In mid-March, four months after my father died, my son got married. My father had been in declining health for a few years, during which time my mother took on the role of full-time caretaker (as a lifelong partner might be expected to). Resisting entreaties to accept regular outside help, she also stubbornly and preemptively ruled out any kind of travel, even for a grandson’s wedding. That she was able to be present after all made everyone happy, including her. The ceremony was joyous, the reception a party for the ages: a happy marriage, if you will, of Russian-Jewish and Italian-Catholic tradition. But the reality of what allowed my mother to be in attendance—and the fact that she was attending on her own—was never far from the surface of things.  

“May his memory be a blessing,” my son’s soon-to-be in-laws said to me in the days and weeks following my father’s death, as together we helped plan the wedding. It’s hard to express the comfort that their words—the English translation of the traditional Hebrew zichrona livricha—brought me. “A Blessing too Good for Jews Alone,” as a headline at the Tablet once memorably put it, and I can now personally attest to that. “It wishes not only that when the living think about those who have died, they do so with warmth and joy,” the article’s author wrote. “It also [marks] the ways those lives have mattered and continue to matter in this world, even if they are no longer in it.” At the reception, when it came time for toasts, my son’s new mother-in-law asked guests to remember family members who’d recently died. She spoke of the “void” the departed leave in the lives of those still living. Until then, I’d experienced my father’s death more as an absence than a void—a difference of degree, not of category, but still a difference. Yet what, if not “void,” best describes that state when someone who was so much a part of this world is no longer in it?

By coincidence, the wedding took place in a part of New Jersey where I’d lived as a child. It’s a densely populated conglomeration of suburban towns and small cities linked by a network of highways, state roads, and commercial strips as tangled and complex as the circulatory system. I feel as if I spent most of that childhood in the car with my parents and brothers traveling these roads—trips to visit family and to see New York City; to gas stations and furniture outlets and appliance stores. Over the course of the wedding weekend’s mandated journeys—airport, bakery, reception hall, hotel—I got to relive some of those earlier drives. The roads still hew to their long-ago plotted routes. Even some of the old landmarks remain, stores and restaurants and malls that have withstood the passage of years.    

This includes a roadside diner we always used to pass without ever stopping to eat at. But once it offered a place of rest. Late on the night of Holy Thursday in 1982, I accompanied my father to our parish church to sit vigil before the stripped and barren altar, one shift in the long line that would carry on through the next afternoon. We stayed for our assigned hour until being relieved by the next parishioner. But our night wasn’t over. Out in the station wagon were boxes of donated food to deliver to a sister parish several towns away in time for Easter weekend. It was getting late by the time we arrived at that church and began to unpack the car. We left the boxes near a row of refrigerators beneath the basketball nets in the gym, as instructed by the parish priest. Then we began the ride home. At that hour traffic was light, but it still felt like a long drive. I’d been in school all day, and my father had been at work. Usually one to push all the way through, he uncharacteristically this night pulled off the road and into the parking lot of that diner we’d always sped right by. I thought he wanted coffee, but he said he just needed to sleep for a few minutes. I sat there watching people go in and out of the diner while my father dozed. The clock ticked past midnight into Good Friday, and a few minutes later, he was awake and ready to drive on.

I’ve often thought about that night, sitting by my father on a hard pew bench in the empty church and, later, in the car while he slept. But it wasn’t until the weekend of my son’s wedding that I actually saw that diner again. I was sixteen in 1982, a junior in high school. My father was forty-six: old to me then, enviably and unimaginably young from where I stand now. Other well-wishers in the months since he died have used the word “imprint” in describing a parent’s lasting, indelible mark on a child. This image, too, has caused me to think. Photos of me from the wedding capture a man bearing unmistakable and not entirely welcome resemblance to his late father—don’t we all want to escape such easy and reductive linkage, so obvious an “imprint”? And yet, beyond what’s visible within the borders of a photograph, there is other evidence of his imprint, perhaps known only to me, that I’m not always so hesitant to acknowledge.

“The mystery / that there is anything, anything at all, / let alone cosmos, joy, memory, everything, / rather than void,” Denise Levertov writes in her poem “Primary Wonder.” There are days that force us to contemplate the void more directly than we might like to. We cannot be sure that the emptiness will be filled; we understandably doubt the very possibility of it. But if a memory can bring blessings, and if we bear the imprint of those who preceded us, it’s a little easier to imagine emptiness becoming fullness, absence becoming abundance, life being renewed. It might even stir that joyful hope: that there is not just anything, but everything, rather than void.

