[Congressional Record Volume 146, Number 131 (Wednesday, October 18, 2000)]
[Senate]
[Pages S10701-S10703]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




     MEMORIAL TRIBUTE TO FREDERICK HART BY REVEREND STEPHEN HAPPEL

  Mr. THURMOND. Mr. President, it was only a little over a year ago 
when this nation lost one of the most inspiring, talented sculptors of 
the 20th century. Frederick Hart's passionate spirituality and his 
extraordinary ability to transform human emotions into physical 
elements were reflected throughout his works of art, and his tragic 
death has left a tremendous void. I know that I convey the thoughts of 
all who had the privilege of knowing Rick as I again extend my 
condolences to his wife, Lindy, and their two sons, Lain and Alexander.
  On October 6, 2000, Reverend Doctor Stephen Happel, Dean of the 
School of Religious Studies at Catholic University, paid tribute to 
Frederick Hart at a memorial service held in his honor at the 
Washington National Cathedral. Dr. Happel's poignant remarks are a 
testimony to a man who embraced the complexity of God and art, and I 
ask unanimous consent that his remarks be printed in the Record.
  There being no objection, the material was ordered to be printed in 
the Record, as follows:

                          The Cathedral Years

   (Remarks of Stephen Happel, Memorial for Frederick Hart, National 
                       Cathedral, 6 October 2000)

       ``We have seen that without the involution of matter upon 
     itself, that is to say, without the closed chemistry of 
     molecules, cells and phyletic branches, there would never 
     have been either biosphere of noosphere. In their advent and 
     their development, life and thought are not only 
     accidentally, but also structurally, bound up with the 
     contours and destiny of the terrestrial mass,'' (P. Teilhard 
     de Chardin, The Phenomenon of Man [New York: Harper 
     Torchbook, 1961], 273). ``The term of creation is not to be 
     sought in the temporal zones of our visible world, but . . . 
     the effort required of our fidelity must be consummated 
     beyond a total metamorphosis of ourselves and of everything 
     surrounding us.'' (P. Teilhard de Chardin, The Divine Milieu 
     [New York: Harper & Row, 1960], 78). The evolution of 
     everything cannot fulfill itself on earth except through 
     reaching for something, someone outside itself. In doing so, 
     literally everything is transformed.
       These quotations from the Teihard de Chardin's Phenomenon 
     of Man and The Divine Milieu were the human milieu that I 
     found when I walked into Frederick Hart's life in 1973-74. He 
     had joined an Inquiry Class at St. Matthew's Cathedral during 
     a particularly difficult time in his life. Inquiry classes 
     are traditional Catholic ways for people investigating new 
     knowledge and spiritual meaning. Rick was living in his 
     studio, a garage on P St with a bedroom attached, his first 
     plan for the facade of the Cathedral rejected (along with all 
     the other sculptors). He was looking for a comprehensive 
     vision in which his own work could struggle to be born. Or 
     better, his artistic work struggled to evolve and create a 
     world, an environment

[[Page S10702]]

