7/23/2019 "A lot more than saintly bones may be tied up in reliquaries"

1/2

SPIRITUALITY

6a DECEMBER 4-17, 2015 NATIONAL CATHOLIC REPORTER

By MENACHEM WECKER

Delineating what precisely is, andis not, a relic presents both linguisticand theological challenges.

Consider the Metropolitan Muse-um of Arts 19th-century Power Fig-ure (in full: Nkisi NKondi: Man-gaaka), created by the Kongo people.St. Sebastian-like, iron shards piercethe slightly hunched wooden figure,whose hands are firmly planted on itships. It may evoke a voodoo doll, butthe embedded metal actually markedtreaty signing or vow sealing, per themuseum website.

The figure which appears in theNew York museums exhibit Kon-

go: Power and Majesty (through Jan.3) also has a stomach cavity withtraces of medicines that were storedtherein and drew the figures power.Does that make it a reliquary, and theplant material a relic?

Strictly speaking, the substancesonce hidden in the stomach werentrare, and they certainly werent bonesof holy men and women. But an intri-cate and deliberate vessel did housepowerful materials.

Alisa LaGamma, the Mets Afri-can art curator who, in 2007, curat-ed Eternal Ancestors: The Art of theCentral African Reliquary and cu-rated the Kongo exhibit, insisted ina phone interview that the sculpture

isnt a reliquary.One has to be very specific about

how one uses the term reliquary. TheKongo power figures are not reliquar-ies. A reliquary is a work that is spe-cifically designed to exercise a certainkind of sacra that is related to impor-tant and revered individuals, she said.You just cant apply [the word reli-quary] to lots of different religious arti-facts. Not all of them are reliquaries.

For most Americans who havespent time in museums or churches,the word reliquaryis likely to conjurecertain associations: gilded and jewel-encrusted receptacles, perhaps shapedlike the body parts of the saints theypurport to protect, displayed in dimlylit rooms meant to evoke chapels ifnot in actual chapels.

But the story of relics and reliquar-ies throughout history is much broad-er than just Catholic objects. Islamicand Jewish mystical traditions havevenerated relics, as have Buddhistand Hindu practices. And dependingon how much elasticity one is will-ing to permit the term, secular societymay also be said to adore its own rel-ics and reliquaries.

At the St. Louis-based Pulitzer ArtsFoundation, the exhibit Kota: DigitalExcavations in African Art (throughMarch 19) explores about 50 Kota rel-iquary guardians, wooden and met-

al sculptures that protected ancestralbones. The exhibit centers on a data-base of 2,000 Kota reliquaries that Bel-gian researcher and computer engi-neer Frederic Cloth developed.

Much of the details surroundingthe Kota reliquaries context and ex-act uses have been lost, which is partof the excitement of studying them,says Kristina Van Dyke, the Pulitzersformer director and the curator ofthe exhibit.

I love the ways these projects makeyou work harder to think about evi-dence and what constitutes ev-idence, because you donthave the luxury of atextual tradition orcopious oral his-tory, she said.You just haveto think,what cluesdo these ob-

jects containin and ofthemselves,and how canI extract thoseclues from the

objects?With objects that

are shrouded in mys-tery, such as the Kotareliquaries (only sixhighly staged imag-es two drawingsand four photographs

exist of the objects insitu), researchers reallyhave to start with the objectsthemselves.

You have to use yourimagination and think:What is here? We knowwhat isnt here, and weknow what we wish washere, Van Dyke said.

The Kota figures, she ex-plained, would havebeen attached to bas-kets that containedrelics. It appearsthat they are sittingon top of them, pro-tecting the relics,she said, noting thatsome of the reli-quaries also contained relics within.

The baskets would contain bonesof multiple ancestors, and were like-ly stored in small enclosures outsideof the villages and were accessibleonly to the initiated. These werentobjects that were shown to just any-body, Van Dyke said.

Like European Catholic reliquar-ies, the Kota figures had precious ma-terials, as well as rare objects such asmanufactured buttons, screws, andshell casings, applied to them, accord-ing to Van Dyke. The objects are in-credibly expensive, she said.

When the reliquaries made theirway to Europe, they typically no lon-ger contained any relics. (Althoughrelics were more important to the lo-cal peoples, outsiders likely found thereliquaries more valuable.)

They might have been willing toturn their objects in, but they wouldhave likely held back the actual relicsand not let those fall into the hands of

missionaries, Van Dyke said.The Central African reliquaries alsoimpacted artists in the West, accordingto LaGamma. There are great sculp-tural traditions that were part of thosereliquaries that have a very big influ-ence on the Western avant-garde atthe beginning of the 20th century, shesaid. The sculptural elements have be-come very famous in artistic circles.

The gap between the value of thereceptacle and of the sacred materi-

al contained within holds for the Kon-go power figures as well. So why doesthat which looks and quacks like a

reliquary not necessary amountto a reliquary?