On Thursday, February 15, a group of gay, lesbian, and transgender activists briefly hijacked a funeral service at St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York. They filled the front pews costumed in carefully chosen funeral garb: the skimpy, the glitzy, the gaudy, and the drag. One eulogist led the congregation in repeated chants of “Cecilia, Cecilia,” the deceased’s name; another celebrated her as “St. Cecilia, mother of all whores”; and one woman interrupted the “Ave Maria” by twirling down the aisle with the refrain of “Ave Cecilia.”

The subject of this sudden canonization was Cecilia Gentili, a transgender activist, former prostitute, and accomplished lobbyist for the rights of streetwalkers and the decriminalization of prostitution. She was a sometime actress and writer and an inveterate performer—in sum, a prominent member of the high-glamor wing of trans and queer New York society. (Her fullest obituary appeared in Vogue online, punctuated by Gucci ads.)

The St. Patrick’s funeral was a stellar example of what, in 1961, Daniel J. Boorstin, called a “pseudo-event.” For Boorstin, a conservative American historian and later Librarian of Congress, a pseudo-event is an event that might have the appearance of a genuine news event but is in fact staged and orchestrated mainly to generate publicity.

Provoking publicity may not have been the only objective behind the staging of the Gentili funeral, but it was surely a major one. The day before the funeral, a clearly alerted New York Times reporter called the archdiocese for comment on St. Patrick’s holding such a rite for a transgender activist. The Times story on the funeral ran for two columns, filled with colorful details, for example, about the “daring outfits—glittery miniskirts and halter tops, fishnet stockings, sumptuous fur stoles and at least one boa sewed from what appeared to be $100 bills.”

In line with the familiar culture-wars script for covering things Catholic, the story proposed that the funeral might be a landmark event. Was the notoriously repressive Catholic Church catching up to the enlightened, progressive worldview of, say, Vogue or the New York Times? Surely that possibility was worth two columns—the space that in my time as the Times’s senior religion reporter might have been allotted for a major papal decree.

The story pinged everywhere. Outrage duly followed. Some Catholics fell ill at the very thought of a priest blessing the casket and commending to God the soul of a transgender person. Others managed to blame Pope Francis. But the common, overriding reaction was indignation and pain at a sacred rite in a sacred space denatured into street theater—and reported as though this were an unambiguously positive thing.

That was certainly my initial reaction. It was magnified by disappointment in the paper where I had prized my own decade as a religion reporter and my two decades as a biweekly columnist. The Times story contrasted the present welcome for Gentili’s funeral with the December 10, 1989 ACT UP protest at Cardinal John O’Connor’s opposition to publicly supported, condom-based “same sex” programs, especially ones mandated for Catholic schools. The article accurately described the massive 1989 protest as “a touchstone in the city’s gay history.” It did not mention that the protest had involved the disruption of a liturgy and the desecration of a consecrated host—and was widely condemned by public officials, media editorials (including in the New York Times itself), and many in the LGBTQ community.

Most disappointing was that the Gentili funeral story, though written by a newly appointed metropolitan-area religion reporter, was religiously tone-deaf. That the event might have abused a religious ritual and setting was apparently not worth even a hint of attention.

My immediate mortification was quickly eased. Hadn’t Jesus warned his followers to anticipate abuse and persecution, indeed in forms far more severe than this? And hadn’t the cathedral been clearly ambushed—and hadn’t it acquitted itself well? The Times reported that the person requesting the funeral had kept Gentili’s transgender identity “under wraps.” One can understand a cathedral official not being aware of Gentili’s identity, whether gender or sexual or political or, for that matter, religious. (She was a self-proclaimed atheist with, it seems, a vague and perhaps growing openness to faith.) The cathedral later explained that it does not do “background checks” on those for whom a funeral was requested, though one wonders whether it will feel compelled to do so now. But Ms. Gentili’s gender status was not really the point. Indeed, when the Times reporter raised the question of that status in his call to the archdiocese before the funeral, Joe Zwilling, an archdiocesan spokesman, refused the bait. The funeral was routine: burying the dead “is one of the corporal works of mercy,” he said; it demonstrated the way “we should treat all others, as if they were Christ in disguise.”

That was the right answer. And once the funeral was scheduled, any backing off would have provoked more public controversy. Imagine refusing entrance to the garishly or inappropriately dressed, or censoring the petition for gender-affirming health care, or confiscating the “mother of whores” imagery, or cutting off the microphone when eulogies turned offensive, or ushering away the “Ave Cecilia” dancer. The event would have gone from provocation to eruption.

