This painting by Botticelli is, if you had to force me to choose, the one I’d pick as the Renaissance-era painting that I love the most. There’s so much going on in it, but the astonishing, gobsmacking beauty of it…
It was brought to mind by the shooting earlier this week at Annunciation parish church near Minneapolis. We live in a world where everthing has symbolic dimensions, even if most of the time we have experiences but miss their meaning. There have been so many senseless shootings, and these shootings for those of us who have not been directly affected by them have come mainly to symbolize the absurdity of American politics, how completely gridlocked the system, how incapable of doing the people’s will or anything that common decency and common sense demands.
All these shootings are horrific, but there’s something different about the ones that happen in churches, perhaps most powerfully the shooting at Emanuel AME in Charleston where the parishioners there welcomed their murderer into their midst. This event on June 17, 2015, was the day after Trump came down the escalator. That was an annunciation of another kind. Some events symbolize better than others.
The world is continuously symbolizing to us because we live not in a world of things, but a world of symbols, and it’s a problem because we don’t know how to read them anymore—everything has become so flat and one-dimensional. We think that facts are the only important things. But there’s no such things as an uninterpreted fact, and so we have to get better at interpretation, and that means we have to become more symbolically literate.
Earlier in the week I wrote a piece about the ‘hyperreal’, and about how our lives are being sealed off from reality, how, a la Baudrillard, the old symbols don’t symbolize anymore, and so how we are seduced into bubble worlds that have their own internal semiotics—meanings that have no reference anymore to anything real, how they are the smile without the cat.
But certain events break through, and the killing of innocents is certainly one of them. That amazing 10-year-old kid talking to the press about his friend Victor. Even the name. They rattle us. They ‘announce’ things. Would that we would all hearken to what we hear.
Maybe here’s a good model of response:
Magnificat anima mea Dominum…
My soul doth magnify the Lord,
And my spirit hath rejoiced in God my Saviour
Because He hath regarded the humility of his handmaid: for behold from henceforth all generations shall call me blessed.
Because He that is mighty hath done great things to me, and holy is His name.
And His mercy is from generation unto generations to them that fear Him.
He hath shewed might in His arm: He hath scattered the proud in the conceit of their heart.
He hath put down the mighty from their seat, and hath exalted the humble.
He hath filled the hungry with good things, and the rich He hath sent empty away.
He hath received Israel His servant, being mindful of His mercy.
As He spoke to our fathers; to Abraham and his seed forever.
J.D.—you listening? I haven’t given up on you completely yet.
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