Memory and Metaphor: A Lenten Reflection
By Dr. Ronald Hecker Cram
Ronald Hecker Cram is Associate Professor of Christian Education at Columbia Theological Seminary, Decatur, Georgia. He is Immediate Past President of The Religious Education Association, www.religiouseducation.net His new book that will be published in May by Chalice Press is entitled, Bullying: A Spiritual Crisis. He and his spouse Susan are members of The Shrine of the Immaculate Conception in Atlanta, Georgia.

"Then Abraham fell on his face and laughed, and said to himself, Shall a child be born to a man who is a hundred years old? Shall Sarah, who is ninety years old, bear a child?" Genesis 17.17

"When I look at thy heavens, the work of thy fingers, the moon and the stars which thou has established; what is man that thou art mindful of him, and the son of man that thou dost care for him?" Psalm 8.3, 4

"And as Peter was below in the courtyard, one of the maids of the high priest came; and seeing Peter warming himself, she looked at him, and said, You also were with the Nazarene, Jesus. But he denied it, saying, I neither know nor understand what you mean. And he went out into the gateway. And the maid saw him, and began again to say to the bystanders, This man is one of them. But again he denied it. And after a little while again the bystanders said to Peter, Certainly you are one of them; for you are a Galilean. But he began to invoke a curse on himself and to swear, I do not know this man of whom you speak. And immediately the cock crowed a second time. And Peter remembered how Jesus had said to him, Before the cock crows twice, you will deny me three times. And he broke down and wept."
Mark 14.66-72

On Good Friday, 1992, I visited the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, Georgia, for the very first time. Off the third floor's marble staircase, I found an extraordinary collection of paintings, including tempera, watercolor, oil, collage, and mixed media. The work of Romare Bearden, a leading twentieth-century African-American artist, was on display. The exhibit was entitled, "Memory and Metaphor."

Maybe because it was Good Friday, my attention was drawn to Bearden's 1945 "Passion of Christ" Series. Geometric, abstract designs, colored with bright blocks of color, brought the Passion of Christ to me in a way that was unexpectedly painful and immediate. There was the Christ before me, at Golgatha, on the cross--his face mingled with blood, compassion, and pain. The perspective of the watercolor and ink painting forced me to look straight into that face--there was no escape, no exit from standing along with the three women in the painting at the base of the cross. I was there, I was present. The Christ moved and talked, and struggled for breath. We stood together at the base of the cross, the women and me, unable to act; unable to do anything but be present with the Christ who was dying on the cross only inches away from us.

There have been very few occasions in my life when the sense of time and space has vanished. As I stood with the women on that hill, all time stopped. There was a timelessness in time that took my memory from mere recollection to active engagement and participation in a place vaguely familiar. "Were you there when they crucified my Lord?" Yes, I was there--not in the past, but in the present. I am there, and he is nailed to the tree. And it causes my heart, and it causes the hearts of the women at the base of the cross to tremble, to tremble, to tremble.

Like Peter, I needed to run, I needed to get away. I did not want to believe that God was ever powerless, that this was the Christ I had placed so much trust and hope in.

The intensity of the experience was such that I found it necessary to turn away. My eyes began to fill with tears. I felt almost unable to tear my eyes away from the Christ, my muscles held me back. But finally, in a moment of awkward transition, I escaped. There was both disorientation and relief. I was between time and timelessness; between place and abyss. Sort of like waking up from a dream, and being thoroughly disoriented, not knowing exactly where I was. Instinctively, I attempted to bring myself back to a time I understood, back to a place I could control, and could make sense out of--at the High Museum of Art, the third floor.

As I turned around, my eye was drawn to Bearden's "The Fall of Troy," a 1974 collage and media on board. The mind of Homer was the mind of Bearden. In spite of myself, I was there, behind the broken walls of a devastated Troy. Over there, the Trojan horse stood, the means of destruction of a city. Here, there were houses and buildings engulfed with flame. Women, children, and old men's voices cried out in horror and in pain. A scene from hell. A scene about force, what Simone Weil once referred to as "that 'x' that turns anybody who is subjected to it into a 'thing'" (Weil 1983, 3). A scene of grotesque hopelessness. As I stood there, in Troy, the smoke in my nostrils and eyes, victims grabbing at my legs and arms, crying out for help and deliverance, I remembered Hector's last moments with his wife and child. Hector, the proud leader of the Trojans, with shiny armor and horsehair plumed helmet.

Hector stretched his arms towards his child, but the boy cried and nestled in his nurse's bosom, scared at the sight of his father's armor, and at the horsehair plume that nodded fiercely from his helmet. Hector and his wife laughed. Hector took his helmet off and lay it all gleaming upon the ground. Then he took his darling child, kissed him, and dandled him in his arms, praying over him all the while. He then returned the child to his wife, replaced the helmet upon his head, turned, and without looking back, marched into a battle from which he would never return. And his wife wept bitterly (Homer, trans. Butler 1942, 97).

Hector had glimpsed the promise and hope that alluded him in the eyes of a child, but he went away sorrowing.

