Latin Mass – Benedict XVI Institute

Metanoia: One Composer’s Catholic Journey

Mark Nowakowski on May 10, 2023

On May 19^th I’ll be releasing my second album, Metanoia, published by the Polish label “DUX” and distributed internationally via Naxos. This is the story of a composer’s journey in creating new sacred music that brings people closer to God.

What is sacred music? This is the first question I wrestle with, for while the line between liturgical and non-liturgical music is at least somewhat clear, the question of what makes music “sacred” drifts into more fraught philosophical territory. Music itself points towards transcendent striving and the music most fully realized is one which engages our contemplative nature. Sacred music is that which makes us stop and contemplate what lies beyond the noise and distraction of the world: It points us toward God.

Even during a time of growing hostility to faith in general and Catholicism in particular within the concert hall, it is the works of Catholic and Orthodox composers which have continued to play a major part in our classical music.

The 20^th century’s greatest composition pedagogue, Nadia Boulanger (1887-1979), was a deeply faithful Catholic and daily communicant, and most of her famous students (even those not implicitly Christian) retain a distinctly spiritual approach to their work.

One of her many contemporaries was Olivier Messiaen (1907-1992), a French composer whose compositions are marked by his Catholic faith and fascination with theology. Some secularists love his fascination with birdsong (which I suspect for Messiaen pointed to the universal harmonies of the Creator anyway). I rather prefer his Poèmes pour Mi, which strikes me as a historical musical prelude (and musical counterpart) to the deep theological meditations of John Paul II’s Theology of the Body.

Francis Poulenc’s (1899-1963) many sacred works, including his Gloria and Stabat Mater, reflect his deep spirituality and commitment to the Catholic Church. In midlife, when a dear friend died in a traffic accident, Poulenc made a pilgrimage to the Sanctuary of the Black Virgin in Rocamadour, triggering a profound spiritual revelation. His resulting Litanies for the Black Virgin for women’s chorus and organ was premiered by Nadia Boulanger during a London BBC concert.

Henyrk Górecki (1933-2010) was another Catholic whose works include luminous choral works and the best-selling Third Symphony, yes, but also a grouping of more challenging chamber works which invite deeper contemplation. (I’ve written about them here.)

Giya Kancheli (1935-2019) was a devout Orthodox Christian born in Soviet Georgia whose striking works, including his Liturgy for Viola and Symphony No. 6, are characterized by their meditative quality and evocative use of soundscapes. John Tavener (1944-2013) was an English convert to Orthodox Christianity. His masterworks include the record-setting The Protecting Veil and haunting Funeral Ikos.

Today the heirs of this line of composers include Arvo Pärt (Orthodox, but setting almost exclusively Catholic texts), and Sir James MacMillan. MacMillan’s compositions reflect his Catholic faith and Scottish identity, with works such as his St. John Passion and Symphony No. 5 receiving critical acclaim, though it is his Confession of Isobel Gowdie and his Sing a New Song which move me most profoundly. Pärt’s minimalist style is infused with religious motifs, evident in works such as his Magnificat and Tabula Rasa.

In Poland, Pawel Lukaszewski holds a dominant role among composers, and I think succeeded in his astounding Via Crucis in writing the first sacred masterwork of the 20^th century. Lukaszewski in turn has inspired composers like Sebastian Szymanski, who writes truly gorgeous music. Finally in North America we have our own Frank LaRocca, who is leading a new generation of Catholic composers in various stages of their career including Jeffrey Quick, Daniel Knaggs, Bobby Chastain, Xanthe Kraft, and others.

The next generation of Catholic composers should take heart: despite the hostility we encounter, both the origins of our craft and its modern manifestation are distinctly Catholic by nature, and I would go as far as to claim that a Catholic art needs a Catholic perspective to be most fully realized.

