened by Fr. Bill’s work to the illumination of the world—“finding God in all things”—and of human beings as icons of the living God, “signposts,” as the painter Robert Henri suggests, “on the way to what may be.”45 Gazing on the faces of those who have gone courageously before us, we need not feel alone as we stumble our way along the journey. Gazing with compassion as we can upon the “icon” of our beautiful but broken world, McNichols’s work reassures us not to be afraid. It says that the world will, in its own way, return our love—even if it is only dimly perceived, under the pale light of the moon passing through shadow. “Let those who have eyes to see, see.” It is the image that leads to the insight, and the poet, the musician, the artist who opens the door to such a faith.

William Hart McNichols, Mary Most Holy Mother Of All Nations; painting in acrylic on wood; 22” x 48”. Used with permission of the artist; http://frbillmcnichols-sacredimages.com.

NOTES

Sergius Bulgakov, Icons and the Name of God, trans. Boris Jakim (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2012), 25–26, 36.
Henri J. M. Nouwen, Behold the Beauty of the Lord: Praying with Icons (Notre Dame: Ave Maria, 2007), 24.
See Bulgakov, Icons and the Name of God, 26. By comparison to Western doctrine, heavily shaped by Augustine’s doctrine of original sin, the Eastern Orthodox understanding of the Incarnation supports a highly exalted view of human nature such that human beings, like Christ, have the capacity to “become divine,” as it were, a process referred to as divinization, theosis, or deification. In the famous formulation of St. Athanasius, “He became human so that we might become divine.”
“Gnosticism” is a term with ancient Christian provenance, which views salvation or participation in the divine realm as an escape from the limits and moral corruption of the body and the embodied human community in history. While condemned as heretical to Christian orthodoxy, various forms of Gnosticism, which hinges on body/spirit dualism, have lived alongside and within Christian thought from the beginning.
Aristotle Papanikolaou, endorsement of Icons and the Name of God, back cover.
Not all of McNichols’s works are “icons” in the traditional sense of representing saints officially recognized as such by the Orthodox or Roman Catholic Church. Sacred “images,” as theologian John Dadosky explains, “may be influenced by the style of icons, but they also take more liberty in expression and incorporate more contemporary images.” John Dadosky, Image to Insight: The Art of William Hart McNichols, with art by William Hart McNichols and foreword by Mirabai Starr (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico, 2018), 5.
For all its hazards, arguably one of the more astonishing benefits of the technological milieu is that works of art from around the world that might otherwise never be seen are easily accessible via the Internet. Such is the case with McNichols’s icons, all of which can be viewed at his website, http://frbillmcnichols-sacredimages.com/, where they are organized thematically into a series of galleries.
Dadosky, Image to Insight, 135. The title of Dadosky’s study is inspired by Canadian theologian Bernard Lonergan’s notion that “The image leads to insight.” As Dadosky puts it in relation to gazing upon icons, “These insights, when effectively communicated, can lead the viewer to social, cultural, political, religious, historical, and even personal understanding.” See Dadosky, Image to Insight, 1.
Ibid., 119
Ibid. Catholic theologian M. Shawn Copeland likewise identifies the “marked” and “broken” bodies of gays and lesbians with the broken body of Christ. See her Enfleshing Freedom: Body, Race, and Being (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2010), 55–84. And like McNichols, she has also been publicly attacked by some of her fellow Catholics for doing so.
The Boy Who Found Gold: A Journey into the Art and Spirit of William Hart McNichols, DVD, dir. Christopher Summa (Dramaticus Films, 2016), here and subsequent quotes in this paragraph (http://theboywhofoundgold.com/).
In May 2002, just after the Boston Globe’s landmark reporting on the child sex abuse crisis, McNichols spoke out publicly in a Time magazine article about the danger of categorizing gay men and gay priests as pedophiles. “I felt I had to stand up for gay people and gay priests.” This ultimately led to him leaving the Jesuits, after thirty-five years in the order. He remains a priest with faculties under the Archbishop of Santa Fe. See Amanda Ripley, “Inside the Church’s Closet,” Time (May 12, 2002), http://content.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,237034,00.html.
William Hart McNichols and Mirabai Starr, Mother of God Similar to Fire (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 2010), 10.
Jon Sobrino, Christ the Liberator: A View from the Victims (Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis, 2001), 40. For Sobrino, resurrection faith is never an escape from historical commitment among the living. To the contrary, such a faith galvanizes hope for the transformation of society, what Jesus calls the Reign of God, on this side of death.
Related by Fr. Bill in conversations with the author and used here with permission.
McNichols and Starr, Mother of God Similar to Fire, 11.
Ibid., 9. In addition to the Spiritual Exercises, McNichols credits John Fortunato’s book, Embracing The Exile: Healing Journeys of Gay Christians (New York: Seabury, 1982), with “rescuing” him from social and ecclesial exile as a gay man, revealing “how many people feel exactly the same way.”
Ibid., back cover.
McNichols, letter to Msgr. Luna, Nov. 18, 2013.
Pope Francis, “Urbi et Orbi,” Christmas 2017, at https://w2.vatican.va/content/francesco/en/messages/urbi/documents/papa-francesco_20171225_urbi-et-orbi-natale.html. Fr. James Martin, probably the best-known Jesuit priest and Catholic spiritual writer in the U.S. today, labors to amplify Pope Francis’s voice for an often resistant U.S. Catholic audience. For his commentary on Francis’s 2017 Christmas message, see James Martin, “Were Jesus, Mary and Joseph Refugees? Yes,” America (Dec. 27, 2017), at https://www.americamagazine.org/faith/2017/12/27/were-jesus-mary-and-joseph-refugees-yes.