Days later, Cardinal Timothy Dolan said on the radio, “I think that our cathedral acted extraordinarily well.” He might want to modify that, at least a little. Are the cathedral’s procedures for accepting and overseeing funerals so bureaucratized or understaffed that the hijackers had free rein? Arrangements are apparently turned over to a funeral home chosen by the person requesting the funeral—in this case, one that had worked with LGBTQ groups. Indeed, what was scheduled appears to have been an actual funeral Mass, which would have raised still more fraught issues about the distribution and reception of Communion. Much like a quarterback switching a play at the line of scrimmage, the soundtrack of the service contains a last-minute “audible”—a cathedral official telling (or reminding) the celebrant to conduct only a funeral service without a Mass.

Then there were the eulogists. One of them, identified as Gentili’s longtime partner, was personal and genuine in his loss. The other two were deliberately provocative and disruptive. Were they vetted? Many dioceses have regulations regarding the always sensitive issue of family requests for “words of remembrance,” as they are properly called. In the Archdiocese of New York, certain standards are recommended while actual policies and practices are left to the discretion of parish pastors, admittedly often a delicate task. In this case, however, the cathedral parish can probably be faulted for being completely missing in action.

Still, having watched the entire film of the service days before the cardinal’s remarks, I had to agree with his basic conclusion. Despite everything, at the service for Cecilia Gentili, the Gospel was proclaimed and preached, the meaning of death explained, God’s love and mercy invoked. Rather than a defeat for Catholicism, it was a victory. 

Whether it was a victory or defeat for the memory and causes of Ms. Gentili is another question. A native of Argentina, she was sexually abused as a child and then trafficked. She came to the United States illegally, and survived homelessness and heroin addiction as a prostitute before advocating for people with HIV and becoming an effective organizer, fundraiser, and lobbyist. By all accounts, she was fiercely generous and dedicated to others in similarly marginalized or criminalized circumstances. True, much of this remarkable life story rests on the testimony of Ms. Gentili herself—a “born storyteller,” according to friends and admirers. Was it the whole truth and nothing but the truth? Enough is on the public record—her overcoming of obstacles, her gifts for friendship, her pursuit of housing and health care for those in need—to elicit compassion, awe, and gratitude despite deeds and convictions to which some might take grave exception.

At the funeral the celebrant wisely steered clear of all this. At moments he looked like an aging high school teacher bewildered by the hijinks of unruly students, but he soldiered on. He proclaimed the miracle of the raising of Lazarus. In words he had obviously spoken many times before, he preached the good news of dying and rising in Christ. He added a reflection from an Anglican woman priest about love of life, hatred of death, and hope of resurrection.

At the end of the service, he blessed the casket and commended Gentili to the “Father of mercies in the sure and certain hope that, together with all who have died in Christ, she will rise with him on the last day…. Open the gates of paradise to your servant, and help us who remain to comfort one another with assurances of faith until we all meet in Christ and are with you and with our sister forever.”

Was such a prayer inappropriate or even blasphemous? Some may feel so. But to me it was profoundly moving, the triumph of our liturgy over provocation.

Of course, the hour-long film I watched kept the camera on the cathedral’s sanctuary, celebrant, cantor, lectors, petitioner, eulogists, and front pews. Was there snickering elsewhere? Or contempt? Or tears? Or boredom? I wasn’t there to know. When the camera followed the casket up and down the main aisle, glimpses of the congregation showed many dressed like ordinary funeral-goers. Seen and heard from afar, many also appeared unfamiliar with a Catholic rite; perhaps they could be forgiven for mistaking a Catholic service for more exuberant ones found elsewhere or for a rally or a theatrical memorial, where applause and cheering might have been appropriate. (The organizer of the funeral said that if St. Patrick’s had been unwilling, she would have sought a theater space.) At the same time, it was not hard to believe that a significant number of these mourners might have been deeply touched by the readings, the homily, and the prayers.

Responding to outrage at the spectacle, St. Patrick’s swiftly held a “Mass of Reparation,” and the Times promptly ran another story, suggesting that the Mass of Reparation represented backtracking on the cathedral’s willingness to host a funeral for a transgender person. Other media took the same tack. Nothing I read from archdiocesan officials suggested that they regretted allowing a service to be held for a transgender activist. Their distress, they said, was at the deception that preceded the service and, above all, at the conduct that accompanied it.

And now it was the turn of the funeral’s organizers to be outraged. The “community Ms. Gentili served,” they insisted, deserved “a public apology” from the archdiocese. Her right to the “full Catholic Mass that was agreed upon” had been violated because “she was an ex-sex worker.” The archdiocese had employed “painful and exclusionary language” in its criticism of the event, and the remarks of an archdiocesan official amounted to an incendiary “hate rant.” Then they played the inevitable sex-abuse card: “Did those priests that raped those young men get an honorable burial?”

