Some locations celebrate the Ascension on this coming Sunday. In the three dioceses of Nebraska we celebrate it today.
This mural depicting the Ascension of the Lord is on the wall behind the altar in our parish church. It was painted in 2002 by local artist, Ardith Starostka.
The artist used parishioners for the models of the people in the foreground. It was kind of funny to listen to some of the comments around the time the picture was being painted. It was along the lines of, "Well, I know so-and-so, and let me tell you, he is no saint!"
The artist's husband posed for the figure of Christ, and her daughters for the angels. She only has two daughters, but there are eight angels.One of the apostles was modeled after our then-archbishop, Elden Francis Curtiss. When he came for Confirmation he was a bit unnerved to see himself in the mural.
Some of the people who posed for the picture are now deceased, so it is a piece of parish history.
I love this song: Hail the Day That Sees Him Rise. Too bad we only sing it once a year.
Katherine, that's a very cool piece of parish history. Is your parish called Ascension Parish? I think it's pretty neat that you have the Ascension behind your altar all the time.
ReplyDeleteOur worship space doesn't have any artwork like that. We do have several statues, including a couple that were commissioned by parishioners as gifts to the parish. Our parish is called St. Edna, but there is no statue of St. Edna to be found in our parish. I don't know how much it costs to commission a statue, but if I win the lottery, maybe I'll consider doing that. She was an anchoress - I think she has a story worth thinking about.
That's a nice performance of that hymn. Those OCP session choirs do a great job. We used to subscribe to their sheet music service and play the CDs of their session recordings as drive-around music.
Our parish is actually named for St. Anthony of Padua. There is also a painting of him, not by the same artist. It is around 100 years old, and there are also a couple of statues of St. Tony. The main part of the church was built in 1917, and an addition was put on in the 1960s.
DeleteI didn't know about St. Edna. I looked her up, and it says she was Irish, and succeeded St. Hilda ad abbess of Whitby.
DeleteWhoa! King Oswy's daughter, Princess Aelflaed, succeeded St. Hilda. She had been sent there by Oswy to ensure that the decision in Northumbria to follow the Roman church (of which Oswy was a partisan) did not backside into its Celtic church roots.
DeleteHilda was a Celtic church partisan, but accepted the alignment with Rome. However, many Irish religious left Whitby after Romanization and went back to Ireland, most notably Bishop Colman. Wilfrid, one of Hilda's protege and a Roman partisan, succeeded Colman.
It seems wholly unlikely that the newly Romanized diocese of York would have allowed an Irish woman to head up what was then the most important monastery in England and possibly Europe. There is no mention of St. Edna in Bede, the most reliable source of info on St. Hilda and the Whitby monasteries.
Looks like I got a lot of interesting study ahead of me tomorrow to find out how Edna fits in!
Well, I thought it was kind of odd that an Irish saint ended up in Britain, but sometimes they got around. St. Columbanus ended up in Italy.
DeleteI looked into the story of Edna a number of years ago, researching a homily. My recollection is that there were at least 2-3 saints with that name over the span of a couple of hundred years, during the first millenium of Christianity. They were all Irish but ministered in Britain. The one I selected was an anchoress, in the city of Richmond if I'm not mistaken. She had a cell built against the outside of the church and lived in it for a number of years. The cell had no doorway, but two windows: one set in the wall of the church, which she opened each day in order to attend mass; and the other that opened onto the street or square. The latter was used so that people could provide her with provisions (and presumably switch out her chamber pot), and they also would come to her for spiritual advice.
DeleteSeveral miracles were attributed to her but I don't remember what they were.
Another legend, with quite dubious attestation I believe, is that Edna founded the city of Edinburgh ("Edinburgh" = "Edna's Burg", a burg being a fort).
The legend in our local community is that our parish is named for St. Edna because the donor who provided a wad of cash to found the parish had a wife named Edna (possibly deceased at the time of the donation), and his condition was that the parish be named for her. The parish is younger than I am - it was founded in the mid-1960s - and there are several parishioners who have belonged since the parish's founding, who report this as fact. It doesn't sound unbelievable.
I was going by a Wikipedia entry, and those aren't always fact-checked sufficiently.
DeleteI consulted a handful of Lives of Saints accounts, online and in hardcopy. I doubt they're any more reliable than Wikipedia!
DeleteSt. Edna the anchoress sounds plausible. Early celtic religious were ascetics who practiced the "white martyrdom" by going off to evangelize. St. Aidan, St. Hilda's mentor and founder of Lindisfarne, was in that tradition.
DeleteLives of Irish and early British saints are usually highly colored, melodramatic, and heavily embellished.
My parish is named for St. Luke. Anybody here heard of him?
ReplyDeleteThe parish I grew up in was named for him.
DeleteI like the personal touch in parishes. Philip Johnson, the architect, and I, the reporter, found ourselves trapped in New Harmony, Ind., on a rainy afternoon and discovered we both liked Manhattans. We found the only bartender in town who could make one and killed the time until he was to speak (and I was to report on what he said) by enjoying a Manhattan or two. So I am not sure he would have said this anyplace else. But, since he is no longer with us and it made a huge impression on me, I feel free to pass it on.
ReplyDeleteHe said designing churches is a huge pain in the neck with one exception -- for the Benedictines. Normally, you have a pastor or a board who wants the church of his/their youth, even though it doesn't fit the location or any sensible purpose. And they will "touch up" anything you do to make it more like what they think they remember. On the other hand, he said the Benedictines like art, know art and think it's important. They don't try to impose their childhood memories on the architect.
Our parish has Fransiscan roots. So do a lot of other parishes in the area. They were sent here to start parishes, and they had a basic church design. Red brick with a steep slate roof and a steeple. Inside, a choir loft reached by a winding staircase, and an ornate altar with a bunch of niches for statues. Stained glass windows. It's deja vu when you see these churches, you know that Fransiscans were there back in the day. By now most parishes have individualized according to need. We have an added on area, and the Rococo altar is gone. But there is one little rural parish that still has all the original stuff, from the life sized angels holding a candelabra to the stations of the cross with Polish titles. It always puzzled me, though, why this little church which seats less than 200 people needed a pulpit 12 feet high accessed by a staircase.
DeleteSome people are disturbed that feasts like the Ascension are celebrated by different groups at different times, but sometimes it turns out to work out well.
ReplyDeleteThe Benedictine Monastery in Europe that records the Monastic Divine Office still celebrates in Latin and so sang first Vespers on Wednesday evening as did Saint Thomas Episcopal Church and choir school in New York which records theirs.
The Diocese of Cleveland celebrates the Ascension this weekend so have the recorded Vespers from the Benedictines and Saint Thomas.
Next Wednesday the local Orthodox Church will celebrate Vespers and the Divine Liturgy for the Ascension. They are this year one week behind us for Easter and Pentecost.
So a whole octave of Ascension celebrations!
Today we were in Omaha for the priesthood ordination of a kid from our parish. I shouldn't say "kid", he was 26-ish. But we knew him since grade school. His was the only ordination in the archdiocese this year, and the first one from the parish in 20 years. The three parishes in our town did a pretty decent job of filling up the cathedral.
ReplyDelete