Bones of Contention websource | ||
part 1 | ||
In San Francisco,
the line stretched from the steps of the ornate Carmelite chapel all the
way down the street and around the corner. For more than seven hours, it
neither stopped nor shortened. Long past midnight, in the bone-chilling
fog of the San Francisco night, the devout waited patiently.
Inside the chapel was a reliquary, a casket for holding sacred objects, that held some of the bones of St. Thérèse of Lisieux, the cloistered French nun who died of tuberculosis in 1897 at age 24 and is considered the most popular Catholic saint of the 20th century because of her humility and charity. The three-foot-long reliquary have been touring the world since the mid-90s, and they've drawn huge crowds everywhere they've appeared: France, Italy, Germany, Slovenia, Brazil, Russia, Kazakhstan, and Argentina. Her bones reached the United States last October, and they slowly worked their way westward, seemingly drawing ever longer lines of pilgrims in every city where they were displayed. When the U.S. tour finished in Hawaii on January 28, the relics were put on a plane headed for the Philippines. The enormous numbers of people--more than 1 million in America alone--who have flocked to venerate St. Thérèse's bones are part of a worldwide resurgence of interest in saintly body parts and objects that touched them--after several decades, from the 60s through the 80s, in which they were out of religious fashion. The Internet, which has facilitated a thriving auction market for them, is one reason for the relic revival. Another, more palpable reason may be that increasing numbers of people these days, both religious and secular, see a connection between relics and their desire to transcend ordinary life and find meaning in death. For example, Pennsylvania artist Anne Wolf makes her own relics that have a largely secular significance. "They're small sculptural objects that I call relics because they're like pieces of imaginary culture I'm creating," says Wolf, who is also an art professor at Indiana University of Pennsylvania. "For me, it's about dealing with the idea of continuity in the face of impermanence, so that death becomes like a form of transformation instead of finality," she explains.
The San Francisco crowd that came to see St. Thérèse's relics was as diverse as the city's lifestyles. An African-American man with a shaved head and black leather jacket stood next to a gray-haired Caucasian nun in a navy blue habit. There were young Asian mothers with babies in strollers, hordes of teenagers, and elderly people in wheelchairs. During a Mass in the chapel, the priest, the Rev. Patrick Sugrue, who had been traveling with the relics through California and Nevada spoke of what had happened when the relics arrived at the El Carmelo Retreat House in Redlands, California, a few days before. A party tent had been erected to hold the 1,000 people who had been expected to visit the relics--but the number of pilgrims surged to 8,000 over the three-day period. "Then I drove with the relics across the Mojave Desert to Las Vegas," he continued. "There were 2,000 people waiting at the first church, then another 5,000 venerated the relics at the next one. For me, it was an unforgettable experience." The scene was similar when the relics of St. Thérèse arrived in Seattle after their San Francisco stop. People were packed shoulder to shoulder during the Mass, even in the aisles. "The priest standing next to me said, 'This is like the Middle Ages,'" say psychotherapist Christie Cave, who stood in line in Seattle for a total of seven hours, first to get into the Mass and then to venerate the relics. "The church had the soaring lines of a Gothic cathedral, and the people were just cheek-and-jowl," says Cave. "The only difference from the Middle Ages was that some people got to sit down for Mass, when back then everyone would have been standing." |
||
part2 | ||
|
||
part3 | ||
A less controversial manifestation of the current
relics mania is the International Crusade
for Holy Relics, which Serafin helped found a few years ago and which
aims to revive the veneration of relics through exhibits and conferences.
Its "Saints Alive!"
website allows the devout to venerate a range of relics online, from the
bones of St. Candidus, a 3rd-century martyr, to a vial containing the blood
of St. Teresa of Avila, a Spanish mystic who died in 1582.
Meanwhile, at the San Francisco Craft and Folk Art Museum, an exhibit called "Reliquaries for America" features caskets designed by artists from a variety of cultural backgrounds: Japanese, European, Latin American, and African-American. There's even a weekend workshop in which parents and children learn how to make their own reliquaries. The link between relics and one's personal life cycles has also occurred to anthropologist Margaret Mackenzie of the California College of Arts and Crafts. "It seems connected with this interest in death that I'm seeing," she says. "I joined a reading groups a few years ago that's working with Stephen Levine's book A Year to Live. Part of the practice is thinking about your own death, writing your epitaph and obituary, and visiting graveyards. It's thinking about death, which is being obliterated from mainstream consciousness." In Seattle, for example, a woman in a "Year to Live" group focusing on preparation for death hand-crafted a reliquary to hold her ashes. Since ancient days the veneration of relics has spoken to the human need for deep interconnection, the belief "that all human beings are radically connected over space, through time, and even beyond death," as Woodward writes in Making Saints. Whether sacred or secular in purpose, relics and reliquaries ultimately embody the human desire for transformation in life and death. "People are longing for transcendence in their lives," says psychotherapist Cave, "They go to Native American ceremonies, they go to Nepal, they go to Chartres. But what they're looking for is the doorway to the divine in a palpable, experiential way." And that may explain why people all over America flocked in such unprecedented numbers to pay homage the bones of St. Thérèse, the unassuming young nun who died more than a century ago. Says Cave: "In the Catholic Church, veneration of relics is that transcendent doorway. |