A HEART Alone Is Such a Stone

Pondering stone cutting and how 'The Altar' by George Herbert sings with Antoni Gaudí, Etsurō Sotoo and Barcelona's Sagrada Familia.

 I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit in you; I will remove from you your heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh. (Ezekiel 36:26)

You form a building that rises on the foundation of the apostles and the prophets, with Christ Jesus himself as the capstone. Through him the whole structure is fitted together and takes shape as a holy temple in the Lord; in him you are being built into this temple, to become a dwelling place for God in the Spirit. (Ephesians 2: 20-22)

I didn’t know when I chose Singing, Each to Each as the name for my Substack quite how much it would become a kind of guiding light for the kinds posts I want to write here. But I’m sensing a theme building, this idea of these voices singing to each other and me in the middle listening to them and pondering how they are singing to me. So here are a 17th century metaphysical poet, an ancient altar stone, a 19th century architect and 20th century sculptor, singing to each other and to me — and hopefully to you as well.

A broken ALTAR, Lord, thy servant rears

Karen Swallow Prior has a beautiful close reading of George Herbert’s poem “The Altar”. Click through and read it now.

I probably have read the poem before. I know I read Herbert’s “Easter Wings” when we talked about shape poems in one of my undergraduate poetry classes, and I suspect we looked at this one too. But I can’t remember really connecting with it before. This time, with Karen’s help, I’m entering it more fully, appreciating it more deeply. Perhaps this is also partly because where I am in my own life and understanding and walk with God.

What strikes me is the way Herbert brings together the image of the heart made of stone from Ezekiel, a passage I have always loved, with the stone of the altar. In Herbert’s reading of Ezekiel the stony heart is not so much replaced with flesh as transformed into something that is somehow both stone and flesh at the same time. It doesn’t cease being a stone, but the stone is given a purpose, shaped by the hand of God to become the stone of sacrifice and the site of worship. The altar is the place where love transforms death to life, the stone becomes a living thing precisely in the act of sacrifice.

In Friday’s Morning Prayer I read the passage from Ephesians where Paul declares that we are being built into a temple with Jesus as the capstone. It is the sacrifice of Jesus on the cross which remakes the human heart into a living temple where God may dwell. The heart becomes both at once: stone and flesh, altar and temple.

And as I ponder this poem I think about all the many places stones appear in the Bible. I’d love to collect them all here, but I think this would get too long and unwieldy.

The Stone the Iconoclasts Rejected

Before I move on to talk about my other connection, I wanted to pause to mention the image that Karen Swallow Prior uses to illustrate her post about this poem, a beautiful photograph of a stone altar. Clicking through the link to find the image source, I found the caption :

“Ancient altar stone at Jacobstow Church

This altar is in the South Aisle Chapel. It was the main altar stone up to about 1550 in the reign of Edward VI when the Church of England was becoming more Protestant and an act required that all altar stones should be removed. This one became a footbridge over a stream. It was found and moved back to the churchyard as a seat in the 1800s, and installed in the south aisle chapel in 1972. The nails that form the cross on the base of the altar are 15th century, and were saved from roof restoration work in 1970.”

The desecration of the ancient altars during the English Reformation period is so heartbreaking. I have been fascinated-- in a kind of grim way, I guess-- with the period of the English Reformation, with the martyrs of that period and with the people who silently suffered the loss of the faith they loved. (Robert Hugh Benson’s historical novels about the period have perhaps had an outsized influence on my imagination. Those and Evelyn Waugh’s biography of Edmund Campion.)

There was so much destruction of the Catholic history and heritage in England, a terrible contempt for all that had been holy and sacred for centuries upon centuries. Ornaments, statues, and rood screens wrecked, torn down, broken, defaced. (Shakespeare makes reference to this destruction in his image of “bare ruined choirs” of Sonnet 73.)

Altars stripped, altar stones pulled down and desecrated by being made into paving stones so people would have to walk on them, or, like this one, used as a footbridge and then as a seat in the churchyard. So much was lost in that horrible iconoclastic conflagration.

It's lovely to see that later generations have come to salvage that which was lost. And now this altar stone has finally been restored to it to its proper place in a church after the terrible desecration of being used as a footbridge and the lesser desecration of being used as a bench. What a fitting illustration to Herbert’s poem this storied stone is.

Awakened by a piece of stone

Then in the way that things happen, on the same day that I was pondering Herbert’s altars and stones and the image of God as the stone mason who shapes hearts, I stumble on the news that Etsurō Sotoo, the chief sculptor working on the Sagrada Familia Basilica in Barcelona, Spain, is being awarded with the Ratzinger Prize, given to “people who have answered the challenge of fostering a deep dialogue among science, theology, and philosophy.”