     that could grow like a green space in a desert, expanding to 
     nourish the beautiful on the planet. And he was looking for 
     some words to mirror the sculptural world he was inventing.
       Frederick Hart arrived at the National Episcopal Cathedral 
     in the 1960's as a mail clerk. He had decided, after trying 
     his hand at painting, that sculpture was his vocation, but he 
     needed a place to learn. The learning took place here on this 
     spot, under the guidance of Roger Morigi, one of the last 
     classic master stonemasons, whose techniques went back to 
     Michelangelo and Leonardo da Vinci. Rick graduated from mail 
     clerk to apprentice, when Roger, an often difficult, 
     sometimes volcanic, professional father, found the fellow 
     ``promising.'' After Rick completed a bust of Philip Frohman, 
     the architect of the Cathedral, as a gift for the Cathedral 
     (1969), the clerk of the works, Richard Feller, recognized 
     that this young (now 26) sculptor should be included in 
     the competition for the facade sculpture. Rick continued 
     to produce bosses, gargoyles, and the classic Erasmus, a 
     Catholic reformer with an ironic tone (not unlike Rick's 
     own) until April, 1975 when his second set of motifs for 
     the central tympanum and the trumeau sculpture were 
     approved.
       I met Rick at that Inquiry Class at St. Matthew's Cathedral 
     on Rhode Island Avenue. I gave a talk on the sacraments in 
     which I spoke about how symbols are neither subjective nor 
     secondary in our religious lives. I paralleled the power and 
     effectiveness of artwork and the Sacraments. Each of them 
     transform us if we let them, they invite us into the world 
     they project in front of us. They announce a better world 
     that has not quite arrived, but will if faith prevails. 
     Artistic and sacramental symbols are not substitutes for what 
     is not there, but an incipient presence of the whole, pushing 
     its way into our sometimes dull and quotidian conscious life. 
     Even though the routine of work and domestic life can screen 
     out what is truly beautiful and holy, symbols can break 
     through and insist on being seen, heard, and touched.
       Rick, like the symbols themselves, had a way of fidgeting 
     into a conversation. Although he was respectful of the fact 
     that we had never met, he could not quite resist asking lots 
     of questions early on at the meeting. It did not take long 
     for the two of us to discover that we were cultural and 
     religious siblings, we were both committed to the ways in 
     which religious symbols could change public life. After the 
     ``official'' conversation was over, Rick, Darrell Acree, 
     Father James Meyers and I went to the Dupont Village Pizza, 
     regrettably no longer there, ordered pizza and (I have to 
     say) more than one pitcher of beer while discussing art, the 
     sacraments, and his plans for the Cathedral's facade. Somehow 
     I'm quite sure that the Lord would not have understood our 
     discussing the sacraments over the pizza and beer!
       Rick was at the beginning of his new proposal. Basically, 
     he just wanted to know whether his view of the world was 
     theologically crazy. It was not; it was genial. Through the 
     help of his friends, he had not only made his way from Childe 
     Harold and the Benbow, local pubs, but he had also read 
     Teilhard de Chardin and classic philosophies of art. In 
     between these books and his wanderings, he would take his 
     meager paychecks from the National Cathedral to build a 
     garden with a fountain in the backyard of the garage and 
     draperies to remake his interior world. The next winter the 
     drapes were useful; they kept him warm when he wasn't 
     sleeping with the two dogs that sufficed as a heater in the 
     unheated studio.
       Rick lived physically on the margins during those years. 
     Deliberately, energetically; he found the ``in-between'' a 
     creative locus in which he could explore the ways in which 
     the body could evoke mind and heart, in which the material 
     embodied the spiritual and eternal, in which the physical 
     could struggle, emerge, and become other than it is. This was 
     a man for whom ideas were a passion; and passions could 
     become ideas. I had no trouble finding a life-long friend--or 
     better, a friend for all of his life.
       Later that evening I saw the gouache designs he had already 
     completed for the project of Creation, Adam and Sts. Peter 
     and Paul. But as in all cases with my experience of Rick's 
     work as it evolved, the idea was somewhere within, grasping 
     for life and open air, to live in the public world. Rick had 
     to produce a ``statement,'' as you know, for the competition. 
     That night he and I spoke about how creation evolved, the 
     role of human beings in this evolution, and the primary, 
     initiating power of God's love. If you will, it was a course 
     in Christian anthropology, a human nature aiming beyond 
     itself, a human being unable to make sense of itself without 
     reference to the Other--to God. I took the pieces he had 
     produced, added some theological jargon and sent them back to 
     him. He re-worked them again and sent them in along with the 
     drawings. He won. We are living in the results of his labor.
       Medieval Cathedrals emerged from a vastly different 
     anticipated future. They were painted, very colorful places 
     of worship, filled with multiple altars, incense, and song. 
     An entry through the main doors at the Cathedral at Autun 
     shows an either/or world--either heaven or hell. Christ the 
     Judge seated on a throne presides in the midst of a heavenly 
     court. On Christ's right, angels push souls into the mansions 
     of heaven where Mary and the apostles reside; on the left, 
     demons weigh souls and send them off to torment.
       Rick's vision for the facade of the National Cathedral 
     coincided with the courageous commitment of the building 
     committee. The theme was creation, a new image for a National 
     Cathedral in a new country. The vision was both/and--the 
     material and the spiritual. How to imagine both a primordial 
     past and a transformed future--at the same time? How to make 
     the stone fly from earth into the infinite horizon of the 
     Universe? How to unite the individual and the communal in a 
     contemporary world where the radically autonomous, isolated 
     subject is the ideal? Can what is new be rooted in history 
