Arriving at this place has been the focus of my work since childhood.   I’ve gotten to it by looking at great works of art and listening to music.   Art seems to be a doorway and an invitation.   We have meaningful conversations; hearing and seeing things in contexts the original artists could never have imagined.   I’m grateful for the differing mystical languages we use to explain it all.    I’m also deeply interested in the scientific understanding we have of any location and its relationship to everything else.   Art creates; it builds up.   It is part of the yes that intends life.   Saying yes brings unexpected things.  

 

 

The fall of the World Trade Towers had happened only a few days before and I realized I was seeing the dolls as stand-ins for those who died at Ground Zero.   I was in the midst of a crisis of faith.   I felt religion’s part in the terrorist attacks doomed everyone.   The world was still stuck in the dark ages.   Either by accident or design, we’d probably all eventually end up in a pile like the dolls.   I forced myself to return to them.  If humanity was dead already, what ought an artist to do?  

 

A phrase from my Catholic childhood popped into my brain, “The true church is made of flesh and blood, not stone.”   I interpreted this sentence to mean that a religion could be healthy or ill (maybe both at the same time) but I shouldn’t confuse the two.   And I shouldn’t worry about faith: there was such a thing as truth in a church . . . one that didn’t go flying airplanes into skyscrapers or something much worse.  

 

I then had a vision of the pile of dolls flying upwards in a flowing whirlwind into two square towers.   The dolls were leaping, being carried along with a rhythmic clarity in mathematical patterns, like notes of music.   I realized (with a shock) that the Trade Towers were literally, at that moment, “flesh and blood” – a true church.   When I thought the words, “true church”, the two towers of dolls transformed into the two spires of a Gothic cathedral.   Seeing this vision made me shake all over again.   I was afraid.   I didn’t run around saying, “Oh boy, I want to build this!”

 

That night on the waterfront in Portland, Oregon, I changed my mind.  People were sitting with candles in the grass talking about 9-11.   A homeless girl approached her street-kid friends and asked, “Does anyone know how to pray?”   The vision I had of the cathedral crystallized around us.   I felt, “This is no coincidence.”   We were the church of “flesh and blood.”  We were praying and meditating and crying, or doing nothing at all, with people all over the world.