Fr Robert Hendrickson

The Veiled Virgin, an image of which is below, is a Carrara marble statue carved in Rome by Italian sculptor Giovanni Strazza (1818–1875), depicting the bust of a veiled Virgin Mary. The exact date of the statue's completion is unknown, but it was probably in the early 1850s. I return to it sometimes to marvel at the skill and attention to detail and the focus it must have taken to draw such perfection out of the marble.

It’s tempting these days — and probably all days past — to be so captured by the capacity for human beings to hurt one another that we lose sight of just how much beauty we can create. Whether it’s groups or the individual person we have a choice, day in and day out, whether we will be part of making beauty and meaning or whether we will fall prey to lesser temptations and distractions.

When one considers the sheer volume of bad news it’s possible to feel the tide is closing too fast and we become overstimulated with rage or quiescently numb with resignation. The Christian though has a third way because our Kingdom is not of this world. We can step aside from the vanities and depredations of human malice and capriciousness that mark the struggle for power and respond with a force that is as earth shattering as it is revolutionary — we respond with the beauty of holiness.

We respond by being followers of a loving Christ who simply told the powers of this world that come what may he was who he was, a son with whom God was well pleased. When you find yourself being overwhelmed by the seeming cruelties of the world, or our politics, or our neighbor, or ourselves, it might do us all well to pause and return to some image that draws us back to the human capacity for beauty — for the human capacity to create, build up, and make a more just, beautiful, and peaceful world.

It’s why I return to that Veiled Virgin.

I close with a simple story. Antonio Cassese, a distinguished Italian jurist who has been president of the international criminal court at The Hague was retelling some of the more gruesome stories that have crossed his desk, the sorts of things he has to contend with every day, in trying war criminals. When asked how, regularly obliged to gaze into such an appalling abyss, he had kept from going mad himself. His face brightened. "Ah," he said with a smile. "You see, as often as possible I make my way over to the Mauritshuis museum, in the center of town, so as to spend a little time with the Vermeers."

Yours in Christ,
Fr Robert