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Clarke, Harry - VM - Lanta Davis
Harry Clarke: Stations of the Cross, Saint Patrick’s Basilica
Walking the Via Dolorosa with Harry Clarke
By Lanta Davis
When Harry Clarke designed the fourteen stained glass windows featuring the stations of the cross for Saint Patrick’s Basilica on Station Island, Lough Derg, Ireland, he had already contracted the disease that would kill him just a few years later. As he began working on Jesus’s walk toward death, Clarke had begun his own.
When I went to see Clarke’s windows, I too was walking in the shadow of death. My mother had died from a heart attack just a few weeks before my visit to the famous pilgrimage site. Gazing at Clarke’s via dolorosa with eyes that had recently gazed upon death changed the way I saw Jesus’s walk towards death, and how I saw death itself.
With their fantastical figures and jewel-like colors, Clarke’s windows feel like a fairy-tale. Each of the fourteen windows features an apostle (including Paul and Mary, the Queen of the Apostles,) holding an oval medallion. The apostles appear almost ethereal, floating in the windows and adorned in mystical, otherworldly cloaks. Their faces are still and serene, in their hands, they hold the drama of Christ’s death, with each medallion revealing a station of the cross. Unlike the contemplative calm of the apostles, the scenes in the medallions are full of movement and conflict. One person in the scene usually looks directly at the viewer, as if to remind us that we are not objective bystanders, but participants in the action.
The windows’ colors and figures may seem fairy-tale-like, but on the via dolorosa, there are no vanishing acts, no wands to wave, no magical elixirs. Jesus simply walks the road of suffering, bearing the burden of the cross. This is no easy feat, even for the Son of God. Jesus falls under its weight not just once, but three times. Someone steps in to offer a cloth to wipe his blood-stained face, and even to help carry the cross, but the walk itself must simply be endured.
As I walked along with Jesus on the road of suffering, I found the final station particularly powerful. It depicts Jesus’s friends and family gathered around his dead body and preparing to place it in the tomb. In this moment, they do not know what is to come. The resurrection is not yet in sight. Here, there is only death and grief. At the end of the road, there is no happy ending, no easy answers.
The lack of hope in this last station paradoxically filled me with renewed hope. I had become exhausted with the easy consolations of people who were trying to make me feel better. They felt like attempts to make me move forward, to get on with things. But I wasn’t ready. I needed time—time to weep and reflect and sit in the darkness for a while. There is no shortcut, no magical portal, to the hope and joy of Easter Sunday without first enduring the darkness and doubts of Good Friday. Walking Clarke’s stations of the cross gave me permission to walk the slow walk, and helped me see that grief is a long, arduous journey with no quick, easy escapes. The via dolorosa reminded me that the only way forward is through.
This painful road, however, is not without beauty. Mary holds this final station, placing the dead Christ directly over the womb that gave him life. Mary said “yes” to bearing Jesus, which also meant saying “yes” to losing him. By peering at Clarke’s windows, we see suffering and grief as part of an unfolding story. The apostles, too, may not have followed Jesus on the via dolorosa, but they followed him with their lives afterward. They hold the instruments of their martyrdoms, reminding us what they too endured in order to say “yes” to Christ. The medallions are right in the center of their bodies, as if the apostles are carrying suffering in their bellies. Their faces, however, remain calm.
Their serenity, combined with the beautiful, almost shockingly vivid colors of the windows, remind us that when we say yes to carrying our cross, it means we have also said yes to the colorful beauty and vivid surprises of life. Grief, Clarke’s windows helped me understand, is intertwined with gratitude. My life was more vividly colorful because of my mother’s love. I grieved her loss because I was so grateful for her life.
Perhaps, then, the “fairy-tale” quality of Clarke’s windows helps remind us of the true fairy-tale: the story that shows us that the path of suffering and death also happens to be the path of beauty and life.
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Harry Clarke: Stained Glass Stations of the Cross, Saint Patrick’s Basilica, Lough Derg, Pettigo, County Donegal, Ireland.
Harry Clarke (1889-1931) was an Irish stained-glass artist and book illustrator. Renowned for his jewel-like colors and intricate details, Clarke was a major figure in the Irish Arts and Crafts movement. In addition to his sacred windows, Clarke also crafted windows influenced by literature, such as The Eve of St. Agnes and the Geneva Window. He died from tuberculosis at 41.
Lanta Davis is the author of Becoming by Beholding: The Power of the Imagination in Spiritual Formation. She is Professor of Humanities and Literature for the John Wesley Honors College at Indiana Wesleyan University. During a Fulbright at Queen’s University Belfast, she fell in love with Harry Clarke’s work. For more about her work, visit www.lantadavis.com/writing.
ArtWay Visual Meditation 29 September 2024