     and tradition? For Rick, it was both/and in his sculpture, 
     not either/or.
       Creation in the stone embodiment of Frederick Hart is an 
     ongoing event--what theologians call a creatio continuia--
     simultaneously ``conservation'' and ``preservation'' by God. 
     This is not an image of a distant past event, astronomical 
     or human, but the constantly emerging present life of the 
     human community. Ex Nihilo symbolizes the choral dance, 
     the human perichoresis in which we are all even now part 
     of one another, linked body, soul, mind, and heart. The 
     figures emerge from the ground, but are not yet completely 
     defined. As Rick used to say, the Ground from which they 
     come is as primordial as the figures that emerge. Without 
     the involution of matter, sinew and bone folding and 
     revitalizing themselves (as Teilhard said), the unique 
     figures that are human beings would not appear.
       Adam is the test case. The central trumeau figure is at 
     once grasping for the air and being grasped. With closed 
     eyes, he is the old Adam yearning with his right arm to push 
     from the ground from which he comes; with the left, he is 
     being pulled, however tentatively, from the swirling ooze, 
     tugged by an invisible hand. The torso leans ever so slightly 
     upward.
       This Adam is both the old Adam--and on a longitudinal axis 
     with the new Adam sitting in glory over the high altar on the 
     reredos. He is also an Adam for an American context, both 
     striving to enter the world and helped by One he cannot yet 
     see. This is not a solo, antagonistic, power-hungry figure in 
     the style of Nietzsche; this sculpture has its humanity in 
     and with an Other, a partner who cooperates to bring it into 
     existence.
       Perhaps it is this theme that is subversive in Hart's 
     sculptural theology; the sculpture invites, seduces, even 
     provokes the viewer into participation in the world it is 
     announcing. St. Paul, caught at the moment of transformation, 
     the mystic transported to the seventh heaven, sinks below the 
     emergence of the night sky from the swirling chaos. St. 
     Peter, the only facade sculpture with his eyes open, draws 
     his net to build the church under the creation of the day. 
     Thus Hart presents time and space in a single sensuous 
     continuum in which the history of the early Church unfolds 
     from the call of Adam and all humanity pulled out of the 
     visible chaotic ground.
       In this sense, Rick's work here (and elsewhere) offends 
     people. Not simply because it does not `fit into' the current 
     or recent art establishment--though the 70's were not a time 
     for well-modeled, fine art. His work demands of the viewer a 
     participation that insists on re-making the world. Again I 
     quote Teilhard de Chardin: ``To create, or organize material 
     energy, or truth, or beauty, brings with it an inner torment 
     which prevents those who face its hazards from sinking into 
     the quiet and closed-in-life wherein grow the vice of egoism 
     and attachment. An honest workman not only surrenders 
     his tranquility and peace once and for all, but must learn 
     to abandon over and over again the form which his labor or 
     art or thought first took, and go in search of new 
     forms.'' (P. Teilhard de Chardin, The Devine Milieu, 41) 
     Frederick Hart knew this intimately, even painfully. The 
     facade sculptures reach out from the center to the edges 
     of day and night and extend themselves into the city and 
     our world. They proselytize; they preach; they evangelize 
     about how the world could be if values of beauty and truth 
     were embraced. For Rick these were moral values.
       Just as Enlightenment values of autonomy, individual 
     history, and emotional independence were moral imperatives, 
     so Rick Hart's work pushes beholders into their inner lives, 
     asking for cooperation to build a world. Rick's sculptures 
     embody the very boundaries he lived between; they provoke 
     viewers into asking about the aura of the Other that envelops 
     them in the material stuff of their day to day lives. But 
     sensing the material as a symbol of the immaterial is not a 
     current ideal. Cooperation is not a current norm. Newspapers 
     are sold on conflict and disagreement; debates are structured 
     on differences; business is won or lost on the basis of 
     unique combative marketing; computer systems are structured 
     on either-or options.
       The theology of cooperation Rick espoused in his art, 
     despite his love of playing the antagonist in conversation, 
     was absolutely Trinitarian. The chorus of human activity was 
     a symbol of the internal life of God. The God who creates us; 
     the God whose Beloved Incarnate One we follow and worship; 
     the Spirit that animates human history--all are One 
     terrifying and vivifying, swirling fire. We live in the midst 
     of the divine milieu, as Teilhard says; we cannot escape our 
     God. ``Is the Kingdom of God a big family? Yes, in a sense it 
     is. But in another sense it is a prodigious biological 
     operation--that of the Redeeming Incarnation.'' For Rick, God 
     lives in the heart of matter, calling us, prodding us to 
     share in the divine life of love, justice, and truth.

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       Rick's best work, his masterpiece on the facade of this 
     building, invites the city to admire the house of prayer, but 
     more to enter it. The sculptures set up the conditions under 
     which a community, a city might transform itself. Enter the 
     choric dance; establish a cooperative rhythm; be drawn like 
     Adam to what you cannot see; drop the sword of contention and 
     enter the mystical night--and maybe, just maybe, you will be 
     able to build the day. You might find God.
       Rick Hart was a friend. But I make no apologies for my 
     praise of his work; I believe I have been privileged to know 
     a great, passionate artist whose values emerged within his 
     creative processes and embodied themselves there. As a 
     result, I know that long after I am dead, the ideas and 
     values he, I and others shared in friendship will awaken 
     others. The symbols will remain--continuing to make parts 
     into wholes, building a community of living stones from the 
     stones he shaped, drawing us beyond ourselves into God.

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