The Stained Glass Buffalo: Art

04 May 2008

Christ and a monk and two shepherds...

"At the top of this miniature, Christ and a monk hold up an abbot's crozier, symbolic of a shepherd's crook. Below on the left, sheep and ar vigilant shepherd and dog represent a good flock. On the right, a slumbering, neglectful keeper and his seated watchdog fail to monitor a herd of bad goats. The only full-page miniature in the manuscript, this frontispiece heralds Hugo de Fouilloy's Treatise On Shepherds And Flocks, a mystical commentary on certain verses of the Roman author Virgil's Ninth Eclogue. The illumination draws its imagery of Christ as a shepherd and the separation of sheep and goats from the Bible. In Hugo's discussion, Christ is a model for an abbot who is shepherd to his monks. The two shepherds depicted represent the qualities of vigilance and neglect." {At the Getty...}

Great Popes. Great Artwork.

(10 min... and some ain't popes - but still nice)

It is Jesus

“It is Jesus that you seek when you dream of happiness; he is waiting for you when nothing else you find satisfies you; he is the beauty to which you are so attracted; it is he who provokes you with that thirst for fullness that will not let you settle for compromise; it is he who urges you to shed the masks of a false life; it is He who reads in your heart your most genuine choices, the choices that others try to stifle.

It is Jesus who stirs in you the desire to do something great with your lives, the will to follow an ideal, the refusal to allow yourselves to be ground down by mediocrity, the courage to commit yourselves humbly and patiently to improving yourselves and society, making the world more human and more fraternal.”
--Pope John Paul II

Carlo Carretto:

How much I must criticize you, my church, and yet how much I love you! You have made me suffer more than anyone and yet I owe more to you than to anyone. I should like to see you destroyed and yet I need your presence. You have given me much scandal and yet you alone have made me understand holiness. Never in this world have I seen anything more compromised, more false, yet never have I touched anything more pure, more generous or more beautiful. Countless times I have felt like slamming the door of my soul in your face - and yet, every night, I have prayed that I might die in your sure arms! No, I cannot be free of you, for I am one with you, even if not completely you. Then too - where would I go? To build another church? But I could not build one without the same defects, for they are my defects. And again, if I were to build another church, it would be my church, not Christ's church. No, I am old enough, I know better.