In the strictest aca-demic sense, a relic re-

fers to the remainsof a holy person, or

some thing or ob-ject associatedwith that person,said S. Brent Ro-driguez Plate, vis-iting associate pro-

fessor of religiousstudies at Hamilton

College and manag-

ing editor of the jour-nalMaterial Religion. Plate cites the teeth of

Buddha, the whiskers fromMuhammads beard, and

splinters of the true crossor milk from Marys breastas examples.

Relics are very bodily and aremeant to give a sense of continu-

ity that an encounter with these re-mains collapses space and time and

becomes a direct encounter with theoriginal person, he said. Thus,people make pilgrimages over long

distances to be in the presence ofthem. The objects stand in for the per-

son who is no longer here.

While relic is a neutral term, theAmerican Protestant-dominated way of think-ing sees other traditionsas more superstitious andinfatuated with magicalthings, according to Plate.

The Protestant concep-tion of Catholics and theiruses of things, smells and

bells has been negative, he said. Rel-ics are another one of those things

Protestants see as being part of an in-ferior system.

(Never mind, he says, that Protes-tant traditions claiming to be morewrapped up in beliefs than objects cre-ate their own bibles and particularkinds of music and images of Jesusthat cast him in subtle pastels andcalm colors.)

In the ancestral remains in Africanreliquaries, theres a marked differ-ence from Muslim and Christian rel-ics, which tend to contain a very smallpiece of a single person.

The other difference, Plates said,is that its probably a lot more like-ly that the African reliquaries actual-ly contain the bones of the ancestorsthey say they contain, while its high-ly unlikely that the splinter of woodin the reliquary is actually from thecross of Jesus.

So the medicines and other organ-ic materials contained in the Kon-go power figures, strictly speaking,arent relics. But Plate says one canalso consider the ways that they func-

tioned in peoples lives.They may not be bones and true

relics, but for the people involved,they are treated as such, he said.That seems much more interestingto me than trying to give the authori-tarian Thats not a relic!

The key, to Plate, is that relics arentmerely symbolic. Theres an actu-al presence that is believed to be con-tained in the reliquary, or in closeproximity to it. He admitted, however,These are, of course, art museum andart history terms, and they may or may

Loyola House

Retreat &

Training Centre

Ignatian Training Programin Spiritual Direction &

Retreat MinistryPhase 1 beginning October 4 2016

Spiritual Directors WorkshopJuly 5-17 2016

Summer Training & Practicumin Spiritual Direction

June 20-July 31 & June 20-August 31 2016

Spiritual Exercises Institute40-Day - October 4-November 13 2016

Silent Retreats + more programs

519 824 1250 ext 266

loyolahouse.comGuelph, Ontario Canada

A lot more than saintly bonesmay be tied up in reliquaries

30All-Natural Flavors

Trappist Fruitcakes

The Popes CologneOriginal & Authentic

Francis CologneHonors Pope Francis

Chocolate

Cookies

Fudge

Christmas Cards

Made by Monks & Nuns

MonasteryGreetings.com8004720425

FREE CATALOGWith Hundreds of

Monastery Products

Mathieu Ferrier

A 19th-century reliquary

guardian figure from Obam-

ba, Gabon, part of the ex-

hibit Kota: Digital Excavac-

tions in African Art

7/23/2019 "A lot more than saintly bones may be tied up in reliquaries"

2/2

not mean much of anything to the orig-inal people who used the objects.

Interestingly, that actual pres-ence carried particular kindsof power. For local people,relics had intrinsic pow-ers, and they might re-move particles, submergethem in water, and then

drink the water, LaGam-ma said.Since the ancestral

bones were believedto be a means to ap-peal to ancestral in-tervention in timesof need, as specificancestors recededinto the more dis-tant past, there wasa process of decom-missioning or retir-ing old bones and add-ing those of ancestorswhose memories werefresher.

You were always up-

grading. Certain thingswent in; certain thingscame out, she said. Themore remote an ancestorwas, probably the less re-sponsive one consideredhim or her to be.

Even the Portuguesemissionaries who be-gan arriving in Cen-tral Africa in 1483thought the powerobjects were potent.Prior to 19th centu-

ry, when Europeans began thinkingof the local people as superstitious,

the power figures didnt appear inEuropean collections. Europe-ans considered the figures idola-trous, and encouraged their de-struction; they did not spareany examples and bring themback home with them, as they

did with textiles and ivories des-tined for princely collections. They would have hada sense of their poten-

cy for local people, andthey wouldnt have ca-sually collected thingslike that, LaGam-ma said. They wouldhave wanted to keeptheir distance in han-dling that kind of ma-

terial.

[Menachem Wecker is a

Washington, D.C.-based re-

porter and co-author of the new

book Consider No Evil: Two

Faith Traditions and the Prob-lem of Academic Freedom in

Religious Higher Education.]

SPIRITUALITY

NATIONAL CATHOLIC REPORTER DECEMBER 4-17, 2015 7a

Serving in Boliviassilver country

Copper mines perpetuatepoverty in Zambia

Travel the world withGLOBAL SISTERS REPORT!

Sharing stories of women religious around the globe.