As to my own part, In my 2017 release for Naxos, Blood Forgotten, the string quartets featured within were deeply personal statements (as many string quartets are) and represented some of my most heady and complex music (as many string quartets do). There are rich statements of culture and philosophy here, yes, but also distinct moments that reach for the sacred in music. While the album was successful, a number of other diverse projects were already brewing, from chamber to choral to even electronic music. Over a period of eight years I collected the best recordings from these various collaborations, intent on assembling them into a distinctly Catholic vision of non-liturgical sacred music. I hope to craft and share music which challenges the listener and takes them on a journey, or perhaps provides contemplative fodder for their own spiritual journey. From this my second album, Metanoia, has been born.

The title track, “Metanoia,” was a collaboration with the Italian-based Monteverdi Cello Octet, with whom I developed an immediate connection despite the geographical distance between us. The piece explores the Gospel meaning of the Greek word “Metanoia,” which is often translated as “repent,” but in reality carries the deeper command to “change one’s manner of thinking.” There is difficulty of changing ingrained thoughts and habits, yes, but even more profoundly there is great struggle to change spiritual habits and enliven dead hearts; music for its part is the ideal vehicle with which to explore and express these often indescribable spiritual struggles.

Metanoia begins with strained and uncertain textures and builds into a rich melodic landscape before arriving at a place of fierce conflict. Eventually, the conflicting lines settle into an aggressive percussive repetition, while a new pleading melody emerges, threatening to explode into ecstasy before descending into a more uncertain ending: the journey goes on, as we have “put into the deep,” but Christ is with us, and our fundamental transformation continues.

It’s the most challenging work on the album and intentionally put first on the disc: This is contemplation, not easy listening.

We travel from Italy to Poland next with “Tu autem, Domine?” which is a gentler work, a meditation for mixed chorus that repeats and refashions its short text into a series of varied spiritual questions, which seem as much a plea as an impassioned demand. The questioning ultimately settles into a dramatic “Amen,” vacillating between uncomprehending resignation and peaceful acceptance. I explored the particular way that Poles approach God in our personal and historical difficulties in this work, which was beautifully brought out by Szymon Wyrzykowski and his wonderful “Chaps” choir in a recording session in Szczecin, Poland.

The album proceeds to “Before I formed you…,” a work for voices and baroque stringed instruments, arising from my frequent collaborations with Three Notch’d Road and violinist Fiona Hughes and bass-baritone Peter Walker. As a father of four, the meaning of this work is far from ambiguous for me, and our premieres with Three Notch’d Road featured Catholics pensively approaching me to see “if I really meant what I think you meant.” Indeed, I did. After all, I’ve had the privilege of witnessing beautiful little humans – full of personality and complexity – manifest into our universe, challenging and enlivening us with their precious presence.

To think of what this means, and how God cooperates with mere humans in the begetting of eternal beings, is a shattering reality that I wished to contemplate in this new work. The piece takes its text from Psalm 139:13-15, announcing “For thou didst form my inward parts,” and slowly growing in intensity as they declaim: “thou didst knit me together in my mother’s womb. My frame was not hidden from thee…”. The music takes a fragile and introspective turn with the singers stating: “when I was being made in secret, intricately wrought in the depths of the earth.” If the preceding words can be understood as an individual’s praise for their own creation, the reply from Jeremiah 1:5 is perhaps God’s answer. The strings transition into a modern and sparse sustaining texture as the singers state in unison “Before I formed you in the womb, I knew you,” at which point the sustain buzzes and grows with the words “and before you were born I consecrated you.” The piece is bookended by a variation of the opening string duo, a musical ellipsis implying the continuation of life’s drama beyond the musical expression itself.

All sacred music, properly understood, is prolife, but this hymn happens to use the same Biblical quote Archbishop Cordileone used to title his letter on the Eucharist, abortion and Communion.

Listen here:

The piano trio Reaching moves from mysterious textures to rampaging exchanges, pushing the University of Memphis Trio to their limits. Metaphorically, the piece is about “crabs in a bucket,” or a story that fishermen tell. When one of the crabs closer to the top sees the light and tries to escape, the other crabs reach up and pull their intrepid colleague back down. The moral of the story, of course, is that “people are like crabs in a bucket.” Anyone who strives to break the mundane will struggle through such things in their own life, and often we are dragged back down despite our best efforts. In such moments a repose is necessary, a re-gathering of strength, a prayer, and a renewed ascent begins.

