Doors of Faith

For spiritual seekers, for pilgrims who seek an encounter with God, the journey begins through the doors.

Rising three stories, including a crowning tympanum, 2 1/2 feet thick at the hinges and so massive that they must be opened with a motorized hydraulic system, these are “The Great Bronze Doors” being fashioned by artist Robert Graham for the Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels that is rising on a downtown site.

While the $163-million cathedral designed by Spanish architect Jose Rafael Moneo is expected to inspire awe and civic pride when it is finished late next year or early in 2002, its five-ton cast bronze doors will unquestionably become a focal point of artistic interest. For Graham--he has also designed such works as the Franklin D. Roosevelt memorial in Washington, D.C.--and the church they are also a symbolic and literal threshold on faith’s journey.

“A portal to a sacred space has a kind of a power that can overcome humans who experience this passage,” said Father Richard S. Vosko, the project’s liturgical and art consultant, who is based in New York. “In mythological terms,” he said, crossing the threshold “says to the pilgrim that anything is possible on the other side of the door.”

A sign of welcoming and, for Roman Catholics, a sign of Jesus Christ, the doors will be fitted on the south side of the Los Angeles cathedral facing a great plaza. They are designed to reflect the cultural and ethnic diversity in the nation’s largest Roman Catholic archdiocese, in which Mass is said daily in more than 45 languages.

Emblazoned with Old World themes that beckon across the ages--Japanese signs of heaven, a Hebrew depiction of the hand of God and depictions of the Virgin Mary--”The Great Bronze Doors,” the church hopes, will speak to the New World in an artistic idiom that is as universal as music yet communicates directly to the particular cultures and ethnic groups of Los Angeles.

On the doors’ lower panels, set on 4-inch-square pedestals, will be 40 ancient symbols representing God and godly attributes: a tai chi symbol for harmony, a dog symbolizing loyalty, a peacock symbolizing resurrection, a Celtic evangelist, a Croatian cross, a Samoan kava bowl. A winding grapevine, symbolizing the church, curls around the symbols to bring unity to the whole.

Befitting a cathedral named after Our Lady of the Angels, the upper panels feature various representations of Mary, whom Catholics revere as the mother of Jesus. Here again, the cultural and ethnic diversity of the nation’s largest Roman Catholic archdiocese is evident. There is Mexico’s Our Lady of Guadalupe, the Peruvian Virgin of Pomata, the Colombian Virgin of Chiquinquira, Spain’s Virgin of Montserrat and Our Lady of Loretto, to name a few.

In panels that depict the crucifixion of Jesus, a rooster is rendered in a decidedly Aztec motif, and Our Lady of Sorrows has a dagger in her heart. There are the instruments of crucifixion used by the Romans: nails, a hammer and pliers.

Unifying the cultures represented below is a life-size statue of Mary unlike any other. Suspended above the bronze doors, she is youthful with a feminine sinuousness and understated athleticism. She stands on an upturned crescent moon in keeping with the Catholic view of Mary as Queen of Heaven. She is wearing a full-length dress with billowing sleeves.

“We can’t dress her in conventional clothes of a time that doesn’t mean anything,” Graham said. “Her single garment must echo everything else, but is of our time.”

Behind Mary’s head is a bronze rectangular backdrop through which a round skylight is cut. As the sun courses through the sky, its light will pass at various angles through the skylight to create a halo effect around her.

Her face is hard to characterize. Latina? African American?

Graham is not immediately forthcoming. As he puffs on a mild cigar in front of a large model of the great doors, he says that Mary, like the other renderings on the doors, can only suggest mystery.

“This is not public art. This is not a civic project. It’s not even about art. It’s about something else, about something . . . “ Graham pauses, grasping for the right phrase before confessing he is at a loss. “I’m not sure what it is. It has to have power where you can’t say, ‘That’s art.’ ”

The great cathedrals of Europe, he said, have lost much of their power of religious imagination. Standing for hundreds of years, they spoke to the souls of people long ago. Today, that is not always so.

“Great cathedral works are now just ‘art.’ They don’t have the power they once had,” he said.

The use of monumental bronze doors dates to the glory days of Athens and Rome. The portals of Greek temples were often cast-bronze grilles, and Romans characteristically used double doors, like the 24-foot doors of the Roman Pantheon. The monumental bronze doors in the U.S. Capitol, installed in 1863, were the first such doors in the United States.

Passing through such a threshold on a ceremonial occasion can be an overwhelming experience, even for non-Catholic Christians like Cecil M. Robeck Jr., a Pentecostal Christian and professor of church history and ecumenics at Fuller Theological Seminary in Pasadena.

Invited to represent Pentecostal churches at an ecumenical service in Rome Jan. 18 when John Paul opened the holy door of the Basilica of St. Paul Outside the Walls, Robeck said he was humbled by the beauty and meaning of the gesture.

“I knew very clearly what we were trying to say. We were saying, ‘Jesus Christ has declared himself to be the door through which we come,’ ” Robeck said.

“We still stand with the one who calls us through that door.”

Graham and church officials hope that sense of mystery will transport spiritual questers.

“The cathedral is not a container of ritual objects and art, but a metaphor of what the Christian religion is all about,” said Vosko. “It’s about journeying.”