See Andrew Greeley, “The Mother Love of God,” in The Catholic Imagination (Berkeley: University of California, 2000), 89–103. “The sacramental imagination, when working properly, apparently does sense a correlation between a lurking God and equality of women. It does perceive, however dimly, that a woman’s body is as much a sacrament of God’s love as a man’s body” (103). Today Greeley’s qualifiers, “apparently,” and “however dimly” ought to be unapologetically stricken from the record.
See Maureen O’Connell, If These Walls Could Talk: Community Muralism and the Beauty of Justice (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2012), a breathtaking theological reading of the Philadelphia Mural Arts Program, a community movement of some 3,500 wall-sized images painted on warehouses and on schools, on mosques and in jails, in courthouses and along overpasses. I have often brought O’Connell’s study into my classes as a complement to McNichols’s iconography. There is more in common than might be evident at first glance between explicitly religious art-forms such as iconography and so-called secular and urban forms of contemporary art.
The Catholic “analogical imagination” (David Tracy) senses the resemblances across these distinct realities, the “unity-in-difference” of diverse human experiences, in joy and in suffering. The extension of the analogical imagination to the suffering Earth may be the most urgent theological task of our times, a task long taken up by ecofeminist and environmental theologies, and more recently by Pope Francis in his encyclical “Laudato Si’: On Care for Our Common Home.”
See Andrew Brown, “The War against Pope Francis,” The Guardian (Oct. 27, 2017), at https://www.theguardian.com/news/2017/oct/27/the-war-against-pope-francis.
One thinks here of the uneasy but politically expedient marriage between American Evangelical Christianity and the presidency of Donald Trump, or the implicit and often explicit alliance between President Vladimir Putin and the Russian Orthodox Church.
Dadosky reinforces the point, noting that Mary and the apostles and saints and all the subjects of icons “are not worshiped but venerated. Only God is worshiped.” Indeed, “More than most people, the iconographer is well aware of the limits of images to adequately express divine reality.” See Dadosky, Image to Insight, 2.
Interview with Stuart Jeffries, author of Grand Hotel Abyss: The Lives of the Frankfurt School, Vox (Dec. 26, 2017), at https://www.vox.com/conversations/2016/12/27/14038406/donald-trump-frankfurt-school-brexit-critical-theory.
I borrow the phrase “mysticism of open eyes” from German theologian Johann Baptist Metz, who uses it to describe the spirituality of Jesus himself, who “did not teach an ascending mysticism of closed eyes, but rather a God-mysticism with an increased readiness for perceiving, a mysticism of open eyes, which sees more and not less.” Johann Baptist Metz, A Passion for God: The Mystical-Political Dimension of Christianity, trans. J. Matthew Ashley (New York: Paulist, 1998), 163.
Ibid., 163.
Today the ancient town of Bethlehem, a city of about 22,000 residents, is surrounded on three sides by a concrete security wall, eight meters high, littered with graffiti. In one place, the graffiti gives way to an icon of the Virgin Mary, known by locals as “Our Lady Who Brings Down Walls.” The man who wrote the icon is Ian Knowles, a British theologian and founder of the Bethlehem Icon Center, where Palestinians and students from around the world are learning the ancient art of icon writing, and finding their own lives illuminated by newfound hope. Cited in “The Icon Painters of Bethlehem,” BBC World Service, Heart and Soul Radio Program (Dec. 24, 2017), at https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/w3cswcyx.
Melissa Raphael, The Female Face of God in Auschwitz: A Jewish Feminist Theology of the Holocaust (New York: Routledge, 2003), 82.
See McNichols’s website under the gallery “Drawings, Illustrations, Images.”
Dadosky, Image to Insight, 137.
Ibid.
Ibid., 85. Decades ago, Catholic feminist theologian Elizabeth Johnson drew powerful links between the subjugation (“rape”) of nature and the subjugation of women, while cautioning against the dangers of personifying and feminizing the natural world. See Elizabeth A. Johnson, Women, Earth, and Creator Spirit (Notre Dame, Ind.: St. Mary’s College, 1993).
McNichols and Starr, Mother of God Similar to Fire, 23.
Mirabai Starr, “Foreword,” in Dadosky, Image to Insight, x.
Sandra Schneiders, Women and the Word: The Gender of God in the New Testament and the Spirituality of Women (New York: Paulist, 1986), 19. Just as images of the self and world can be healed, Schneiders argues, “so can the God-image. It cannot be healed, however, by rational intervention alone.”
For example, The Advent of Hagia Sophia, in the gallery “Divinity and Angelic Figures”; Hagia Sophia Crowning the Youthful Christ, in the gallery “Jesus Christ Our Lord.” The latter icon was inspired by Viennese artist Victor Hammer’s line drawing of Hagia Sophia, and Thomas Merton’s poem of the same name.
Cited in Dadosky, Image to Insight, ix.
John J. L. Mood, Rilke on Love and Other Difficulties: Translations and Considerations (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1975), 34–35.
Rowan Williams, A Silent Action: Engagements with Thomas Merton (Louisville: Fons Vitae, 2011), 50.
Wendy M. Wright, “A Wide and Fleshly Love: Images, Imagination, and the Study of Christian Spirituality,” in Minding the Spirit: The Study of Christian Spirituality, ed. Elizabeth A. Dreyer and Mark S. Burrows (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University, 2005), 316–33; emphasis added.
Paraphrasing Walt Whitman, in “Song of Myself”: “Do I contradict myself? / Very well then I contradict myself, / (I am large, I contain multitudes.)”
Robert Henri, The Art Spirit (1923; reprint, New York: Basic Books, 2007), 9.