Quo Vadis, Domine? is a 20-minute sacred drama set on the famous story from the early days of the Church, as famously dramatized towards the end of Henryk Sienkiewicz’s novel Quo Vadis. As a libretto, I set the very words of the scene from Sienkiewicz’s novel into a dialogue form, after which they were translated into Latin by a priest-scholar from the Confraternity of St. Peter (FSSP). Individual singers represent the characters in the story: Peter sung by countertenor, his boy traveling companion by soprano, and the words of Christ by Peter Walker’s resonant bass-baritone. When singing as a trio, the ensemble represents the narrator. This ancient economy of means allows for expansive storytelling, and if a poem can bring deeper spiritual insight and focused intensity into a minute event or observation, then music has the added advantage of also stretching out the emotional and contemplative material of such an encounter into temporal time.

The album concludes with Bogurodzica: Medytacja (“Mother of God: Meditation”) a work for cello duo and electronics which takes as its source material the famous Polish hymn of the same name. The initial low antiphonal exchanges between the cellists allow the electronically generated accompaniment to subtly enter, ushering in a rich tapestry of sounds almost entirely drawn from digitally manipulated recordings of the cello. It is, in many ways, a companion work to Blood, Forgotten, for solo violin, video and electronics, the title track of my debut 2017 Naxos release. I know that some listeners will see the words “cello and electronics” and flee, but it was my intent to go against the grain of so much pointillistic and unapproachable electronic music, and instead write something moving and beautiful where the cello – not the computer – takes the lead. There is a challenging contemplative arc to the piece, but my hope is at the end of this album, Bogurodzica will leave the listener in a timeless and expansive place.

As a Catholic composer, I hope that this work will inspire others to seek transformation and to embrace the challenges and opportunities of the spiritual life.

Composer Mark Nowakowski’s latest work Metanoia is available here: https://naxos.lnk.to/DUX1916

The Last Vermeer: Is There in Truth no Beauty?

Charlotte Allen on April 27, 2021

The Oscars just tanked. Beautiful small but barely-watched movies, combined with boring woke politics, produced an epic collapse in ratings.

But the significance of a work of art does not ultimately lie in its ability to reach a mass market. Now, seems as good a time as any to visit another small, beautiful film released last year about two Dutch Catholic painters. The one, Johannes Vermeer (1632-1675), is one of the greatest artists of all time. The other Henricus Antonius “Han” Van Meegeren (1889-1947) became perhaps the greatest art forger of all time.

What does it tell us about the integrity of art when the value of a painting depends on the name attached to it? This is not a new question. Another Catholic painter, Andy Warhol, played and replayed on this theme in his work. But The Last Vermeer takes exploring this question to a different level by setting up a dramatic confrontation between a Nazi hunter who cares more about truth than revenge, and an artist who ultimately chose revenge over truth.

Revenge against whom? Against the tyranny of the modern critic over the creative artist, of course. The sneers of the critics in response to Van Meegeren’s first exhibit of paintings in Amsterdam left him humiliated and his career in tatters, but with his taste for alcohol, women, and lavish living intact. His response was to unleash on the art market a series of exquisitely painted fake Vermeers along with a new finishing process that would foil the experts’ chemical tests used to authenticate the age of the painting.

Van Meegeren’s new Vermeers burst onto the international art scene; they were praised and pronounced authentic by the most distinguished critics and hung in major museums (including the National Gallery in the United States).

During the Nazi occupation, Van Meegeren even sold the widely lauded Christ with the Adulteress to future Nazi war criminal Hermann Goering.

Han Van Meegeren, Christ with the Woman Taken in Adultery

After the liberation of the Netherlands, Van Meegeren was charged with collaborating with the enemy, a capital crime under Dutch laws. Van Meegeren’s spectacular defense was to declare himself an art forger who had patriotically tricked the Nazis into trading priceless looted Dutch masterpieces for fake Vermeers. To prove it, he painted a brand-new Vermeer, Jesus Among the Doctors, right in the courtroom as the two-year legal proceeding progressed (in the movie, which telescopes the action, he completes the painting while in prison awaiting trial).