Was this response utterly cynical, one more ploy in the orchestration of a pseudo-event? Many people, especially many Catholics, will see it that way. Because motives are always mixed, they would not be altogether wrong. Still, I see something else at work here, something sincere and for that reason all the more serious. It is a sense of entitlement common to the glossier sector of the LGBTQ world. It is the entitlement of victimhood—the entitlement of an identity that defines itself by its victimization.

“We still gonna show up as us!” said a trans eulogist at the funeral before whipping up the congregants into the initial chanting of “Cecilia, Cecilia.” Showing up “as us” seems to have meant not surrendering their identity to the Gothic arches and Catholic expectations of reverence for a rite at St. Patrick’s. Showing up “as us” meant: This is our space now, our time, and we proceed by our own norms. It meant parading one’s derision of traditional sexual or social codes and reveling in the transgressive as an expression of freedom and a path toward fulfillment. If the words “bitch” and “whore” are terms of endearment in certain trans settings, then they should be no less welcomed as part of queer culture in St. Patrick’s Cathedral, as two authors argued in the National Catholic Reporter. If the Catholic Church employs the title “saint” in a very particular way and we don’t, then tough luck for the Catholic Church.

No matter that flaunting this defiant scorn for a religion and its norms both misrepresents most gay, lesbian, and transgender people and makes life harder for them. It has broader consequences as well. Is it really surprising, for instance, that so many Americans suspect the liberalism that defends and applauds Drag Queen Story Hour? Or that sympathy with pride flags and marches is fading? Or that questions about “gender-affirming” medical treatments for children, who gets to use which school bathrooms, and who can compete as male or female in athletics have escalated so quickly to the top of our cultural politics?

It would be wrong to think that the sense of entitled victimhood that rendered the organizers of the Gentili funeral insensible to the norms and feelings of millions of Catholics is in any way unique. On the contrary, variants of it are currently inflaming American life, from left to right. Everyone has an identity, and every identity is a victim of some other identity. Consequently, every identity is entitled to its own form of assertion. If that assertion is excessive or even a little false, so be it. We are, after all, the real victims, and we are entitled to fight fire with fire.

The “we” in this outlook is, of course, very flexible. The fundraising letter from the Republican National Committee in front of me warns of the “dismantling” of the foundations of “the American way of life we once knew.” Who is this victimized “we”? All of us? All Republicans? All who disagree with the “agenda” of “Joe Biden and his socialist allies” to “normalize gender-dysphoria, high-taxes, and…endless handouts to illegal immigrants and criminals”? This is nonsense of course, but it is part of the rhetoric of victimhood that seethes all around us. Not all versions of that rhetoric are equally plausible, not all claims of victimhood equally persuasive. But they all have a similar logic. Whenever we don’t like this kind of rhetoric, we call it self-pity and resentment; when we do, we use phrases like “showing up as us.”

For years, scholars have puzzled over the growing appeal of what is not so much sturdy conservatism as aggrieved anti-liberalism. Why does it flourish in the very small towns and rural areas that have benefitted from liberal government programs? Why do fanciful or unspecified MAGA promises (“I will fix it”) enjoy so much more trust than imperfect but solid liberal programs? Liberal pundits scratch their heads, parse the latest numbers on inflation and unemployment, and wonder why these economic factors get so little traction. In the wake of the president’s State of the Union address and its many claims about past economic achievements or future economic initiatives, the head-scratching may only redouble.

The answer might lie not in the economic factors at all but in cultural factors that create the distorting filter of distrust through which the economic factors are viewed. This is a very large topic. It could easily go back to the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century making of middle-class progressivism and its two wings: the cultural and bohemian wing rebelling against the religious and sexual conventions of late-Victorian “genteel” America, and the socioeconomic wing combatting new monopoly powers, urban poverty, immigrant slums, frightful working conditions, and political corruption. The story might skip over the Roaring Twenties, when the cultural rebels were in the ascendancy, and take up with the New Deal and its economistic legacy in politics and social analysis. But its most accessible starting point might be the sixties and the profound shaking of taken-for-granted notions about race, sexuality, gender, religion, and the meaning of America.