The Ratzinger Prize, established in 2011 has generally been awarded to theologians and scholars; but Sotoo is not the first artist to have been awarded the prize. In 2017 it was given to Estonian composer Avro Pärt. In 2018 it was awarded to Mario Botta, a Swiss Catholic architect. I’m fascinated with the notion that a sculptor is honored among those who have contributed to the theological conversation, to our understanding of the relationship between God and Man.

This new story caught my eye because it is not my first encounter with Etsurō Sotoo. A few years ago I stumbled across this beautiful short film, Stone Cut. (It’s only 6 minutes long, go watch it!) It’s a film that has taken root deep in my imagination. It haunts me.

In the film Sotoo tells a story about seeing a stone curb on the side of the road while stopped at a traffic light and being haunted by it, called back again and again to the stone. “I was awakened by a piece of stone,” he says. That awakening eventually led him to travel to Europe from his native Japan.

He says he wasn’t initially interested in Gaudi, but he found himself drawn to his work and asking to be allowed to work on the Sagrada Famila, following Gaudi’s plans. He says: “Gaudi talked with God about something very big and profound. To this day no one really knows what it was about. I wanted to touch a bit of that world.”

Cutting Stone, Being Cut

And then Sotoo says something that feels like it belongs next to Herbert’s poem:

“I must cut stone to be able to answer this question that burns inside of me like a magma that I can’t control.

I ask myself, “Why did I feel such an urge to cut stone back in those days?”

After decades, I concluded that I needed someone to cut me, to deform me, or to transform me. So I realized that by cutting stone I was actually sculpting myself.

Of course, when he says, ‘I was sculpting myself,’ that might seem like it’s antithetical to Herbert’s poem. Herbert writes:

A HEART alone

Is such a stone,

As nothing but

Thy pow'r doth cut.

So Herbert says only God can cut the human heart; while Sotoo says ‘I was sculpting myself.’ And yet Sotoo also says: "‘I needed someone to cut, deform, or transform me.’ In another interview Sotoo says: “the Sagrada Familia is a tool for building us.” When you delve more deeply into Sotoo’s thought about Gaudi and God, we see that he does give more credit to God the divine sculptor than the “sculpting myself” phrasing implies, but that his transformation was a long process. I actually love the idea that God’s process of shaping our hearts is done with our cooperation. God sculpts the sculptor’s heart through the sculptor’s process of cutting stone. He’s shaping himself, his are the hands, but it is God who is ultimately the designer.

At first Sotoo was primarily interested in Gaudi, in following in his footsteps, following his plans. But eventually, he says, he came to a point where he no longer had Gaudi’s plans to guide him. At that point, he says, he was about to give up and go home to Japan. But then he realized that if Gaudi could no longer guide him, he could gain insight by standing in Gaudi’s shoes and looking where Gaudi looked: by looking at Jesus.

And so, standing in Gaudi’s shoes, looking at Christ instead of at Gaudi, Sotoo became Catholic. He quips that originally his conversion was so that he could understand Gaudi’s vision. But it’s also clear listening to him talking about his artistic process that he is constantly inspired by delving more deeply into Scripture as well as reading the book of nature. His feet might have been placed on that road by Gaudi, but the road leads to Jesus.

Today Sotoo is a supporter of Gaudi’s cause for canonization. And this is indeed what the saints do for us. The purpose of saints is always to point to Christ. By looking at Gaudi and studying his works, Sotoo found the one to whom Gaudi was pointing all along and turned his eyes from the creature towards the Creator.

Sagrada Familia is a tool for building us, Sotoo says. God wants to shape our hearts into altars where we can worship him. And one of the tools God uses is Beauty. Whether it be the Beauty of the natural world, the Beauty of a poem like Herbert’s “The Altar”, or the Beauty of a grand basilica like Sagrada Familia.

God wants to form us into living stones and he wants to build his church out of these stones, with Christ as the capstone. But we must allow ourselves to be cut, reformed, shaped, transformed.

Those words of Sotoo’s, “I needed someone to cut, deform, or transform me,” remind me of a poem by another metaphysical poet and Herbert’s contemporary, John Donne:

Batter my heart, three-person'd God, for you

As yet but knock, breathe, shine, and seek to mend;

That I may rise and stand, o'erthrow me, and bend

Your force to break, blow, burn, and make me new.

Interior of the Sagrada Familia image from Wikimedia Commons