I could stand it no more. I began running toward the city gate along with the other plundered women and children of Troy. Mindless, hopeless fear.

Again, I felt the need to get away, the need to escape. Mechanically, I turned around, and there in front of me was a painting of a bullfighter who had just been gored by the bull. The red cape was tossed in the air, out of control. Bearden captured the intense split-moment between life and death in a thoroughly abstract and realistic way. I read the title of the painting, it was "Garcia Lorca." Lorca. Lorca. How long it had been since I had remembered the name Garcia Lorca? I was a senior in Santa Ana High School in California. The last three weeks of school, in spite of my bad case of senioritis and acne, I was required by my Spanish teacher to memorize a poem by Garcia Lorca about the death of a bullfighter gored by a bull while in the ring before the cheering crowds. The poem was entitled, "Lament for Ignacio Sanchez Mejias."

I remember that some of the lines went this way:

A las cinco de la tarde
Eran las cinco en punto de la tarde.
Un nino trajo la blanca sabana
a las cinco de la tarde.

At five in the afternoon
It was exactly five in the afternoon.
A boy brought the white sheet
at five in the afternoon.

Las heridas quemaban com soles
a las cinco de la tarde.

No me digais que la vea!

Porque ti has muerto para siempre
como todos los muertos de la Tierra,
como todos los muertos que se olvidan
en un monton de perros apagados.

His wounds were burning like suns
at five in the afternoon.

I will not see it!

Because you have died for ever,
like all the dead of the Earth,
like all the dead who are forgotten
in a heap of cowering dogs.

In the middle of the classroom presentation, I stopped. I could not continue to recite the poem. The death of the Christ on the cross became so vivid and so painful to me, that I had to stop. The teacher judgmentally presumed that I stopped because my memory had failed. I took my seat. My classmates were snickering and surprised. Cram always had his assignments completed. It didn't matter. I remember asking myself, "Is this all Jesus is--a bullfighter? Didn't Jesus take unnecessary risk, waving the red cape of God's reign in front of the powers and authorities that inevitably would gore him, kill him? Who did he think he was?" I did not want to see it. I was successful in avoiding most of these questions, even throughout seminary. Here, in the High Museum, these questions and connections, long dormant, long forgotten, demanded more of me than I thought I could bear. I did not want to see it, but I could not bear to look away from the bullfighter, or from myself, or from the crucified Christ.

I wondered if Bearden had made a similar connection between the Christ and Lorca's bullfighter. Perhaps.

The crowing of a rooster, the removal of a helmet, a bullfighter in the ring, the knocking at a gate. All metaphors. All moments when the self-delusions and insanities that form the taken-for-granted worlds that we choose to call "home" are utterly, irreverently shattered, and glimpses of wholeness and truth somehow begin to emerge.

You can't be the Son of God, you with the red cape before the bull! There is no alternative to brute force and to war in the real world! We are not deceived by our own quests for political power! The ends, after all, justify the means! And then the rooster crows. The helmet lowers. A bullfighter dies. A knocking at the gate is heard.

An angry patron jolted me back to the High Museum, back to everyday life--a life that was now both the same and different than before I entered the third floor of the gallery. Whether by accident or by providence, I cannot be sure, but I choose to believe the latter. The disruptive anger of the patron, in their own Fellini-esque sort of way, entered my life, and helped me see more clearly the place and time where distinctions between sacred and secular disappear, where time and timelessness are not opposites, but comrades. It is a placeless place, a holy place, where we are jolted out of our nightmarish human constructions of inner blindnesses, where walls that need to be torn down are built, and walls that need to be built are torn down. It is a place of recognizing that the Christ whom we frantically try to find was among us all the time. Sometimes it takes consistent denial of the Christ to bring us to these places of discovery. Sometimes we are invited to such liminal spaces by the works of the Bible, fine literature, classroom experiences long forgotten, or by a Romare Bearden.

These are places where memory and metaphor become occasions for forgetting, and forgetting occasions for memory, where repentance often results in the death of our god, the death of the god of our limited hopes and fears. It is a place and time for well-meaning cowards like Peter, like me, like Abraham, and perhaps like you.

It is a placeless time beyond human reason, where the "experience of being saved by God through Christ in the power of the Holy Spirit" is understood as the only valid option of the Christian life (LaCugna 1991, 3). It is a timeless place of free will, free choice, into paths of sorrowing, or into paths of repentance, change, and awe-filled joy. It is the awe and wonder of the Psalmist about God and about ourselves, where laughing at God's power is mockery, where hiding from the crucified God is a form of self-deception and idolatry.

No experience is normative, my own included. I choose to understand my experience at the High Museum to be an invitation, nothing more. An invitation to reconsider God's power, God's powerlessness, and human limitations in ways perhaps not understood before. Perhaps an opportunity for repentance, a chance for disruption, maybe room for some humble change. For me, my experience in the High Museum on Good Friday provided a partial glimpse, however brief, of the culture of God's reign, a foreign land already but not yet present among us.

This article is republished by permission from the author and was first printed in the journal, Religious Education, www.religiouseducation.net.

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