Poetry
Gunn, Mark
Mark Gunn The Altar in Saint Peter's Basilica Good Friday, 1993 They built it in the center instead of at the head. Spires root into the dust freckled air. spires of twisting gold,...
...Those theologians who presume to an economical regulation of mercy's currents remain something of an embarrassment: John Calvin, for instance, whom even Presbyterians don't like to mention too often, least of all during missionary campaigns...
...God a father, a spiritual essence, and a son: the heavenly reaches, the numinous, the mundane, all enclosed within one concept...
...But Christian ambition...
...1 am appropriately moved...
...The sign says (in Laiin...
...Now these evocations of an atmosphere are meant to attest to an explosive potency in Christianity far beyond the worship of God and the necessities of the soul—but the explosive can't always be kept within the boundaries meant to contain it, no more than it could be in Paul's unique but considerable coiner of Christianity...
...14: 25 March 1994...
...It is, I think, the artist's employment of perspective by incongruity, so much braver than the critic's, to reveal the darker possibilities in the good news of revelation...
...It's also a responsive imagination: it picks things up...
...Such as—as I put it upon beginning—"an odd moral ambivalence in the Christian mechanics of mercy...
...The priest likens her to a "holy man [who] lived in sin all through his life, because he couldn't bear the idea that any soul could suffer damnation....This man decided that if any soul was going to be damned, he would be damned too....I don't know, my child, but some people think he was—well, a saint...
...Trinitarianism is a Catholicism much more encompassing than geography...
...but such is not the case...
...I'll say it: I believe...
...The\ support nothing but the weight of the piety thick air...
...tourists, unbelievers...
...This rich atmosphere matters enormously to some minds...
...And in some of those to which it matters there's a sort of "fermentation...
...Stone steps trickle down to it...
...an ashen center, a riddled pith...
...And if it interprets that oddity as "a certain imaginative relation between criminality and grace," that need not be a scandalous attempt to shock the faithful and entertain the profane...
...locked off by iron gates to protect the tomb from assassins...
...Its catholicity: by which I don't mean only its horizontal universalism...
...But at the same time, I am resistant...
...with a crux he denied the existence of almost two thousand years ago today...
...At the other extreme: Rose, the enamored of Greene's Pinkie Brown, would rather be damned than saved if Pinkie is not to be saved...
...Jemand von Niemand," with his peers and masters, is of a certainty roasting in hell...
...And then: "The church does not demand that we believe any soul is cut off from salvation...
...The literary imagination is a fictive one, of course: it makes things up...
...spires of twisting gold, spires that are really pillars, not spires at all...
...bitious faith there ever has been—which isn't to belittle the Hebraic visions of the Old Testament, for the accomplishment of monotheism was an enormous task, as was the establishment of a law "unto all the nations...
...But for all the fevered bravery of imagination, Christianity remains the religion of Mercy...
...Beneath...
...For while I don't doubt the saintliness of the man the priest speaks of, I have a hard time with a faith so spendthrift of mercy that it cannot assure us that "Dr...
...And then: "You can't conceive, my child, nor can I or anyone—the...appalling...strangeness of the mercy of God...
...the prayer heavy air that hugs an altar of black and gold...
...Perhaps if Christianity had managed to be a small world view, say roughly the size (and interestingness) of pragmatism, there would be no problem...
...The totaliter aliter or Wholly Other mixed with the familiar...
...this is the grave of the Rock of the Church...
...an archaic trope...
...Sometimes it seems to me Christianity says to the world: Give me your tired and huddled masses of certainties, ambiguities, clarities, contradictions yearning to be One...
...I believe Saint Peter holds up the great walls of a faith with the grisly embers of his heart...
Vol. 121 • March 1994 • No. 6
