Pleasantly Disturbed Friday

It’s time for another edition of random musings, idle thoughts, unrelated occurrences – in other words, it’s Pleasantly Disturbed Friday.

I’m currently reading Johnson’s Life of London: The People Who Made the City That Made the World by Boris Johnson, and it’s delightful. Johnson, the mayor of London, provides (relatively) short vignettes on 17 people (and one hotel) who had a major impact directly on London and more broadly on the world. You’ve heard of Geoffrey Chaucer and William Shakespeare, but what about John Wilkes, Robert Hooke and W.T. Stead? The book is history and biography and it’s full of insights on the city and its people. And yes, the title is a take-off of Boswell’s Life of (Samuel) Johnson – and Johnson is one of the 17 profiled. Review is coming Monday.

Yesterday, I had a telephone conversation with a good friend about the publishing business. We talked about publishers, genres, marketing of books, lack of marketing of books, expectations publishers have of authors and expectations authors have of publishers. We both agreed it was one crazy industry. But if you’re a writer and are published or want to publish, it’s what you have to work with.

Magazines sitting on my desk waiting to be read: two issues of Poetry (I’m behind); American Poet; Englewood Review; Oxford American; Writer’s Digest; Ravi Zacharias’s Just Thinking; and the 2012 fall planting guide from Dutch Gardens (summer hasn’t officially started and I’m already having to consider bulbs for the fall).

I biked Grant’s Trail in suburban St. Louis Wednesday after work. It was a beautiful evening. I’ve been gradually building up distance and speed (making sure my ruptured disk stays healed), and I’ve ridden the same 20-mile roundtrip a dozen times or more so far. The trail crosses two or three major streets, a couple of parks, Grant’s Farm (the Clydesdales!), several wooded areas and suburban subdivisions. It can make for an interesting ride – locally sponsored group rides where everyone is afraid of being left behind and so they run the rest of us off the trail; the professionals practicing for races who ignore red lights and trail etiquette; what look like small sticks or branches suddenly wiggling across the paved trail; beavers; suicidal rabbits; families of wild turkeys; and swarms of gnats at certain times of the day.

I forgot to mention that I love biking Grant’s Trail.

On Tuesday I was in downtown St. Louis at the London Tea Room (actually, outside the Team Room on the sidewalk) for our local observance of Queen Elizabeth's Jubilee. There was a raffle to raise funds for a children's disease research association, and one of the raffle items was that fine novel Dancing Priest.

Last week was a significant birthday for my wife; she turned at least 21 (that’s all I’m allowed to say on the subject). Good friends from New Orleans flew in and stayed with us for a few days, and we did a restaurant atop an old, former warehouse with a good view of the Arch and downtown St. Louis, the Lantern Festival at the Missouri Botanical Gardens (and it was COLD), the St. Louis Art Museum, an art fair, an art gallery or two (including Brother Mel’s); and a stroll around downtown Kirkwood, our little St. Louis suburb, during which two of us had an ice cream cone from Jeremiah’s Custard Stand (names withheld to protect the guilty) (but the vanilla was delicious) (from what I understand, of course). We had a great time.

A Breath Surrounded by Eternity

Last Saturday, my wife and I visited the Marianist Art Gallery in our own town of Kirkwood. It’s on the campus on St. John Vianney High School, and is largely devoted to the art and sculpture of Brother Mel Meyer. On Sunday after church, we went to the St. Louis University Art Museum, which I having an exhibition of Brother Mel’s works. And it is a wonderful exhibition.

I wrote about our meeting Brother Mel in 2010. I have two of his small metal sculptures in our office at home – Jesus on the Cross and The Last Supper.

After wandering around the Marianist gallery, we went outside – to see what I had spotted when we were getting out of the yard – rows of small tombstones. I had never noticed it before. It turned out to be the final resting place of Marianist brothers and priests. The tombstones are identical in shape and size, but some are much older and weather-worn – the oldest birth date I saw was 1849; the most recent burial had been in 2011. Irish and German names abounded, reflecting two of the three major streams of immigrants who settled in St. Louis (the third being Italian).

