Isabella Stewart Gardner and a Mother’s Love

My son Liam attends college up in Boston and last weekend was the first weekend we got up there to visit him since moving day back in September.

He’s been home a few times, but this is the first time we’ve been up there to really see him in his element.

He navigates the T like a pro; he walks the winding streets knowing where we are headed, guiding us on our way.

It was a wonder to see and wonderful to be there with him.

We went to dinner Friday night and then to the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum on Saturday.

The Gardner Museum is a curious place.

It was constructed in the late nineteenth, early twentieth century by the museum’s namesake, Isabella Stewart Gardner who was from one of the grand families of Manhattan and married into one of the great families in Boston.

At first her marriage in Boston was rather routine for someone of her ilk.

Her husband managed the family business focusing on shipping and trade, Isabella had a baby.

She was twenty-three and living the good life, a life of mansions and wealth, until her child died of pneumonia at just 21 months.

A year later, she miscarried and was told she would never bear children again.

There is a photo of her with her child.

At first glance you can tell it is from the 19th century, the colors are black and white, everything is in and out of focus all at once.

But this is not a typical picture, the ones we are so familiar with where people are seated and standing posing stiffly, standing still so that the longer exposure times are not left with a permanent blur.

This picture is different.

It is a picture of the baby sitting atop a porch railing, his eyes are bright and curious, he sits upright, he faces the camera with his chin angled slightly downward so that his gaze is almost shy, looking up at the slightest angle.

A tuft of the softest baby hair springs from his head.

Behind him and to his side, stands his mother.

And there is the difference in this picture, for Isabella is smiling.

She is smiling a deeply happy smile as she rests her head against her baby’s, her nose almost nuzzling the child’s neck.

The smile and the proximity to her baby makes it seems as if she is feeling him in all her senses, the feeling of his dressing gown upon her ungloved hands, the wisp of hair tickling her forehead, a scent of baby-scented aroma inhaled.

Her eyes opened, crinkled through a grin take in what seems to be the loveliest love, a love a mother has for her child.

And after this child was gone, after the promise of another child was left unkept, Isabella Stewart Gardner entered into a depression.

Her doctors advised her as a woman of means that she should travel, that she should remove herself from the place of memories, those places that reminded her of her loss, and see the world.

And she did.

She returned to Paris where she lived for a part of her life when growing up.

She saw much of Europe, she went Siberia and Asia.

She fell in love with Venice, her travels proved to be a balm for her soul.

And from all of her travels, she returned with works of art.

Tapestries from Italy, vases from Asia; Rembrandts and Degas, she returned home with so much art that she decided to build a museum.

So she did.

It is a pretty nondescript building on the outside while the inside is just jaw dropping.

You enter from a glass corridor and as you walk into the museum proper, you find yourself in a courtyard modeled after a Venetian palace.

The courtyard is green, lush, full of flowers and beauty, you are no longer in Boston, you are here.

You are in Isabella Stewart Gardner’s world.

And you feel her presence.

You feel her presence in the way she places art in the various galleries, the humor with which they are placed, she has a self portrait of a young Rembrandt looking out across the gallery towards paintings he would paint later in life as an old master.

There were many portraits of Mary with the Christ child.

Did she collect them searching for her own son?

There was a painting of Christ carrying the cross, a single tear falls from his face.

In front of this picture is a silver cup with live flowers, to be placed there always in memory of her husband.

I cannot explain to you just how moving this place, this palatial museum was, without stressing just how much I felt this woman’s presence ninety-eight years following her death.

I was unprepared.

I was struck with awe.

And that feeling is not unrecognizable, for I understood that feeling.

It is the feeling I sometimes have in prayer, sometimes have when celebrating the Eucharist, sometimes experience when two or three of us are gathered together in Christ’s name.

I felt the presence of Isabella Stewart Gardner in her museum in much the same way as I experience the presence of Christ.

I felt her loss.

Her sadness.

Her wandering soul.

This was not knowledge.

This was not reading a biography and citing facts, this was feeling.

It was internal pointing to my heart.

External as I felt the uneven floor tiles beneath the soles of my shoes once tread upon by Gardner herself, the echoing sound of footsteps in sensible shoes carries on through the years.

We walked that museum in whispers and awe, separated by the physical; united by the metaphysical.

My son was by my side.

We walk too with Christ.

We sometimes experience these Sundays as routine, as things to do before brunch, before yard work, before a good meal as reward for a full day of Sunday things and in preparation for a full day of Monday things.

We sometimes count the beats of a hymn, counting down the verses to its end, 4, 3, 2, 1.

We line up for communion without the expectation of anything except being fed.

These weekly gatherings can be routine.

And yet sometimes, we are transported.

We are transported into a place of safety, the uneven floorboards beneath this carpet tell us we are home.

We shift our kneelers just so, so that they are not in the way as we sit, we prepare ourselves for prayer.

We bow our heads acknowledging our God, come Lord Jesus, come.

We empty ourselves.

We take on holiness through prayer, we ask forgiveness for our sins.

We are absolved of the evil we commit; we are free through faith, God sets us free.

“Who are these, robed in white, and where have they come from?” I said to him, “Sir, you are the one that knows.”

And at some point during worship, when we are truly present before God, when we realize we are in room inhabited by and gathered together in the name of love for each other and the perfect love of Jesus Christ, we begin to feel God’s presence.

Then he said to me, “These are they who have come out of the great ordeal; they have washed their robes and made them white in the blood of the Lamb.

Perhaps it comes in the reading of the word, the hopeful voice of a people freed from the vacuous vagaries of a world on fire.

Perhaps instead of “just” a meal, we encounter the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist, through the bread, the body of Christ, through the wine, the blood of Christ.

They are elements transformed just as our very souls are transformed through the love God provides.

Perhaps it is outside these walls where we truly experience the presence of God, hiking in the hills and on the mountains that surround us or wondering at the wind-swept winter-scape along the coastline; beaches abandoned by all, habited only by the wind, the presence of God, and a horizon in the distance.

For this reason they are before the throne of God, and worship him day and night within his temple, and the one who is seated on the throne will shelter them. They will hunger no more, and thirst no more; the sun will not strike them, nor any scorching heat…

When we experience more than the routine of worship, when we overcome the humdrum machinations of a disbelieving world, we are gifted with the presence of God, a God who shelters us, a Christ who loves us, a Spirit who flies with us.

We are Christ’s sheep and when we experience that feeling…

No, not just feeling. ..

When we know and understand to the depths of our very selves, that gift of being able to release all that distracts us however temporarily, when we give in to the authority of God and give up trying to be the shepherd, we are able to experience the presence of Christ in our lives.

…(F)or the Lamb at the center of the throne will be their shepherd, and he will guide them to springs of the water of life, and God will wipe away every tear from their eyes.”

From the depths of her deepest depression, a mother kissed her child one last time, travelled the world, and ultimately built a monument to love.

From under the weight of her deepest burden, a mother witnessed her son on a cross in a place called Golgotha.

They witnessed and knew the greatest of pains and still knew the glory of resurrection, the presence of God in their lives.

That presence is there for us, too.

For all of us.

We can find that glass corridor which transports us into a new space.

A different place where we can best experience the presence of God.

A space that transports us into calm.

Where we will drink from the waters of life.

Where our tears will be wiped dry by a God who loves us.

This is our journey.

This is our wherefore and why.

Let us remove ourselves if only for a short while from our distractions and tasks.

Rest.

Close our eyes.

Breathe.

And accept the real and true presence of God.

Amen.