Morning Thanks--a monumental work

Monumental?--yes, in spades. Beautiful?--let me think about that. Jerry Traufler's extraordinary wood sculpture of DaVinci's The Lord Supper, two tons of hard, exacting work, will take your breath away. Let me just expend some adjectives here: it's notable, it's massive, it's remarkable and striking. Go ahead and visit sometime--Trinity Heights, Sioux City. You won't come away unaffected. 

It's huge--each figure weighing in somewhere between two and three hundred pounds, the table itself incredible, quite lordly. Judas is here, of course. In some ways, he's the evil star of the show, the one who's created the shock on the faces of those, at this very moment, who were his friends. Here he is, thirty pieces of silver in a bag in his hand.

And Peter, although the knife he wields in the original is more hidden in the massive carving than it is on the wall in Milan. He's bald, the only one in the room without hair. Don't know why. Here he is, whispering into the ear of a very female-ish John, the youngest of the bunch, for whom Traufler used his wife as a model. For the record, DaVinci's John is remarkably feminine too, often thought to be, in fact, Mary Magdaline. 

Doubting Thomas is here, his finger in the air--I'm not sure why, but Leonardo has him in the same pose. That's James the Greater with the swooping mustache, pointing an accusatory finger maybe? 

And then there's Jesus, eyes mysteriously closed. On a tape that plays in the background, Traufler says closing the Savior's eyes was his choice, not DaVinci's.  Traufler deliberately wanted to close Christ's eyes. 

Not my preference. If the eyes are the mirrors of the soul, then we see nothing here. Perhaps this Jesus didn't want to be distracted from the suffering He knew was to come--that would make good sense. But those gathered in the upper room are the ones he'd called, the ones he'd loved, the ones who'd been with him through thick and thin, even though they'd abandon him soon. 

Maybe it's the balance of the paradox. Christ the King has his eyes closed; Jesus, the carpenter's son, has them open. He's both--human and divine, the mystery no one can quite get his or her mind around.

Maybe my hesitancy about beauty is created by Christ's refusal to see what's happening at his table, his deliberate blindness to evil intrigue suddenly roiling the chosen. But then, maybe what's dispelling is the greatly-heralded fact that Traufler used his buddies as models, that the disciples are just a bunch of guys from LeMars. 

Still, The Lord's Supper a colossal undertaking, a massive work of love that required great quantities of zeal and dogged dedication. Like Thomas, you really have to see it to believe it. 

It's stunning, but it's as human as all of our creations. 

That having been said, this morning I'm thankful Jerry Traufler, the woodcarver, spent so many years of his life creating it because it is, without a doubt, in every sense of the word, monumental.