It’s a quiet place, shaded by trees, with a sculpture of Jesus on the cross behind the tombstones (if you squint you can see the sculpture in the photograph above – I have never claimed to be an ace photographer, especially with a cell phone).

Surrounding the graveyard in a semi-circle are metal sculptures by Brother Mel – representing the stations of the cross. Benches are available for praying and meditating, or just sitting. A soft breeze was blowing as I walked the rows of graves, wondering at how each of these men had given their lives to their vocation. I only had to look at the semi-circle of sculptures to find the answer for why they did.

At The High Calling, Mark Roberts has been doing a series on the stations of the cross. He’s a Presbyterian, the stations of the cross are a Catholic devotion (that began with St. Francis of Assisi) and often practices in Lutheran and some Anglican churches as well. Today, Roberts reflects on the sixth station – the scourging of Jesus and his crowning with thorns.

In that graveyard, feeling the warm wind, looking at the tombstones laid out so neatly and orderly, studying the sculptures, and above all listening to the quiet, it was so clear that we are but a breath upon the landscape, a breath surrounded by eternity.

The Art of Brother Mel

In November, our church had its annual art fair. It’s actually a fairly prestigious event – your work had to be submitted and accepted, and a select group of judges evaluates each work and awards ribbons in various categories. About 100 works adorned the walls of Sunday School classes and hallways, or rested on tables and pedestals.

Submissions to the show can come from the community at large, and quite a few people from outside our church participate. The first weekend the show was open, I walked into my Sunday School class and was amazed at the quality (the room for our class ended up with most of the sculpture).

A metal sculpture on one wall caught my eye. It was clearly a representation of the Last Supper, but the individual figures were real spikes, bent to resemble Jesus and the 12 disciples. The sculpture was done in the style of Michelangelo’s Last Supper, with the figures seated and facing in the same direction. The appearance is not polished but rather rough. I was so taken by the sculpture that I took a picture of it with my smart phone (the photo above).

The artist was Brother Mel Meyer, a Marianist who lives and works at St. John Vianney High School in my own St. Louis suburb of Kirkwood. I had seen metal sculptures on the campus some years ago, when my oldest played sports for a rival high school, but I had no idea that the artist lived and worked there.

The price was reasonable; I told my wife I knew what I wanted for a Christmas present. And then I called the number listed for the gallery at the school. They held the sculpture for me until we could come pick it up.

When we arrived at the gallery one cold Saturday earlier this month, we discovered the world of Brother Mel Meyer. And what a world it is.

Sculpture. Oil paintings. Watercolors. Frescoes. Furniture. Pottery. Brother Mel’s work runs the gamut of media.

We wandered around the gallery (several rooms and on two levels), examining the pieces while under the half-dozing eye of an elderly man helping customers.

The elderly man turned out to be Brother Mel.

A native of the St. Louis area, he has been a resident artist for more than 35 years. He studied in Switzerland and Paris, and earned a Master of Arts degree at the University of Notre Dame. There’s even a wonderful coffee table book about his life and work, entitled Brother Mel: A Lifetime of Making Art by Anne Brown.

It was a wonderful time. He fetched the Last Supper from the back; it's – not surprisingly – heavy, heavier than it looks, and we have to get someone in to anchor it on my office wall. We also bought the book and a crucifix (pictured).

I could have spent a lot of money in that gallery.

Perhaps that best place in the building is a small room that seems a kind of chapel. There are no seats, but simply to stand in that quiet place furnished with religious art was a moving experience.

St. Louis has many wonderful attractions – the Arch, the world-class zoo (still free), the Botanical Garden and many others – but the gallery of Brother Mel Meyer is worth repeated visits.

Photographs: Top - Last Supper by Brother Mel Meyer (2010).
                     At right: Crucifix by Brother Mel Meyer (2010).