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Richard Malmberg (left), Senior Pastor of the Second Church in Newton, UCC, and artist Laura Baring-Gould spoon ashes into origami boats as part of a September 11th related installation in the church’s Chapel Gallery. Photo by Tiffany Vail Related articles:
> Churches there for one, all, on 9/11 (Oct., 2002)
> Gifts from the heart sent to Afghan children (Oct. 2002)
> Churches aim for unity on Sept. 11th (Sept., 2002)Links:
> Second Church, Newton
> Boston Sculptors
Finding ways to express the inexpressible
October, 2002
By Tiffany Vail
A great windstorm arose, and the waves beat into the boat, so that the boat was already being swamped. – Mark 4:37
The passage from the Gospel of Mark held a particular resonance when it was read at Second Church in West Newton recently. It was read on the evening of September 11th, a date when many people were feeling threatened, fearful, insecure – perhaps adrift on an angry sea — just as the disciples felt that night long ago.
Adding to the mood were hundreds of tiny, ephemeral boats, all seemingly afloat in the air overhead; all filled with ashes.
But [Jesus] was in the stern, asleep on the cushion; and they woke him up and said to him, “Teacher, do you not care that we are perishing?” He woke up and rebuked the wind, and said to the sea “Peace! Be still!” Then the wind ceased, and there was a dead calm. He said to them “Why are you afraid? Have you still no faith”? — Mark 4:38-40
Those attending the service were not left adrift either. Instead they were offered hope, symbolized by a single candle standing in a small, adjoining chamber. After saying a prayer for the victims of September 11th, Senior Pastor Richard Malmberg went into that room, lit his candle, brought it back into the main chapel, and passed the flame to the candle of the person next to him. The flame was passed from person-to-person, spreading that hope as it went.
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Although Second Church has long offered display space to area artists – it has housed the Boston Sculptors in its Chapel Gallery for the past 10 years – this is only the second time in recent memory when a worship service and art installation were combined.Senior Pastor Richard Malmberg says he sees both art and worship as a “search for truth.”
“It’s about reaching what’s beyond words. Art is trying to articulate something without words, and much of our tradition is about putting the ineffable into words. I think the synergy of both together can be very fruitful,” he said.
The artist who created the installation, Laura Baring-Gould, feels that art and religion have always gone hand-in-hand.“People coming into this space perhaps will think something they haven’t before, and that’s the essence of prayer to me,” she said. “Throughout history art and religion weren’t separate, and art and ritual certainly aren’t separate.”
Baring-Gould said the idea for the installation, entitled Point of Departure, came from all the papers that flew around the World Trade Center after the terrorist attacks.“The towers fell, but what survived was the paper,” she said. “Paper went from Manhatten to the Bronx. It was all over. And I thought ‘what a fragile vessel paper is for our memories.’ Think of everything we keep that is paper – photos, love letters, tax returns. So I decided I wanted to work with paper.”
Baring-Gould said she has also often focused on boats in her art, as they are central to rituals in many different cultures around the world.That led her to enlist friends, relatives and school children to fold nearly 1,000 origami boats, using white tracing paper. The boats were then suspended from the ceiling with fishing line, and filled with ash from various sources: a Buddhist retreat center, a barbecue grill in a Jamaica Plain neighborhood where people have gotten together regularly since September 11th; burned palms from Palm Sunday.
“The diversity of ashes speaks to the diversity of the victims,” Malmberg said.