Review: "Uncertain Times: Martin Luther's Remedies for the Soul"

From the October 20 Sounds of St. Francis

Designing an exhibition to commemorate the Reformation’s 500^th anniversary is a fairly heroic task for any gallery.  Far more art was destroyed than created in the sixteenth century in those European lands that embraced the teachings of Luther, Calvin and Cranmer.  But the Walters Art Gallery has made a humble but probing attempt in its single-room exhibition, “Uncertain Times: Martin Luther’s Remedies for the Soul,” on display until October 29 at the museum in downtown Baltimore.

Fittingly, many of the most significant pieces on display are not paintings, but books.  The personal prayer book of Luther’s close associate Philip Melanchthon is there, worn from heavy use, annotated in the margins.  There’s a handsome early edition of Luther’s Tabletalk, the collection of theological rejoinders and moral advice dispensed by the aged master in his later years over the daily bread and beer, carefully recorded by his students.

Words are also the medium of a mesmerizing eighteenth century German folk art piece featured centrally in the exhibition.  The anonymous artist has scripted the many lines of Luther’s Small Catechism as a globe around the rose and cross of Luther’s coat of arms, a loyal tribute to the way in which the theologian has most often been encountered across the centuries—in this careful summary of Reformation teaching, written to be memorized by children as they prepared for their confirmations.

Commentary: God, Where Are You? by Gerard Hughes

My friend Ian gave me this memoir of a renowned British Jesuit when I was ordained, together with a two-volume rubrical guide to celebrating the liturgy.  He told me that both of them would be good for me, in quite different ways.  I expect he’s right.  For nearly a decade now, I’ve pulled the rubrical guide out early in Holy Week to remind myself precisely how to unveil the Cross on Good Friday and how to bless the Paschal Candle. This year, I decided I really ought to give Gerry Hughes a turn as well.

Ian was certainly right about these being two very different sorts of books.  For though Hughes was a faithful Roman Catholic throughout his life and priest for many decades, he wasn’t the sort to fuss much about liturgical niceties, and over his life, seemed to develop an allergy to rules of most kinds.  Though the book has a few moving descriptions of Christian worship, Hughes concentrates on the ways that God is revealed in life outside the sanctuary: in loving relationships, common work for justice and peace, sad and troubling experiences and the beauty of the natural world.

Hughes is best known as a writer of spirituality for ordinary people, tracking the mysterious ways of the “God of surprises” who reveals himself in deeply personal ways.  “I can only know You,” he prays in the book’s moving preface, “through my own experience, my only access to You…No one can teach me who You are, or what You are like, unless you show me Yourself.  My experience is unique to me: it is there and there only that I can catch glimpses of You and know Your attractiveness.”