In the ensuing “culture wars,” politicians, especially Democratic politicians, often waffled and dodged, but liberal and progressive thinkers and activists did not. They lined up on the side that viewed traditional values as obstacles to liberation and progress—and in many instances they were right. When they found themselves at a popular disadvantage, however, they went in several directions. With great success, they went to the courts. (This is now conveniently forgotten.) Or they turned to what might be called the “commanding heights of the culture”—higher education, movies, television, theater, professional organizations of everyone from doctors to teachers and librarians—to promote what remained unwinnable in legislatures. Or they hoped that the genuinely needed economic benefits of active government would soothe the pains of cultural shocks. Or they simply counted on time and demographics to win their battles for them in the long run. One thing they did not do was to treat cultural resistance as something to be engaged, conciliated, possibly learned from. Instead, all such resistance was assumed to be intransigent and unalterable—the atavistic remains of racism, sexism, homophobia, Evangelical nationalism, or xenophobia.

For many liberals and progressives, cultural factors—a.k.a.“social issues”—were to be understood as the tools that right-wing demagogues wielded on behalf of entrenched wealth to bring out backward people and fool them into voting against their own economic interests. Or, conversely, cultural issues were cheap diversions that neoliberal elites favored to distract voters from challenging corporate power. Either way, economic benefits and losses were where the political action was. The culture, at least traditional culture, was a sideshow.

It’s been over a month since the hijacking of St. Patrick’s. If any liberals have criticized it, their voices have been lost in the vast galaxy of opinion-makers. The event is already receding from view, and its details will soon be forgotten as it becomes in retrospect just one more drop in the drip, drip, drip feeding the impression that the leading edges of liberalism view Catholic convictions and customs in essentially negative terms, ranging from inexcusable ignorance and insensitivity to outright hostility.

But overstate this impression, and one sinks back into the quicksand of entitled victimization. No one was faster out of the blocks in denouncing the Gentili funeral than the MAGA-mouthpiece CatholicVote. Still, the point remains: those who would take the threat to liberal democracy seriously should lift their eyes from economic factors and register the impact of provocations like the St. Patrick’s funeral and the apparent inability of mainstream liberalism to view it as anything but a blow for inclusivity and progress. It’s a small but striking example of a large problem. 

Self-immolation as a form of political protest has a long tradition. Among the most famous examples is that of twenty-year-old Jan Palach, who, in 1969, set himself on fire to protest the Soviet occupation of Czechoslovakia. Palach was part of an activist group that had chosen, at random, one of its members for this ultimate gesture. Despite the Catholic prohibition of suicide, Tomáš Halík, who later became a priest and famous theologian, helped organize a requiem for Palach. He and other Czech dissidents revere Palach to this day, claiming that his death planted a seed for the Velvet Revolution twenty years later. 

The tradition continues. In February, a twenty-five-year-old Air Force officer named Aaron Bushnell died after setting himself on fire in front of the Israeli embassy in Washington D.C. His motive was clear: “I will no longer be complicit in genocide [in Gaza],” he said on Twitch, a live-streaming service, before dousing himself in flammable liquid. He hoped his act would spur the consciences of his fellow citizens. 

Like Palach, Bushnell has inspired thousands of conversations and debates and has been celebrated as a hero by some activists. And as with Palach, a Christian thinker has come to Bushnell’s defense. Halík didn’t say so explicitly, but his admiration for Palach might be rooted in the words of Christ: “Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.” In his memoir, Halík called Palach’s death “a sacrifice,” saying it “established a firewall in the conscience of many people in his generation.” Presidential candidate Cornel West, a professor at Union Theological Seminary, sees Bushnell’s action in similar terms: “Let us never forget the extraordinary courage and commitment of brother Aaron Bushnell who died for truth and justice!” he wrote on X. “I pray for his precious loved ones! Let us rededicate ourselves to genuine solidarity with Palestinians undergoing genocidal attacks in real time!” 

Most other commentators have been critical of Bushnell’s actions. Some have assumed that Bushnell was mentally ill, and that it would therefore be irresponsible to praise his suicide. Bernie Sanders called it a “terrible tragedy” sparked by “despair.” The Australian journalist Caitlin Johnstone, a trenchant critic of American foreign policy, praised Bushnell, but in carefully qualified terms. She would never do the same thing herself, she wrote, nor counsel others to do it, but Bushnell’s self-immolation was an act of “profound sincerity.” 

What Halík, West, and even Johnstone have failed to see is that a suicide can never be self-sacrificial in the Christian sense. Ambiguity is built into the act of self-immolation, no matter how noble the cause. Whoever dies fighting a just war or delivering aid to the suffering has sacrificed their life for justice and truth. Bushnell’s action, on the other hand, may have been physically courageous, but it was finally an act of self-directed violence that did nothing to stop the violence it was intended to protest. Immanuel Kant wrote that suicide entails a contradiction: suffering makes it difficult to live, so we seek relief from suffering in order to improve life—but you can’t improve life by ending it. In Bushnell’s case, the contradiction inherent in suicide also muddled his message: he tried to defend the dignity of Palestinians while violating his own. 

