The Story of a Controversial Devotional Painting

Devotional art has a style that admits few newcomers. I challenged that claim one Divine Mercy Sunday by introducing the accompanying painting for the people’s devotion. How do you think it went?

“Wait. Wait. Wait,” you say, “what the heck is devotional art?” Come on. If you’re Catholic, it was all over the ceiling your goopy baby eyes were staring at when the priest slathered you with baptismal water. If you’re not Catholic, just step inside one of our churches. Yep. That’s it in the stained glass. Sure, the mosaics too. Definitely on the stone façade. You don’t have to stop at churches, though. You will find devotional art knit into our sweaters, soldered onto our necklaces, stuck to the chrome bumpers of our sedans and trucks, even jabbed into shoulders, biceps, or thighs, and I’ll stop there.

But how can one define devotional art? Well, let’s call it art that supports one’s religious devotion. Yes, that is no narrow definition, and that is because religious devotion is no narrow reality. It is a way of relating to God that spans the broad turf between baffling and beautiful. It is as important to us as potable water. It is the necessary light under which I’ve had my most human encounters.

When I first conceived of that phrase, “my most human encounters,” it was intended to be positive. I think of the campesina I met in Guatemala. I came upon her in a dark church under white fluorescent light. She was kneeling on two bony knees mouthing her fervent petitions before a statue of St. Jude. I was walking toward the sacristy. The woman motioned me over, and then, reaching up with both hands, she pulled mine into her cold sinewy grip and held them to her face where her warm tears crested her high cheekbones: “Father, my son is leaving for the United States,” she said in a Spanish I more intuited than understood. “Please pray for my son.” And she said other words in whispers and whimpers and pulled away so that I would see her eyes, see how the tears ran through her weathered cheeks the way one sees rivers spilling along the pleats of a mountain from an airplane’s round, thickly paned window.

I knelt and prayed.

Then there was the New Yorker who, one February morning, zigged off her typically zagging commute to fast walk up the nave of Our Lady of Victory where I stood in the transept just before the lip of the sanctuary. I wore a white surplus over my habit and in my hands sat a small bowl of damp palm ashes. When she reached the end of the line – only three people deep at that moment – I could see that the vein in her neck was throbbing. She drew the church’s high and fragrant air through a small gap between her lips, filling her lungs and calming her heart. She held her sunglasses in one hand then the other as she approached me.

“Are you ready?” I asked. I expected her eyes to alert with surprise at my departure from our annual rite – very possibly the one rite she attended all year. But no. She looked straight into my eyes as if she had been pondering that question since Eighty-Sixth Street.

 “Oh no, Father. I am such a sinner.”

I forgot my line. But my thumb was instinctively patting the damp black ashes in the clear bowl in my hand, and I found it again. I traced across her forehead the dark form of a cross. Her closed eyes and pursed lips and slightly inclined chin settled into their most primitive posture. And I said my line: “Remember that you are dust and unto dust you shall return.”

“Thank you, Father,” she said, unclosing her eyes the way one does having just come up for air.

I say “my most human encounters” because amid his religious devotions, a man acts fully conscious of his own creatureliness. He may spend the rest of his day eschewing it: he puffs out his chest; he hoards shiny or pixelated objects to guarantee self-sufficiency, the one thing he most certainly does not possess; he loads his verbal cannon and levels it at any one of his fellow men in order to take their lunch money or whatever dark grown-up acts express the same childish aggression only in bigger, stronger bodies and more desperate circumstances. But religious devotion rises out of the man who inhabits his creatureliness (which, let’s face it, is neediness) before his Creator, and that, I propose, is a most human achievement.

Although. There is an underbelly to devotion. The human creature, being a needy creature, is always vulnerable to entitlement. Thus my friend, the pastor of an ethnically diverse parish in New York City, tells me that the abuelas nearly hanged, drew, and quartered him after he rearranged the many painted-plaster Marys populating the various altars and niches of his church. Twelve months out of the year, the pious women argued about whose patroness would be positioned in the sanctuary’s side-altar, so the pastor, to quell the feud, put the Sacred Heart there instead. Well, all hell broke loose in the parish council meeting, and in face of a common enemy, the ladies were tightly united.

I wondered how the abuelas would receive the religious art accompanying this article.

I knew it would not be a popular image. The style is too contemporary for the palate of popular piety. Like a devotional image, however, it is relatively easy to read. In fact, the rays of white and red light are directly lifted from the current, wildly popular devotion of Divine Mercy. Sister Maria Faustina Kowalska, OLM (now Saint Faustina), kept a diary in which she recorded the many apparitions graced upon her by our Lord in the 1930s. Based on what she saw, a painting of him was commissioned. Jesus is depicted with European features, standing upright with one hand raised in blessing. The other is parting his white robe at the level of his heart so that the “rays of mercy” shine out upon the viewer. You will probably notice it on your mechanic’s bulging forearm next time he changes your tire.

