SEASON'S READINGS : Needing Angels

By THOMAS MOORE

Dec. 4, 1994 12 AM PT

<i> Thomas Moore is the author of "Care of the Soul," "Soul Mates" and "Meditations: On the Monk Who Dwells in Daily Life."</i>

In these days of CD/ROMs, Internet and data-retrieval systems, it’s easy to forget that a book is a book, something to hold in your hands, keep preciously on your shelf and treat with some reverence. Artful covers, imagistic bookmarks, creative typography, textured paper, cloth binding, impressive spines and colorful endpapers all make a book a thing of beauty, and, along with other simple tools of reading--wooden bookshelves, reading glasses and soft lighting--help sustain important old values in a time of lightning-fast information processing. The serifs, swirls and florid patterns that animate the books under consideration here pleasure the heart and imagination, even if the mind would settle pragmatically for a clear page and plain type.

The subject matter of these books also marks a major turn in public concern, toward an intelligent, tolerant, earnest search for the sacred. In the current world of publishing, angels, death, chant and soul reflect what may be the identifying characteristic of the ‘90s--a new interest in spirituality.

What I like about these books is that they are not abstract, moralistic or excessively interpretive. They give us plenty of images and tell in full-bodied language the popular traditions, poetry and stories of religions around the world. This is exactly what we need today. We have enough people telling us what we should believe and how we should act. These books offer an enticing invitation to the rich images of the religious life, encouraging us to find our own imaginative ways to deepen our lives and tend the spirit.

Saints: A Visual Almanac of the Virtuous, Pure, Praiseworthy, and Good by Tom Morgan is an owner’s manual for those who want to live once again in the daily presence of saints. Its pages are alive with rich design, color and illustration; its content gives us all we need to get started on a saint-conscious life: a glossary of terms once much in vogue and now fossilized, a calendar of saints, lists noting areas of patronage (Funeral Directors, look up Joseph of Arimathea) and brief, wonderfully told biographies.

The book has the look and feel of a maker who is sensitive to the materials of this world and to the texture of words. He paints the saints he knows in vivid, luscious language and pictures. St. Peter Celestine, listed as patron of bookbinders, clearly had a hand in this one.

Saints: The Chosen Few by Manuela Duun-Mascetti is also filled with brilliantly presented illustrations and also provides a Who’s Who of saints, as well as descriptions of rituals, pilgrimages, miracles and offerings. This book considers saints in a broad context--in Islam, Judaism, Hinduism and Buddhism--and suggests to me that we could each make our own catalogue of saints, whether from a religious tradition or from our own acquaintances, family or national life.

Conversations With God: Two Centuries of Prayers by African Americans gives us extraordinary examples of how language often finds blood and character as it serves holy rather than merely utilitarian purposes. Consider these lines from a 1980 sermon by James Brown:

We are nothing but a chaff before the wind

Before the wind

We get raindrop in the morning just as

Bloom of the lily.

By noon we cut off wilt and die

Die!

Have mercy, if thou only so please

O yeah

When our spirituality has soul, it’s alive with color, deep feeling, image and song. For too long we’ve lived a split in religion of intellect and emotion, and its resolution is not to be found in an intellectual balancing act, but in a different direction altogether, where the emphasis is on image, language and texture. We seem to be rediscovering finally what African-American spirituality has long cherished: beauty and expressiveness as a path to divinity.

Among the choirs of angel books rushing into print, we have two. Cherubs: Angels of Love is a grand valentine to the putti that have added sentimental grace to hundreds of paintings and greeting cards. I like to see sentimentality contained by the beauty of these images and the special papers and textures of the book, rather than bleeding into our politics and our image of ourselves as a nation. This book is for those who love, as I do, the excessive sensuality of Venus and Cupid.

Angels: The Mysterious Messengers is the companion volume to the NBC television series of the same name. It’s a gathering of many voices and several points of view, for the most part in interview format, discussing the theology and science of angels, as well as personal interpretations and experiences. This is not a panel report by serious “angelologists,” but it does cover just about every question anyone might ask about angels, and it contains a few genuine insights.

In it Malcolm Godwin suggests that we are encountering angels today because “we are counterbalancing the loss of the numinous, the loss of the magical. We seem to have lost some essential mystery--some deeper experience which human beings require.” Angels are more than a compensation, and yet all of these books indicate that we are indeed feeling a loss of profound mystery.

Painted Prayers: Women’s Art in Village India by Stephen P. Huyler is a book of extraordinarily beautiful photographs of women’s holy art, which has lessons of great relevance and importance to teach us--that ordinary arts keep the religious imagination alive, that our psychological problems don’t need analysis and change as much as they need pious expression at a spiritual level, and that our homes are the primary temples of everyday piety.

These photographs show how to live an enchanted life in a sacred world, an attitude obviously quite foreign to modern America, yet badly needed. I’m struck by the similarities between this Indian approach to art and the “natural magic” developed by 15th-Century European artists and theologians. It’s a secret of ordinary spirituality lost in the megabytes of our information highways and our speed-driven roads.

The Art of Devotion in the Late Middle Ages in Europe by Henk van Os is another book of enthralling paintings, altarpieces and sculptures. It is published in connection with a current exhibit at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam. Not only is it valuable to see from an art historian’s point of view how art plays a central role in devotional practices, it’s also helpful to be reminded of the place of devotion in life. We often give attention to intellectual analysis or technological progress, but are we devoted enough to deep values of the heart? Even in religion the accent may be placed on ethics and belief, while devotion is considered old-fashioned. Some studies even suggest that devotion inspired by art objects has long played a role in the spiritual treatment of illness.

Finally, Huston Smith has now published The Illustrated World’s Religions: A Guide to Our Wisdom Traditions. As a student of Huston Smith at Syracuse University I discovered his passionate intellect and immense heart. He is the world’s ambassador to religions everywhere, a role hinted at by the book’s jacket photo, which shows him with his arm around the shoulders of the Dalai Lama.

This book is an illustrated, “refined” version of his classic “The World’s Religions,” originally entitled “The Religions of Man.” He writes clearly, warmly and appreciatively, not about religious institutions, but about the vision contained in the major traditions. Sadly, as a society we have yet to discover the guidance and wisdom just waiting for our attention in the great literature, iconography and poetry of the world’s religions. Faced with our family and social problems, I believe it would be far better to spend one thoughtful hour with Huston Smith’s book than to hunt and search for yet another psychological method or sociological explanation for our distress.

But these books are not about distress, they are celebrations of the religious imagination that one hopes is making a colorful and inspiring return. Many still associate religion with prohibitions of all kinds and sober, intense belief. But these books give us joyful color, rousing poetical sermons, fantastic saints, comforting angels and houses painted to entice divinity. Now that’s religion worth resurrecting.*

SAINTS: A Visual Almanac of the Virtuous, Pure, Praiseworthy, and Good by Tom Morgan

(Chronicle: $16.95; 176 pp.)

SAINTS: The Chosen Few by Manuela Dunn-Mascetti

(Ballantine: $30; 255 pp.)

CONVERSATIONS WITH GOD: Two Centuries of Prayers by African Americans

(HarperCollins: $20; 256 pp.)

THE ART OF DEVOTION IN THE MIDDLE AGES by Henk van Os

(Princeton University Press: $49.50; 192 pp.)

CHERUBS: Angels of Love by Alexander Nagel

(Bullfinch Press/Little Brown: $29.95; 128 pp.)

PAINTED PRAYERS: Women’s Art in Village India by Stephen P. Huyler

(Rizzoli: $50; 204 pp.)