I can see it now. If I close my eyes, or simply remember its place in my home and in my heart, I clearly recollect the crucifix that hung above my crib. Made from some cheap plastic, and crafted to look like antique ivory (but also horribly stained with cigarette smoke), the cross was lightly latticed in a simple yet attractive cross-pattern in the French style.
The corpus was almost entirely different: painted in gold, but not like some carefully written icon, but of a paint that was flaking and falling off the crucified image of our Lord; it simply hung there, silently celebrating some substantive subtlety not immediately evident to casual observation. Altogether, this crucifix was about as ugly as ugly could be, and certainly could not in any way be considered high, or even “good,” art. It was kitsch, mass-produced kitsch.
But it was precisely there, unceremoniously hung upon our wretchedly painted wall in our raggedly attired apartment, that I encountered Christ crucified. It was precisely at that place and at that time where Christ called me to look up and “see” this atrociously articulated Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world (John 1: 29). There Christ called. There I responded. There I encountered how Christ truly “reigns from a tree” of glorious indignity.
Christ crucified is not entirely compatible with his frequent depictions in art. Christ crucified, while magnificently depicted by artists such as Van Eyck, Velazquez, Grunewald, Dalí, Watanabe, and others, is far more common, far crasser, far more kitsch. And it is precisely for this reason that we ought to celebrate kitsch.
Kitsch captures the Kenotic Christ. Christ emptied himself (Phil. 2:7). Christ descended. Incarnation, properly understood and interpreted, is holy kitsch—the celebration of God becoming one of us in all our ragged fleshiness (albeit without sin), without anything to attract us to him (Isa. 53: 2). God Incarnate is kenotic kitsch at its best. As excruciatingly ordinary, kitsch captures not only Christ’s redemptive work, but also the realities of our lives—and this despite our struggles to beautify and sanctify them. The cross of Christ is so horrifyingly ordinary, shockingly ordinary, that its unique offering becomes extraordinary. Put differently, it is so awful that it is awe full. It is Christ for the masses. It is Christ, at his “became sin for us” center (Num. 21:4-9; 2 Cor. 5:21), for the masses.
Kitsch communicates common experience. The cross on my wall adeptly depicted the theatre and trajectory of my life, and our lives. I was born into the ordinary, lived in the ordinary, served in the ordinary, wept and prayed (to draw on T.S. Eliot) in the ordinary and, likely, will die in the ordinary. Like untold millions of other human beings, I will live and die as an exceptionally ordinary human being. Like millions of others, I will hang upon the walls of this world for my allotted “three score years and ten” and pass into eternity having, I hope, helped others along their pilgrimage.
This should not surprise anyone. No one should think that I am being dour and dark. This is a kitschy commonness. St. Paul tells us that there are not many who are of high standing and high importance (1 Cor. 1:26). We are not high and mighty. We are “everyday people,” in the words of Sly and the Family Stone, living achingly ordinary lives, and yet we are in Christ and with Christ and for Christ! And in him we join in and receive and share sacramental grace.
And this is precisely what makes the ordinary extraordinary. This is precisely what makes kitsch constructive. This, put differently, is what makes living art out of kitschy constructs. Knowing that Jesus Christ fully embodied himself in the ordinary, including (from a strictly human perspective) an ordinary death endured by thousands of other Jews under Roman occupation, gives substance and structure and strength and spirit to our extraordinary ordinary.
Knowing this, both objectively and subjectively, empowers hope within us. If Christ fully embraced the kitsch of what it means to be fully human, again albeit without sin, we also can and must orient our lives within and around the kitsch of the ordinary. As St. Irenaeus wrote, “the glory of God is a man fully alive.” To be fully alive and live resurrected and ascending lives, lives of saintliness, we must fully embrace our humanity. St. Charbel, a 19th-century Lebanese monastic, wrote: “You cannot be a saint without becoming a human being first” (Love Is a Radiant Light: The Life and Words of St. Charbel by Hanna Skandar).
Kitsch confirms our common lives. I am fortunate to have in my home office a range of images—Wosene’s Fishing for Words, California Mission mosaics, icons of our Lady, brass carvings from the Book of Kells, and iconographic metalwork by D.J. Cassis. But I am not a beautiful image, so to speak. Nor are most of us. As the late Christian psychologist, Larry Crabb, wrote, “we are a glorious ruin.”
To be sure, to repeat Scripture, we are “fearfully and wonderfully made.” To be sure, we share God’s “image and likeness.” To be sure, we must celebrate that God has crafted us and cares for us. The psalmist’s rhetorical question (“What is man?”) must always be answered with “Someone who God in Christ, by the Holy Spirit, unconditionally loves.” But on other levels, both physically and spiritually, we “are not all that and a bag of chips.” To be honest, when we prayerfully and carefully look at ourselves, we are all in desperate need of reimaging, remodeling, repackaging, and rebranding.
We need beauty to see and be and become different, to be made new. With the Apostles, a rather kitschy and clumsy crew at best, we are all in the same boat, caught in the same storm, and in need of the same Jesus (Heb. 13:8) to speak the same turbid and turbulent “sea” into silent order. And we must not in any way overlook the varied means of everyday graces that God offers, particularly the “thorny grace” (to borrow from Brian Doyle) of living together as a community of disparate people who, against all odds, share “one Lord, one Faith, one Baptism, One God and Father of all.”
Kitsch calls us to community compunction. When I was a child, I thought that my crucifix, with all its smoke-stained imitation ivory and its gold-flaking corpus, was the epitome of beauty. That crucifix said it all to me. It was the highest of art forms.
There, hung upon my shabby wall, Christ was crucified for love. There was love, condescending, to be hung upon the walls of my heart in all its shabby gentility. And through that image, Christ pierced me. Compunction was birthed within me. I longed for this Christ, that kitschy Christ, to take me up into his outstretched gold-flaking flesh, and tell me that I had (and have) a home in the New Jerusalem and “a friend in Jesus.” I encountered the Living Christ there, amid its evident kitsch.
And now that I am much older, and my days are almost done, and I certainly have a far deeper and broader and richer appreciation of the distinctions between common kitsch and the craftsmanship of a true artisan, I celebrate the common simplicity of having a multitude of common things made available to those people whose income and insight may not afford them higher aspirations. Like me, all that they might be able to enjoy is a shabby cross on a shabby wall decorating a common heart that, by God’s good grace, creates true compunction and a lasting longing for Christ, his cross, and his kingdom.
Christ’s Incarnation, life, death, and resurrection made salvation, sanctification, and glorification commonly available to each of us. His radical descending into the everyday and the ordinary made the ascended life the extraordinary opportunity that it is for each one of us.
The Rev. Donald Richmond, DMin, DD is a Guest Writer. He is a semi-retired priest and worships and serves at St. Luke's Episcopal Church, Auburn, California.