It was sweet revenge for Van Meegren: the critics were publicly humiliated, and he became an instant national hero for hoodwinking the Nazis into trading genuine Dutch masterpieces for fakes.

To explore its themes of integrity, the film The Last Vermeer chooses for its protagonist not Van Meegeren himself but a Captain Joseph Piller (Claes Bang), a Jewish Resistance fighter in the Netherlands who is charged with investigating Van Meegeren for the Allied Forces. While investigating the sale of Christ with the Adulteress to Goering, Piller discovers a lascivious photo of his wife, Johana (Susannah Doyle), attending one of Van Meegeren’s debauched parties with a Nazi official. The discovery severs his marriage and separates Piller from his beloved little son. Piller has every motive for pursuing Van Meegeren: doing so would satisfy a deep desire for revenge for the desecration of his wife, his people, his country. And yet, he chooses to defend Van Meegeren in the Dutch courts. “It’s not the man, really” he explains, “it’s that he’s innocent.”

Piller’s emotional plight is tangible but nonetheless upstaged by the virtuoso performance of Guy Pearce as the suave, cultivated, and endlessly fascinating artistic genius Van Meegeren, with his elegant Amsterdam home and his extensive collection of cut-glass liquor decanters, to the point the viewer might briefly wonder why Piller’s story is in the film at all. But both performances are upstaged, at least in the courtroom scenes, by the looming presence of Van Meegeren’s fake Vermeers themselves.

The Van Meegeren trial attracted such international attention that newsreel footage of it survives to this day, and the settings of the courtroom in The Last Vermeer faithfully replicate history. Over the judges’ heads hang the enormous religious paintings hauled in for the trial: Christ With the Adulteress, a Last Supper, and The Supper at Emmaus, a 1937 painting that had persuaded Abraham Bredius, the leading Dutch expert on Vermeer, to pronounce the work “the masterpiece” of Vermeer’s career and thus help launch Van Meegeren’s lucrative business churning out similar paintings for museums and private collectors.

Han Van Meegeren, Supper at Emmaus

To a twenty-first-century eye, these paintings look nothing like the smaller genre paintings of seventeenth-century Dutch domestic life—The Milkmaid (1658) or Woman Reading a Letter (1664)—that we typically associate with Vermeer, but they are haunting.

Johannes Vermeer, Woman Reading a Letter

Johannes Vermeer, The Milkmaid

Vermeer converted to Catholicism only on his marriage to Catharina Bolnes in 1653. The sincerity of Vermeer’s Catholic faith has been the subject of long-running debate. Of the 34 paintings now universally attributed to Vermeer only two, Christ in the House of Martha and Mary (1654-1656) and Allegory of the Catholic Faith (1670-74), have religious themes, and only the latter is overtly Catholic in subject matter, depicting an altar crucifix that would have been unthinkable in a Calvinist church of Vermeer’s youth.

Johannes Vermeer, Christ in the House of Martha and Mary

Johannes Vermeer, Allegory of the Catholic Faith

But that was the nature of Vermeer’s economic and social milieu. The long, war-torn struggle of the Low Countries starting in the sixteenth century to free themselves from rule by Habsburg Spain had left the Dutch Republic an overwhelmingly Protestant country by the time Vermeer was born. Catholics, associated with Habsburg rule, were tolerated, even accepted in the social fabric, but forbidden to hold public office or worship in public. They met for Mass in warehouses and private homes, likely including that of Maria Thins, Vermeer’s wealthy mother-in-law, where the Vermeers, who never had much money, lived. Reformed doctrine forbade religious images inside churches, so there were no commissions for the huge religious paintings that were features of Counter-Reformation church decoration in the Catholic countries of the seventeenth century. Art production during the Dutch Golden Age was strictly for the private market, and market forces and fashions determined its content. While some prosperous citizens of Delft and elsewhere hung paintings with Biblical themes in their homes (which the Reformed Church allowed), most preferred smaller works with secular themes: portraits, landscapes, still-lifes, and the genre paintings at which Vermeer became a virtuoso.

