The cover of Issue 5 — Saint Anselm 2021 — of The Lamp magazine, a bi-monthly publication that bills itself as offering an orthodox Catholic perspective on the problems of modern life. The magazine offers views on literature, science, the fine arts and other topics. ERIC HANSON, COURTESY THE LAMP.
I recently subscribed to The Lamp magazine, which is basically a Catholic version of The New Yorker. The artwork on the cover is usually a black and white sketch of some amusing scene of what I call “Catholic Americana,” such as a cigarette-smoking nun on a riding lawn mower or a cocktail or a cocktail party of smiling clerics and laity.
But my favorite Lamp cover of all is from their Saint Anselm 2021 issue. It uses the same artistic style as the rest but features a very different kind of content.
The sketch depicts a mass of businessmen, moving to and fro, some absorbed by the screens of their phones, one smoking a stogie, all looking purposeful and professional in their suits and kempt hairdos. But in the midst of them all, initially almost undetectable, stands a camel-hair clothed John the Baptist, hand raised, mouth open, beard wild and unruly.
The symbolism is clear. John originally preached “as a voice crying out in the wilderness” of Judea circa 1 AD, but his message of the coming of the Savior, the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world, is as relevant in the wilderness of American life today. Also, like the Baptists’ audience of yesteryear, Americans of today have all kinds of distractions and pursuits that allow them to avoid the Gospel, a message that clashes sharply with the predominant values and priorities of the ambient culture.
The image was attractive and provocative enough for me to put the cover on my wall. It serves as a daily reminder to “prepare the way of the Lord” amid all my apparently mundane activities — my work, studies, and social life.
But the scene struck me in a new way one evening while praying my rosary in an armchair across from it. Because the room was dimly lit, certain features of the drawing stood out even more than they do with the lights on. For one, the figure of John, with his darkly drawn clothing and beard, was far more noticeable, and was more evidently the focal point of the whole work. In fact, the other characters, basically just black lines on a white backdrop at this point, seemed to recede into the background.
What can be drawn from this experience? For one, John the Baptist — and ultimately the One to whom he points — is more real, more substantial, more meaningful than the merely practical horizon represented by the businessmen, what German philosopher Josef Pieper calls “the work-a-day world.”
It’s not that work and business aren’t good and important things. But what’s true is that they can only have any ultimate value if they are connected to and ordered vertically, toward God, the foundation of all reality and the guarantor of our worth and meaning. The fact that this insight only came when the lights were dimmed and my bodily senses were effectively dulled also points to the primacy of the spiritual reality that undergirds the visible, and the absolute importance of prayer in being able to see things truly.
Furthermore, the “weight” of John in the drawing flows directly from his humility: He is drawn so darkly — and therefore stands out so much — precisely because he is wearing such rough and coarse clothing, and because his beard grows so wildly. In other words, he stands out because he is poor.
John’s poverty doesn’t make him empty. Instead, it allows him to be completely filled with his love for the Lord. As the late Cardinal Jean Danielou pointed out, and as I’ve written about before, John’s entire mission of radical renunciation only makes sense as “a man set apart for this one great joy” — the joy of first knowing Jesus in the womb of his aunt, Mary, and then of anticipating meeting Christ once more. John is filled with this joy, he is filled with Jesus, and thus he stands apart from the crowd as more real and more substantial.
This is not a new idea. In “The Great Divorce,” C.S. Lewis depicts the Spirits of heaven as more “solid” than the shadowy Damned who come to visit them, for whom the grass feels as “hard as diamonds.” Underlying Lewis’s approach seems to be the theology of St. Augustine, who taught that evil is merely a “deprecation of the good” — it is not real in and of itself, but is only the absence of reality, of what should actually be there. Those who love the Lord completely, like the Spirits of heaven and St. John the Baptist, are more real because they are more fully what they were created to be: sons and daughters of God and partakers in the Divine Life.
As St. Irenaeus of Lyons, our newest doctor of the Church, once declared, Christ is “calling men anew to communion with God, that by communion with Him we may partake of incorruption.” John the Baptist extended this invitation 2000 years ago, and it’s offered to each of us today, as plain and factual as his weighty presence at the heart of that magazine cover. Sometimes, though, we just need our man-made lights to go down to see it all more clearly.
Liedl writes from the Twin Cities.
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