Sometime in the winter of 1995/96 my friend and mentor Milania Austin Henley turned me on to the artwork of Michael Schrauzer who, like Milania, was associated with St. Andrew’s Abbey, a Benedictine Monastery at Valyermo. It was through the “Journal of the Arts and Religion” called Image. Schrauzer’s work is formal, often housed in rich cabinets, yet inviting, contemplative. The Annunciation consists not of cabinetry but of interlocking frames: a gilt T—the last letter in the Hebrew alphabet1—foreshadows the Cross; its setting sun smolders in the base of the letter’s upright, bisecting a white rose. It is almost cruel in its “truth, perfection, completion.” It’s the obverse of Oscar Wilde, who describes his wonder at the, well, banality of this consequential moment.
Ave Maria Gratia Plena
Was this His coming! I had hoped to see
A scene of wondrous glory, as was told
Of some great God who in a rain of gold
Broke open bars and fell on Danae:
Or a dread vision as when Semele
Sickening for love and unappeased desire
Prayed to see God’s clear body, and the fire
Caught her brown limbs and slew her utterly:
With such glad dreams I sought this holy place,
And now with wondering eyes and heart I stand
Before this supreme mystery of Love:
Some kneeling girl with passionless pale face,
An angel with a lily in his hand,
And over both the white wings of a Dove.
— Oscar Wilde, Vatican Gallery, Rome, 1877
I found another artist in the pages of Image: Jim Morphesis, with whom I had an early-Covid conversation. During Lent of 2021 I wrote:
It’s that time of year and I’m reminded of your Crucifixion paintings. […]
Jim, in the lovely foreword to your catalog, Michele Cairella Fillmore writes, regarding your work:
However, while religiosity and its visual interpretations float on the surface, one can earn more by delving much deeper. By exploring the more profound meaning beneath layers, a subliminal encounter more personal in nature, evolves.
Having been a lay gemstone journalist for several years, I immediately thought of a phenomenon in opal called, in Spanish, lloviznando (drizzling) or, less literally, floating light. Just as the opal beckons us to probe both surface and substance, Cairella Fillmore explains how your paintings capture, then call for cogitation.
When I was entering the Catholic Church in 1991, Bruce Schwartz, who you met, asked me about the meaning of the Passion. As now, it was that time of year, and likely near the Easter Vigil in which adults like me were brought into the church after a couple of years of study. I remember grasping for an answer because for me the Passion is like the end of a stanza in Leonard Cohen’s “Suzanne”:
But he himself was broken, long before the sky would open
Forsaken, almost human, he sank beneath your wisdom like a stone
The Passion had sunk so deep beneath my wisdom only later could I articulate its meaning on a personal level.
Your catalog leads off with The Crucifixion. I know that’s only one piece of the Passion, but could you discuss the significance of both for you?
This is the sort of conversation that I and dear Milania, who left us on August 18, had on many occasions in Los Angeles before I moved to Denver in 2005. During one such dialogue, in the winter of 2000/01, Milania and I decided on a visit to St. Andrew’s during which, on her walk of the Abbey’s form of the Via Crucis, she collected artifacts as muses for her collection of verse: Meditations on the Way of the Cross.
Milania gave me her text—with a, mm…, crucial addition—and I created the layout in an application likely lost to a technological purgatory (Adobe having many sins to be purged). This was to be something made available in the Abbey gift shop, but at some point we were thwarted by the mechanics of actually getting it printed.
Meditations on the Way of the Cross –
The Virtual Booklet
Oddly, the PDFs offered below were created on May 7, 2005, just days before the sale of my house in Mount Washington closed on the 31st. Even then we might have hoped for publication.
Meditations on the
Way of the Cross
In the coming days I plan to write my remembrances of Milania. This is offered on the occasion of her memorial, Saturday, September 20, 2025.
Notes
- According to designer Gabriele Levy, the letter Tav “is the symbol of truth, perfection, and completion.”