Erin K. McAtee, Mother of Divine Mercy, oil on canvas. Used by permission.

If one is able to read the rays, the accompanying image becomes clear: the girl must be a pregnant Mary, Mother of Divine Mercy. The artist is Erin K. McAtee, and she conceived of this project in a moment of prayer. I know because she is a friend, and that is what she told me amidst friends in a subway car or at a café or walking the sidewalk of some New York City avenue. Perhaps it was during the same conversation in said subway car or café or on the gum-battered sidewalk of said avenue that she proposed something be done with it for Divine Mercy Sunday. By happenstance, I was already slated to celebrate two masses that Sunday at a Latino parish in Yonkers, New York, for a priest who would be away on his annual retreat.

“Sure,” he said to me over the phone. “I preach on art all the time. Will you need an easel?”

“That would be amazing. Do you have one?”

“Yep. In the rectory. The secretary can help you. How big is it?”

“It’s pretty big, Padre.”

“Don’t worry, we’ve got big.”

And he did have big. The painting measures three by six feet. Erin hauled it to the top of the Bronx one afternoon on the 5 Train, holding it between her knees like a giant baby and receiving compliments from fellow passengers. “I know who that is,” said one man. (I am assuming he winked. It seems like he should have, right?) I laid the painting flat on its back in the space usually occupied by the disheveled back benches of our Town and Country and drove it to the friary, where I laid it against the parlor wall until Saturday, when, using the big wooden easel, I placed the image beside the ambo at the church, where I would be preaching the following day.

The next day, I arrived at the sacristy and was greeted by the deacon. His large hand folded around mine. Only, he didn’t let go after the few typical seconds of pivoting at our elbows. I could tell something was wrong because he wasn’t grinning. His mouth was shut; his eyebrows were knit and the skin between them, pinched.

“Father, you better move that girl,” he said to me as if I had had her tied to the train tracks and the 9:05 from Harlem was making impeccable time. “The people were calling me all night: ‘Deacon, who is that girl?’ and, ‘Deacon, what is that girl doing in the sanctuary?’ and, ‘Deacon, where is the Divine Mercy?’”

Each time he had changed the pitch of his voice to indicate that it was yet a different person who had called him. Not so easy to read as I thought, I thought. I walked out into the nave and faced the sanctuary to see how things looked.

“Father, why is that girl there?” The voice came from a pair of lips at the height of my elbow. It was Doña Martha, eucharistic minister and parish matriarch.

“That girl is Our Lady,” I said matter-of-factly. “She’s there because I am going to preach about her.”

“But, Father, it’s Divine Mercy Sunday.”

“I know that.”

“Well, where is the Divine Mercy?”

He’s in her womb is what I didn’t say.

That religious devotion is a very personal matter is something any priest learns quickly. I knew better than to challenge the people too much. Besides, Doña Martha was right. So I asked if there is, in the church, a Divine Mercy image that they typically display today. “Yes!” It was as if the entire nave replied in one violent affirmative.

“Great,” I said, “let’s leave the girl where she is next to the ambo. We’ll simply place the Divine Mercy in front of the ambo. How ’bout that?”

Well, despite the noiseless friction of a hundred people rolling their eyes, that is what we did.

The homily I preached beside Erin’s painting that day is hardly memorable. I remember it only because I typed it up and just re-read it. “Saint Francis calls her the virgin-made-church,” I began (like a good Franciscan) and then did the work of uncovering the symbols for the people. “And so, the rays of Christ’s mercy, rays which we are so accustomed to see emanating from his heart, are here emanating from the womb of the virgin. Their source, of course, is his heart; it just so happens that his heart, at this young and tender stage of her pregnancy, is in her womb.” I’ll spare you the rest. The idea was to present Mary as an image of the church, the very place where Christ’s mercy is accessed through its sacraments.

I had taken the opportunity to expose the people to an image that I thought might provoke contemplation and serve their religious devotion. “Did it take?” you ask. Well…

Devotional art tends to prize antiquity. Barring that, it values realism and sentimentality. Contemporary art is not really any of those things. Additionally, devotional art is generally easy to read, its symbols being as familiar to us as the golden arches hanging alongside our highways because they have fueled our imaginations since infancy.

