[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.
[[Page S10703]]
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.
____________________