But some art historians have discerned subtle Catholic imagery even in some of Vermeer’s secular paintings. The University of Montana’s Valerie Hedquist argues, for example, that the veiled, clearly pregnant young woman in his Woman Holding a Balance (1662-1665) is an image of the Virgin Mary, and that Vermeer included in the painting such traditional Marian symbols as the pearl and the mirror. In any event, Vermeer named one of his sons Ignatius after St. Ignatius Loyola, the Jesuits’ founder and another son became a priest.

Johannes Vermeer, Woman Holding a Balance

Van Meegeren, by contrast, was born into a middle-class Catholic family in Deventer, in the eastern Netherlands. He seemed to have abandoned the practice of his faith early on, probably in rebellion against his father, a schoolteacher, who ridiculed and tried to stifle his son’s artistic talent. In one respect, however, he retained a Catholic sensibility: He revered and practiced traditional representational art, refusing to participate in the Expressionist and Cubist movements that critics of the early twentieth century baptized as the only serious art. Van Meegeren deemed them decadent. He won prizes and praise for meticulous draftsmanship and made a fair living traveling around Europe painting portraits. Then, in 1923, critics derided an exhibition of his paintings as derivative and lacking in psychological depth. He maintained that the trauma of that damning criticism was what drove him to forgery: He would play the critics for fools and prove his artistic genius by turning out counterfeit masterpieces that they would dub masterpieces.

Soon enough, working through layers of art dealers so as to protect his anonymity, Van Meegeren was flooding the art world with “newly discovered” paintings by the masters of the Dutch Golden Age: Franz Hals, Gerard ter Borch, Pieter de Hooch, Dirck Van Barburen, and, of course, Vermeer—all finely executed and plausibly resembling known works by those painters. He used seventeenth-century canvases from which he scraped the existing paint and mixed pigments from materials that the seventeenth-century masters had used themselves.

Wealthy collectors snapped up the paintings, and some ended up in museums. (Indeed, to this day it is unclear whether certain museum Vermeers are actually Van Meegerens—and a supposed Van Barburen owned by the Courtauld Institute in London was found to be a likely Van Meegeren as recently as 2011.) These were all smaller works, and by the early 1930s Van Meegeren was plotting to execute a Vermeer on a grander scale—The Supper at Emmaus–that would finance his expensively debauched lifestyle.

Vermeer was an ideal choice. His work fell into obscurity after his death and had few collectors. Not until the 1860s did art historians focus on his luminous genius and begin to rank him as one of the greatest of the Dutch Masters. Lost Vermeers and imagined Vermeers regularly surfaced after that, and it was not hard to believe that still more of them hung undiscovered in musty European corners. Van Meegeren spent several years perfecting a Vermeer-like brushstroke and teaching himself how to recreate the colors of Vermeer’s limited palette. He spent a small fortune on tubes of expensive genuine ultramarine, made from pulverized lapis lazuli, a semi-precious stone that makes a brilliant blue paint. Vermeer lavished ultramarine on his paintings (his famous Girl With a Pearl Earring, painted around 1665, uses ultramarine for its subject’s bright blue cap.) To achieve craquelure, the hardened, time-cracked surface of centuries-old oil paintings, Van Meegeren mixed liquid bakelite, the stuff of old telephones, into the paint.