For example, the figure with human limbs and features but eagle’s wings affixed to his back is an angel. If Tanner paints him as a column of light, we get it; but it doesn’t go on our frescoes. Although angels happen to be, in fact, noncorporeal beings, on our stained glass, our tailgates, and our ankles, they better have muscles and two mammoth wings. Every now and then, a whacky, new symbol finds its way into our devotions. Leave it to God! Ever notice the flowers on Our Lady of Guadalupe’s dress? They have smiley faces. In most other respects, she is nicely conformed to the symbols and shapes we like and know, but flowers with smiley faces? And yet Mary was depicted on Juan Diego’s tilma with many such symbols. What do they mean? Who knows! So, we reproduce the image with the faceless flowers we like and know. But the smiley faces mean something. And if we were as literate in such symbols as, say, an Aztec farmer, we could read the Guadalupana as easily as an erudite theologian might read John’s Gospel and, more or less, draw the same conclusions.

And there is another great example: John’s Gospel. Most of us reading it will take Mary to be Mary, the mother of Jesus, and think nothing more of her. It’s what we know. It’s what we like. That John might layer further meaning upon her is something we likely don’t consider. No. We like that his mom is present at his first miracle in Cana. We admire Christ’s filial devotion, how, from his cross, he entrusts Mary to his beloved disciple, since Joseph, her husband, had already passed. And as with any devotional practice, if that leads us deeper into the mystery of God and our salvation in Christ, it’s a win.

The Gospels, however, while being historical texts, are also literary texts. This does not mean they are fiction; it just means that they are crafted, that the authors make use of symbols and techniques, and we should expect that. In this way, the author or artist is able to layer meaning into his work, layers which the reader or viewer get to travel, and that’s fun. In other words, symbols allow an author to relate two or more things at once. If your genre is God’s revelation, that must be a very helpful tool.

And John uses this tool. He uses it because he is doing some heavy work to uncover the deep messianic truths in the midst of historical events. So, while he is reporting Mary’s presence at the wedding, he noticeably does not report the presence of a bride. He mentions the bridegroom as the one responsible for the wine (wink, wink). Additionally, he uses the words woman and hour, cutting right through the next seventeen chapters and placing us at the cross where we find our bridegroom and his bride, as well as those words at the very moment when he entrusts “the woman” to his beloved disciple and him to her. Addressing his mother as “woman” is like putting a smiley face on her dress at Tepeyac: it is just too odd not to point beyond itself.

It just so happens that the prophets personify the messianic city, Zion, as a woman. “As soon as Zion was in labor,” says Isaiah, “she brought forth sons” (66:8). The psalmist writes, “But all call Zion ‘Mother,’ / since all were born in her” (86:5). She is Jesus’ mother, and therefore in the messianic age, she is the mother and so, your mother, the mother of you who are a disciple: be you priest, campesino, daily commuter, abuela, mechanic, or cleaning lady (she’s coming up). Mary, the virgin-made-church, indeed.

But confronting new symbols and traveling their layers requires patience. And we are not always so patient with art.

Devotional art will always be popular, I suppose, because it requires the least amount of work of us. It is typically self-evident and easily grasped. There is nothing wrong with that. The whole point of devotional art is to aid devotion. For many, this means reinforcing for them what is familiar. These are the ninety-nine, let’s say. There are others whose work is aimed at the one whose devotions are daringly distinct and who is drawn into the mystery by new symbols and forms that require patience and contemplation. It is for the religious artist to strike this balance, or perhaps, to adjust the fulcrum.

After Mass, a handful of parishioners stood at the lip of the sanctuary in front of Erin’s work. I had wondered if, having had time with the image during Mass, they might have warmed to it a bit. Many of them did leave with a far smaller version printed on cards the artist was handing out after the liturgy, but I wasn’t sure.

Like I said, religious devotion is a very personal thing. It touches intimately on how a person relates to God, and that merits reverence irrespective of aesthetic preferences. The images we use that help us articulate, experience, and live our faith need to find resonance within us. Maybe Erin’s art is sprung from devotion but is not yet for devotion, at least not for the ninety-nine.

And yet Erin has reason to hope. It was Matilda, the Mexican lady who cleans the rectory, with whom the work resonated, for whom it provided a consolation and a point of communion. She stood apart from the handful after Mass, contemplating Erin’s painting. I was standing next to her. Matilda said to me, in a voice instinctively lowered, the way we do around sacred things, “I like how she’s brown like us.”

I could hardly make out her words. “What?” I said and inclined my ear toward her.

“I like how she’s brown like us.”

“Yeah,” I said, also at a whisper, “I like that too.”

And she stayed praying.