Grief on the way west

This is Bernini's David, a work of art that isn't just to look at. When you share the room with him, as he winds up for combat with Goliath, you know you're in a battle. He's coiled like an Olympian with a discus, but he's got a sling and he's about to leave an indelible mark on a giant. 

Bernini wanted you to feel the David and Goliath story, to experience the story's significant moment of life-and-death truth. Renegade reformers were upsetting the church's applecart. Something had to be done. Bernini and other baroque artists claimed you couldn't just observe the Bible's stories anymore; you couldn't just idealize biblical characters, put them on some Renaissance flannelgraph. People had to feel them. If you want to understand what the term baroque means, step into the room with Bernini's David, where the boy is soon to become a man by felling a monster. David isn't an illustration; he's an 600-year-old marble action figure. 

If you've never been moved by sculpture, you've probably never been to Rome. But I don't mind saying that you don't have to tour Italy to see impressive sculpture. There's a piece just down the road that'll take your breath away, even though the two major characters are neither identified nor even noteworthy. Though their names are immaterial their suffering is profound, the agony that surpasses any other, the death of a child, not just any child either, the death of their child.

This one has none of the naked beauty of Michaelangelo's David, none of the almost mercurial action of Bernini's. The faces are indistinct. Just exactly who this was of little consequence. What sculptured monument in the graveyard across the street from the Mormon Trail Museum at Winter Quarters in Omaha is meant to commemorate is not who but how--how the suffering along the trail to Zion, to home, required faith that could move mountains, faith to overcome the worst life itself can bring--death.

It's a young couple. Since there are no clinging children anywhere to be seen, what we can't help but notice is that the child, way down there beneath their feet, ready for burial is their first and only. The father does his best to hold to his wife, but he's on stony ground, not the prairie. These two are nowhere near the Missouri River. The setting is itself a rocky climb, a precarious place. He's trying to keep balance himself in a strong wind, while holding the baby's mother as close as humanly possible.

Their faces are downward and dark, as if our looking any closer at their faces would be unseemly of us. The darkness is their dignity. We don't need to see their swollen eyes to know at least something of what it is they feel just then. 

And there is an inescapable premise here. The two of them, mother and father, are on a trail to Zion, on their way west. The suffering they're undergoing is in quest of a better life, and soon enough, mother and father will have go, leaving their precious bundle--the child about to buried beneath them is a baby--behind. In the bottom left corner you can see the child's face in a grave carved out from the rock.

The story the sculpture tells has particular meaning in the Winter Quarters cemetery, where only three graves remain from hundreds who died here while the LDS people were waiting to winter to abate so they keep moving west toward the Salt Lake. But the artistry reaches beyond the immediate and into the universal, for while the leave-taking is particular in its grief, the loss is anyone's. 

I've not experienced it myself, but many have and many do and many will. There's just something about the sculpture that brings me back time and time again. It's just so very telling.