Johannes Vermeer, Girl with a Pearl Earring

The real measure of Van Meegeren’s brilliance as a forger, however, was his fabrication of an entirely new artistic style for Vermeer. His model was not Vermeer himself, but Caravaggio. The style of that Italian Baroque painter (1571-1610) had influenced a generation of Northern European Catholic artists, especially in Utrecht, a Dutch city that remained predominantly Catholic throughout the Reformation and whose churches continued to commission art. They created their own striking versions of Caravaggio’s large-scale religious paintings: naturalism, chiaroscuro effects, and simple, dramatic compositions in which the painted figures looked as though they had been photographed at a moment of high emotion. Art historians of the 1930s wondered whether Vermeer, too, had imitated Caravaggio, especially during his early career when he made at least one known painting with New Testament subject matter (Christ in the House of Mary and Martha looks somewhat Caravaggio-esque and very unlike Vermeer’s later work). The Supper at Emmaus, modeled on a 1610 painting by Caravaggio dealing with this post-Resurrection appearance of Jesus, responded directly to the historians’ speculation. It was the missing link.

Caravaggio, Supper at Emmaus

Once Bredius enthusiastically endorsed it as a genuine Vermeer, a wealthy shipowner bought the painting for $5.5 million in today’s dollars and donated it to the Boijmans Van Beuningen Museum in Rotterdam. That opened the reputational and financial floodgates for Van Meegeren to generate and launder through his dealer network even more counterfeit Vermeers in the same style with similar New Testament themes, including the Christ With the Adulteress that he sold to Goering. Overall he earned about $50 million in today’s dollars from his ventures into art forgery.

After Van Meegeren’s conviction and death, the value of his fraudulent Vermeers collapsed. With the passage of time, they look more obviously like concoctions of the 1930s and 1940s—perhaps Van Meegeren’s version of the Expressionism he found so aesthetically deficient. It has been easy for many of today’s critics to deride Van Meegeren as a mediocre painter and the experts such as Bredius who swallowed his bait as vain, self-aggrandizing fools.

But as Friedkin’s movie The Last Vermeer suggests, the Van Meegeren affair raises genuine and complex questions about the meaning and value of art.

While watching the courtroom scenes in the film, I found myself unable to take my eyes off The Supper at Emmaus and Christ With the Adulteress. They were compelling in their stark geometric composition and their focus on the liminal and unknowable presence of Jesus as a figure who sets astonishing revelations in motion. None of those paintings was a knockoff; they were genuine originals, just not by Vermeer. What if tastes in art change again over, say, the next 70 years, and we regard the avant-garde twentieth-century art that was the reigning style when Van Meegeren painted as childish rather than cutting-edge? In a 2010 documentary Fiso Lammertse, a curator at the Van Beuningen Museum, pointed out that people loved The Supper at Emmaus during the 1930s. “They thought it was beautiful. And it is beautiful. That wasn’t wrong.”

The climactic scene of the film is about the nature of integrity to one’s calling. Piller and Van Meegeren meet up after Van Meegeren is acquitted of treason and basking in his glory as a national hero. Piller confronts Van Meegeren with another truth: great artists in every age become great because they persist through the rancor of critics, through the ignorance of audiences, through public failure, in remaining true to their own artistic vision. What instead did Van Meegeren do with all his talent? The art forger has no answer.

In The Last Vermeer Captain Piller discovers—and this is true to history—that Van Meegeren had, during wartime, sent an autographed copy of a book of his drawings to Hitler with a fawning dedication. In the end of the movie, Piller throws the book into the trash and goes to reconcile with his wife. She is flawed like Van Meegeren, flawed like himself. She is the woman taken in adultery, to whom Jesus said in John’s Gospel, “Neither will I condemn thee. Go, and now sin no more.”

It could be said that at least in this fictional story Van Meegeren did not paint his fake Vermeers in vain.

Charlotte Allen is a culture and arts reporter for Catholic Arts Today

Mr. Tanner (A Short Story by T.M. Doran)

T.M. Doran on April 20, 2021

“MR. TANNER!” an eager voice called out from behind a dense Buttonbush in its red and green glory.

Mr. Tanner knew Betty’s voice as well as he did his own, but he was in hot pursuit of a pea-sized predator on a flowering Blackhaw Vibernum so he didn’t respond.