Heads of state might see themselves as lords of life and death, and it is right to protest this lie. But no human being is the lord of life and death, including one’s own life, one’s own death. To declare protest-by-suicide permissible, even heroic, is to declare that the prohibition against taking innocent human life does not apply to the taking of one’s own life. The best that can be said of Bushnell’s tragic self-immolation is that it briefly drew attention to a horrific war before adding to its body count.

The Judge Harry Pregerson Interchange is a 130-foot tall, five-level stack interchange near the Athens and Watts communities of Los Angeles It is considered one of the most complicated interchanges in the United States, with multiple entries and exits in all directions between the I-105 and the I-110. Returning to LAX from traveling, I always look forward to my husband driving me home through this interchange. It offers a breathtaking view of Los Angeles; you can see the city below and downtown in the distance. The Santa Monica Mountain Range serves as a backdrop. Some days the range looks more beautiful than others, depending on how clear the sky is. Then there are the palm trees (another iconic symbol of Los Angeles, in addition to the freeways). They stand out high above the rest of the city like tulips in a garden, and are a sign that I am home. Even where I grew up on Palmetto Ave., fifty miles from downtown, palm trees line both sides of the street. 

I’ve wondered on Palm Sunday what palm-waving feels like to those who don’t have this connection to the palm tree. As a child, I loved watching the palm trees sway in the Santa Ana winds. Palms are more like grass than hardwoods, so they bend easily in strong winds, even up to hurricane conditions. The palm fronds aren’t as resilient and blow down easily. As children, we felt lucky if we witnessed the moment a large frond fell from above. It was almost exhilarating. After high winds, the street and front yard would be covered in fronds. My father would spend a morning collecting the palm debris and the rest of the day complaining about it.

Though ubiquitous across southern California, most varieties of palm trees are not native to the state. Falling palm fronds can be dangerous to cars, pedestrians, and buildings. Improperly maintained palm trees can accumulate dead and dry fronds over time and become highly flammable, yet palm-tree trimming itself presents unique dangers to those who are tasked with their maintenance. Yet few think about this as they take in the sight of palm trees standing tall, silhouetted by the sun, or bending (but not breaking) in the winds.  

The liturgical Procession with Palms offers two Gospel reading options, Mark 11:1-10 or John 12:12-16. The community, gathered outside the church with palms in hand, will either hear Mark’s description: “Many people spread their cloaks on the road, and others spread leafy branches that they had cut from the fields” (Mark 11:8). or John’s version of the great crowd that “took palm branches and went out to meet [Jesus]” (John 12:13). There is an important distinction here. Mark’s gospel speaks of leafy branches, while John’s specifically mentions palm branches. Jesus’ entrance into Jerusalem in Luke’s Gospel doesn’t mention branches at all, while Matthew states, “The very large crowd spread their cloaks on the road, while others cut branches from the trees and strewed them on the road” (Matthew 21:8). Palm branches are mentioned only in John’s gospel, and yet they are the chosen liturgical sacramental. 

Signs and symbols are important to us. They remind us of a time, people, places, and feelings. John’s gospel differs from the synoptic gospels. It presents a more developed theology, employing symbolism to communicate it. The specificity of the palm branches in John’s gospel allowed his intended audience to easily infer the meaning of Jesus’ entry into Jerusalem. Palms were a symbol of joy and victory in that time and place and for the people his Gospel was intended for. We don’t know for certain what kind of branches were used to welcome Jesus in Jerusalem (or if branches were used at all, based on Luke’s account). What matters most is that Jesus came home, and his return was a victory. 

The palms I wave on Palm Sunday are familiar to me. They have a symbolic meaning unique to my experience. The second Gospel reading every Palm Sunday retells Jesus’ road to crucifixion. Gathered in the worship area in our pews, we are still holding the palms we waved outside for the procession. As I listen to the Gospel account of Jesus’ crucifixion the palm branch in my hand reminds me that like the palm trees, Jesus was bent to great extremes—but I trust that he’ll stand tall among us, silhouetted by the sun on Easter.   

There are two difficulties with writing about Michelangelo’s frescoes in the Sistine Chapel. One is saying anything fresh about them. The other is seeing them at all. I don’t mean the task of hauling yourself all the way to the Vatican, getting tickets, standing in line, jostling with tourists, and straining your neck to squint at the paintings sixty-odd feet above you. That would be, to employ a common distinction, the task of looking at them, difficult enough in itself. Seeing them is a different, more interior thing. Seeing requires attending to the image as it discloses itself to you, not to what you assume you are seeing. This kind of seeing takes intentionality, discipline, self-reflection, contemplation, and, of course, lots of looking. The ubiquity of the chapel’s central panel, The Creation of Adam, in the Western cultural imagination renders it all but invisible to the twenty-first-century viewer. No other work of art, perhaps, is weighed down so heavily by pop-cultural pastiche, from E.T. to Arrested Development. If what a painting like this one means is inseparable from what Gadamer calls the “history of effect,” then seeing it involves self-consciously investigating that history along with the image itself.