GlobalSistersReport.org

Refugees start new lifein Houston thanks toprograms in growingarchdiocese

Demanding alternativesites for housing inIndia

Do you know an interestingproject or sister we shouldwrite about? Contact us!

Facebook.com/SistersReport

@SistersReport

info@GlobalSistersReport.org

Courtesy of the Metropolitan

Museum of Art

Power Figure (Nkisi

NKondi: Mangaaka) a

work of Kongo peoples in

Angola, shown in the ex-

hibit Kongo: Power and

Majesty

By BRIAN HARPER

The virtues we ought to pursue andthe vices we should avoid are usual-ly too stealthy to notice. Efforts to fos-ter love, for instance, might convinceus we have to stamp out hatred, whenfear or apathy are the real culprits.

It is this insight, as well as a deep-er commitment to St. Ignatius DailyExamen, that has helped me discovermy go-to secret sin: defensiveness.

Pride may seem like the natural op-posite of humility, but I think defensive-ness is just as worthy a contender. Onthe surface, they may seem the same,but I have found there are real differenc-es. While pride is the misplaced beliefthat I am superior, defensiveness is my

panicked reaction when I realize I amnot and refuse to accept it.

Defensiveness wears many disguis-es, but for me, it shows itself when I amfacing or anticipating criticism. I findmyself preparing retorts for an argu-ment that will never occur or compil-ing counterexamples for criticism thatwill end up being constructive.

My reckoning with defensivenesscame to a head over the summer. PopeFrancis was returning to Rome af-ter a trip to South America and helda press conference aboard the plane.A journalist asked why he frequent-ly speaks of the rich and poor butscarcely of the working, tax-payingmiddle class.

My blood begin to boil before I evenread the popes response. I picturedmyself in his place, confronted withyet another question through the dis-tinctively North American lens of an-other North American reporter.

Do they ever ask about anythingthat isnt expressly about the UnitedStates? Pope Brian asked himself, ig-noring that the question came from aGerman journalist.

Setting my gut reaction aside, Iread on, expecting Pope Francis tolist examples of times he stood in sol-idarity with the middle class, defend-ed labor unions, or otherwise spokein support of people who are neitherrich nor poor.

I got something else.Youre right, he responded. Its an

error of mine not to think about this.The popes comments were imme-

diately heralded as another exampleof his modesty. The Atlanticcareful-ly documented his exile after servingas provincial superior of the Jesuitsin Argentina, claiming it was humili-ation that led to this humility.

Perhaps it is because humility is sucha rare commodity that Francis straight-forward admission of his imperfectionhas remained with me as much as any-thing else he has said or done. My vis-ceral reaction to the German reportersquestion suggested I might have some-

thing to learn from this encounter.First, the popes response revealsthat the spirit in which a critique isoffered need not determine the spir-it in which it is received. St. IgnatiusPresupposition states, It is necessaryto suppose that every good Christianis more ready to put a good interpre-tation on anothers statement than tocondemn it as false.

In other words, we need to give peo-ple the benefit of the doubt.

There are unquestionably journal-ists who approach the pope combat-ively, hoping to catch him off-guard. Ihave no idea what this German report-ers modus operandi was, but in focus-ing on what he said and not whetherwhat he said was meant as an affront,the pope was able to accomplish some-thing few other leaders do: get to theheart of a relevant question.

This presents another problem withdefensiveness: It is concerned withself-preservation, rather than truth,love or anything else that is good,right and just.

Admitting we are wrong is painful;it publicizes a flaw. This is hard forany of us, but I would venture it is es-pecially so for someone who can infal-libly speak ex cathedra. If holiness isour pursuit, though, we must dismissvanity and the instinct to protect ourself-images.

Finally, Francis approach demon-strates the paradoxical benefits of St.Thrse of Lisieuxs Little Way. Whileour society not-so-subtly promotes fos-tering a healthy ego and sticking toones guns, Francis simple acknowl-edgment of oversight reverberated farmore than any politicians promise tonever apologize.

Power, as St. Paul said, is per-fected in weakness.

The world offers all of us many op-portunities to practice defeating ourdefensiveness.

As a white male, for example, I mightfeel uncomfortable with a national con-versation about the insidious racismand sexism that exist in our schools,workplaces and cities, because that di-alogue lays bare the extent of my priv-ilege. Nevertheless, how can I do abetter job making the embarrassingconcession that I experience an unbe-lievable degree of privilege every day?How can I do better listening to andworking beside people who suffer dis-crimination that I do not?

Choosing not to play defense andasking these sorts of questions ischallenging. If we are to believe Fran-cis, St. Thrse and Jesus, however,the path of the meek, weary, burdenedand heavy-laden, while not the way ofthe world, is the way that leads to life.

[Brian Harper is a communications special-

ist for the Midwest Jesuits. He contributes to

NCRs Young Voices blog at NCRonline.org/

blogs/young-voices.]

Playing defensive:my go-to secret sin

CNS/Paul Haring

Pope Francis answers questions from

journalists aboard his flight fromAsuncin, Paraguay, to Rome July 12.