Mr. Tanner’s chief interests were making things grow, nurturing butterflies, eliminating killer insects and other pests, and the tenor saxophone. He had been a Detroit Zoo gardener for thirty-three years, now responsible for tending the Wildlife Interpretive Gallery’s indoor butterfly gardens and the zoo’s outdoor butterfly garden. He was a sturdy sixty-nine year old, five-foot-eight inch tall man, hitting the scale at exactly one-hundred-seventy pounds. When he’d started working at the zoo, Mr. Tanner had been the only Black man in a crew of twenty gardeners and had stuck out like a praying mantis on a red Hibiscus flower. Now, he drew attention only for the neatly buttoned white shirt and thin tie he always wore beneath his zoo jacket, and the dingy yellow backpack he had carried to work for as long as anyone could remember.

Mr. Tanner debated with himself: Pluck the larvae from its leafy roost by hand? Or use his puffer. The latter would destroy the little thing. Plucking the bug, albeit a more delicate operation, would allow the gardener to retain the living pest for Carla’s examination. Viburnum Leaf Beetle larvae were smaller than caterpillars but if allowed to become full egg-laying beetles could kill a mature shrub in one season.

Mr. Tanner had pruning to do, too, but pests once detected became the first order of business. Who knew how many progeny this creature would beget if he didn’t begot it first—an original saying of his.

Betty burst out from behind the blooming Buttonbush like a trotting ostrich, and Mr. Tanner had to put a finger to his lips to prevent her from interrupting the search-and-destroy operation. A fellow veteran of such missions, the dark-haired, olive-skinned woman in her mid-forties halted in place and, for good measure, held her breath.

Mr. Tanner placed the bug in the plastic container he kept handy for such invaders. “Mission accomplished,” he said to Betty. “How is our prize-winning photographer today?”

She blushed, though Mr. Tanner could tell that Betty appreciated his appreciation. Betty lived alone and could come off as haughty and prickly to those who only knew her superficially. To Mr. Tanner, who knew this woman as well as anyone at the zoo did, she was a person of intriguing contradictions, an adventurer who dared to flout a State Department ban to encounter wild gorillas in the Congo’s Virunga National Park but wouldn’t drive her car half a mile in the snow.

“Here…look,” she said, showing him her camera viewer.

“Oh!” exclaimed Mr. Tanner, observing a young Lion-tailed macaque plucking a snack from a spectacular Blue Celeste Ficus. “Zoo magazine cover material,” he added, and the two shared a smile.

Betty loved the zoo but she hadn’t been an employee there in the sixteen years he’d known her. Rather, she spent hours photographing the animals while serving as a docent in the primate and butterfly exhibits. To Betty, the zoo was a sanctuary rather than a job.

Betty’s smile became a dark frown: “You won’t believe what those people did.”

Per usual, when Betty was preparing to rail against someone, her spine stiffened and she gained an inch on her already towering frame. “The power company cut down that beautiful maple. Now, I have no shade on that side of my house, and I have to look at those ugly poles and electrical equipment!”

For a moment, Betty waved a prefectorial digit at him. Then, mortified and red-faced, she clenched her fists. Mr. Tanner had seen this side of Betty often enough, being the only person upon whom she felt comfortable enough to unload. Mr. Tanner didn’t like the indiscriminate cutting down of mature trees either, but he didn’t know the facts.

“Can you just plant something to replace it?” he asked Betty.

“Nothing as mature and lovely as that maple. What a disaster!”

“Or you could plant a sun garden,” he suggested. “You love the smell of our Bush Honeysuckle.”

“But a bush won’t shade my windows,” Betty objected. “Besides, it won’t overwinter.”

With his mini-snips, Mr. Tanner dead-headed a Blanket Flower, absentmindedly palming the shriveled floral corpse. “I know a woman who keeps a Cape Jasmine in a large pot and winters it in her dark garage. Not cold enough to kill the plant, and no frost. She lets it go dormant for four months. Or what about Hollyhock or Queen of the Prairie? They grow tall.” But mollifying Betty was impossible now, so Mr. Tanner resigned himself to hearing her out, and that took another twenty minutes. He had learned that sympathetic listening was a balm that took some of the sting out of Betty’s chronic frustration.