It is this series of negotiations that Jeannie Marshall sets for herself in her book All Things Move: Learning to Look in the Sistine Chapel. Not that she burdens herself with much phenomenological speculation. And that’s a welcome thing. A journalist based in Rome, Marshall took up the task of going to the Sistine Chapel again and again, looking at Michelangelo’s paintings until she could finally see them, and then writing about them in such a way that her readers might also come to see them anew. In this she mostly succeeds.

Marshall’s narrative of her attempts to see the Sistine Chapel is structured as a series of chapters corresponding to sections of Michelangelo’s grand series of paintings. She works outward from the central panels to the surrounding images, as one would tend to look if one were visiting the chapel. She ends, fittingly, with The Last Judgment, which Michelangelo painted on the altar wall in 1536, more than twenty years after he finished the ceiling. She works patiently and slowly, wrestling with each painting until it yields a blessing. And that means attending to the Sistine Chapel’s whole history of effect: not only theological, political, and historical, but also, more poignantly, personal and familial.

The strongest tension in Marshall’s book lies in the fact that Michelangelo’s paintings are Christian and she is not. She confronts the tension head on and, to her credit, with disarming honesty and self-awareness. “We don’t encounter art from a blank slate,” she says, and her own slate is typically modern and secular. “As a non-Christian,” she writes:

I felt that my interest in Christian art was irreverent, but now I see that believing the story of Christianity doesn’t really matter. A good piece of art touches the same spiritual need in me that it does in a devout Catholic. The intensity of religious art communicates itself even to the non-religious among us because it is about our shared urge to reach up and beyond the knowable world.

I found myself arguing with passages such as this one. Religious art certainly is about our shared urge to reach up and beyond the knowable world, but it is not just that. Michelangelo actually seems to have believed the things he painted—creation ex nihilo, the fall from grace, a universal flood, a final judgment, and all the other weird particulars of a very dogmatic Christianity—and he painted them at the behest of people who also believed those things. To transpose the particularities of the Church’s dogma into a key in which “the story of Christianity doesn’t matter” strikes me not as a natural expansion of Michelangelo’s vision but rather as a too-casual appropriation of his art by an alien ideology.

I dwell on this because it is a point of real disagreement: Marshall tends to think religious art is meaningful because it’s human, whereas Michelangelo believed (and Christians still believe) that we’re human because these things are meaningful. In the second half of the book, Marshall often expresses regret at the intolerant, moralistic direction the Church has taken, contrasting it with the more humane, expansive spirit of the Renaissance. Lord knows we could use a more humane, expansive spirit in this world. But the evacuation of real Christian dogma in favor of a vague aspirational notion of neo-Renaissance ideals seems like a poor trade.

Still, to insist on the fundamental incompatibility of these two perspectives and dismiss Marshall as a sort of apologist for secular modernity would be small-minded and churlish; it would also miss the point. Whether religious art is meaningful because it’s human or we’re human because it’s meaningful, there is plenty of meaning and plenty of humanity to go around. Marshall does not set up her unbelief as a barrier to encounter. Rather, she allows herself to be addressed by the paintings. She opens herself to them. Still finding belief unavailable to her, she attempts to assimilate the art into a perspective that makes sense to her but still welcomes the possibility of an always fuller disclosure of meaning. This is an attitude she brings to all things religious. “Every time I enter a church,” she says, “I feel the sense of mystery there, and I know that having faith is a more complex, even artful way of existing than I have wanted to believe.” Marshall is as much seeker as skeptic. It is this sense of humility and honesty before religious commitment that keeps things interesting.

