Bearded and Blessed

A disclaimer: There's a decent chance that the story this blog opens with will find its way into a sermon one day. Sorry, Christ Church parishioners, but, as you know, this is the strange stuff I dig. Just nod knowingly if and when it shows up again.

Even among the stories of 16^th century iconoclasm, what happened at the Danish church of Holstebro is uniquely bizarre. As the ideals of the emerging Reformation took hold, pietists worshiping at Holstebro found a painting of the Dormition of the Blessed Virgin Mary in their church suddenly incongruent with, even offensive to their Lutheran worship sensibilities. So, with a few careful (one hopes) brush strokes, the virgin was transfigured into Jacob. She was given a beard. Conveniently, the twelve apostles did not need any corresponding alterations to take up their new identities as the patriarch’s twelve sons.

The edited painting remained unchanged until 1907, when the beard was removed and Jacob became Mary once again. Perhaps the long overdue unbending of Mary’s gender was a tragedy Marcel Duchamp intended to counter by providing the Mona Lisa with a goatee twelve years later.

The obvious question first asked about the project of the 16^th century proto-Dadaists is “Who would do such a thing?” But here’s another: “What did such a thing do to the people who prayed near it for four hundred years?”

Think about it. Sunday after Sunday, generation after generation of the Danish faithful said their prayers near a painting of a bearded Blessed Virgin. Were they changed by the experience?

I imagine some folks came to love the painting, perhaps even knowing its complicated story. Others may have been startled and excited to learn of the subversive presence of the Blessed Virgin, watching over them incognito all those strange years. The beard's erasure may have felt to them like a sacred cover blown. Maybe Mary looked more delicate and vulnerable than ever, her cheeks pale and naked as chalk. Who knows?

But even art can't go back. An old reality wasn't restored, because the restored gaze of the original image fell on a different generation of people, with different expectations, with a different set of experiences including the experience of an unshaven Mary named Jacob.

The strange story is one more reminder that meaning happens in the moment. Nothing is retrieved from history intact or unscathed.

So consider this the next time you retrieve a story from the Bible. Do we really want our art, our scriptures, our religion to stay put? Are they stable things to be preserved, or restored, or returned to? Or to they speak to us even as they are being scarred, defaced, and deformed by history and the hands of folks like us?