Marshall’s spirit of receptivity turns out to be an opening into a deeper, more complex engagement with the vectors of belief and unbelief in modernity. It also provides some welcome thematic continuity to her sometimes meandering narrative. The book initially appears to be an account of a purely “secular” encounter with religious art, but it isn’t. Marshall’s family, we soon learn, is deeply entangled with the Catholic Church—though “in flight” from it—and the book’s origins lie in her investigation of her own past during a time of profound loss. Marshall tells us that during this time she found herself compelled to probe her deep-seated ambivalence toward the Sistine Chapel and the Catholicism it represents. Something about it both repelled and pulled at her, and she was not sure why. The name Michelangelo, she says, “vibrates for me like a string plucked long ago” and “has the ring of cultural memory blended with family history.” This sense of resonance, she eventually realized, goes back to memories of a thick cultural and religious heritage woven throughout her childhood: most notably, a grandmother who dreamed of seeing the chapel and Michelangelo’s brilliant works of art but never left her native Canada. But these memories come shot through with a sense of resistance: Marshall’s experience of Catholicism as a child was of a religion “obsessed with small rules of behaviour, of policing our lives for moral transgression.” This attitude was imparted to her by her mother, a lapsed Catholic who harbored deep resentment toward the Church. When her mother visits her in Rome later in life, Marshall learns that her mother’s resentment, which stemmed from an “unsanctioned” marital arrangement that alienated her from the Church, also left her with a terrible burden of guilt. Wishing her mother spiritual peace late in life, Marshall urges her to seek out a priest and make a confession. Marshall’s own spiritual journey is not, it turns out, the only one she is chronicling. Meanwhile, her teenage son, after looking at Signorelli’s The Preaching of the Antichrist in the Orvieto Cathedral’s Cappella Nuova, is unbothered by the threats and perils of traditional religion. He is, she writes, “incredulous that their fear of damnation was so great.”

On the one hand, then, is Marshall’s mother, wracked with guilt and unable to find peace outside a Church that shapes not only her loves but her hatreds as well. On the other hand is her son, “a true inheritor of the Enlightenment,” who finds all this religious art “familiar and meaningless.” In between is Marshall herself, pushed and pulled by what her fellow Canadian Charles Taylor calls the cross-pressures of our secular age. Her own confession, understandably, is more complicated: “I don’t know what to believe, or even if faith and belief are possible for me. I only know what I feel when looking at art, when thinking about a piece of art.”

The success of a book like this, one about the experience of art, the way it shapes and works on you, hinges partly on your visual experience of the book itself. And it is a lovely artifact: a crisp hardcover with Smyth-sewn binding, printed on glossy, full-color pages. On the cover, sloppy graffiti-like text overlays one of Michelangelo’s Sibyls, signaling that though this is a book about supposedly staid Renaissance art, it’s best if we don’t take ourselves too seriously. The text is liberally interspersed with reproductions of Michelangelo’s art, which helpfully complement Marshall’s descriptions. But there are also many uncaptioned photos of modern-day Rome, taken by the photographer and novelist Douglas Cooper. The photos are not simple illustrations of what’s in the text, but they provide an eloquent visual commentary on the narrative. The unidealized Rome they show us is ugly and commonplace, vulgar even. This is a side of the Eternal City that those who have never visited it in person will rarely see. The inclusion of these photos poses a pointed, if unspoken, question to the reader as we follow Marshall in her peregrinations: Where is the sacred in all this? What does Michelangelo’s art mean when it is not ensconced in abstracted Renaissance glory, but rather amid the trash and the poverty and the sprawl and, yes, the beauty of the modern world? If the invisible God is on brazen display in the Sistine Chapel, he quietly haunts the graffitied walls and broken glass of the modern city.

Perhaps that is as it should be. In the first chapter, focusing on the central panels of the Sistine Chapel, Marshall confesses that she finds it very difficult to see the images afresh, particularly The Creation of Adam, which has been overexposed and trivialized into a cliché. Speaking of this painting, she writes, “I once ate a plate of spaghetti atop this image on a disposable placemat.” In keeping with this observation, the most interesting passages in the chapter are not on the central panel but on The Deluge, Michelangelo’s depiction of the flood, where Marshall observes that “Michelangelo blends the sea and the sky at the horizon into a void, an unbearable emptiness.” This leads her into an insightful discussion of the sublime in art. Somehow nothingness is more compelling than God the Father. It’s possible the problem is not overexposure but the fact that the Father is exposed at all, and thus diminished. Even at the dazzling heights of Renaissance virtuosity, the stark, visible fact of a God circumscribed within the bounds of the frame somehow disappoints. “Some of the first people to see the Sistine Chapel didn’t recognize the figure of the old man as God,” she says, which is a telling little fact. God is all too visually present, a being among other beings, more Zeus than the I Am That I Am. Maybe that is something the evacuation of God from the modern world can teach us—that if God is present in the terrorizing immanence of contemporary reality, he is present not as one of us, not as something we can reach out and grasp or see with our eyes, but as a hint or a gesture, a negative presence that presses in against the edges of our experience. 

All Things Move
Learning to Look in the Sistine Chapel
Jeannie Marshall
Biblioasis
$34.95 | 239 pp.