After lunch, Carla showed up, as she always did. As the zoo’s herpetology curator and Lepidoptera keeper, Carla spent mornings at the larger reptile and amphibian exhibits, and when she’d finished with the snakes and frogs, joined Mr. Tanner in the indoor butterfly garden.

“All well?” she asked him, her standard greeting.

“Very well,” he responded.

“The shipment should arrive tomorrow, and the Malachites. Our first.”

“Beautiful!” he rejoiced with her, and then showed Carla the object of his successful morning hunt. “You might want to add some Spined Soldier Bugs to the next order if you want our butterflies to have healthy Viburnum.”

Mr. Tanner had met Carla twenty-seven years before when the zoo hired her as their reptile keeper. Apart from a gimpy knee, Carla had changed little since that time. Single and stout, with a forceful personality that sometimes put off colleagues, Carla’s demeanor softened, her eyes sparkled, and her voice fairly sang when she showed off her winged and scaly creatures to young people. And Mr. Tanner had witnessed Carla’s generosity when a colleague or one of her staff was in need.

“I’ll keep an eye out for the shipment,” Mr. Tanner said. “How’s your knee?”

“I could help matters by losing some weight. In the meantime, I’ll keep this knee brace handy. Have you solved our water problem?”

“Not yet,” the gardener admitted. “I plan to text Ron.” Fixing things was Ron’s special talent.

She nodded. “Light crowd today.”

“Rain in the forecast.”

Their many years together meant the two were thinking the same thought. Carla had seen Mr. Tanner’s saxophone in the office. That meant today was Friday, and if the weather held out, Mr. Tanner would perform his Jazzy Jingles in the outdoor butterfly garden at three p.m., as he’d been doing for close to ten years; music everyone recognized, even if performed by a solo saxophonist: “These Are A Few of My Favorite Things,” “Put On a Happy Face,” “Honey Please Don’t Be That Way,” Tunes that brought smiles to people’s faces. Some annual passholders visited the zoo on Fridays just to hear Mr. Tanner’s evocative music.

They’re not Coltrane jazzy but they jingle was another of Mr. Tanner’s sayings.

Carla started to walk away but paused and looked back. She exhaled audibly, and said, “My sister lost her job. Third time this year.”

“Laid off?” Mr. Tanner asked.

“No, fired. Not exactly how she explained it, but that’s what it amounts to.”

Mr. Tanner had only met Carla’s sister on two occasions and had decided that two sisters couldn’t be more different in temperament and priorities than those two women.

“I’m washing my hands of the whole business,” Carla remarked. “Why bother when she can’t keep a job for more than six months? And that Barry of hers is worthless…irresponsible.”

“Don’t give up on her,” Mr. Tanner urged his boss.

If Carla was surprised to hear her gardener say this, she didn’t let on. Instead, she said, “What do you suggest I do?”

“Stay connected. What she does with your help…” He turned his palms upward.

“It’s frustrating!”

“Yes, but less frustrating if you admit you can’t control what she does.”

“You think I like to be in control?”

They both smiled.

“I’ll hand-water until the irrigation is fixed. Early, so the visitors aren’t disturbed,” he promised her.

Carla returned to the Reptile House while the gardener made for the office.

Mr. Tanner’s work space was a modest affair. In the corner of the office, he had a locker where he kept his once-neon yellow backpack—now faded to the color of straw—his zoo boots, gloves, and stormy-weather gear. Propped against the wall was a camp chair he occasionally used for Jazzy Jingles. When he needed a computer, he used the one on the office desk.

Mr. Tanner updated the butterfly garden’s Predators and Pests spreadsheet on the computer, then went back to work. He was on his knees and surprised to realize that two hours had passed when Ron tapped him on the shoulder.

“The tigers need me,” Ron announced, “but tell me what’s wrong. I’ll come back tomorrow.”

“The watering system’s acting up,” Mr. Tanner answered. How like Ron this was—a man who had recently passed the half-century mark, handsome and a magician with mechanical equipment—to stop in, rather than texting the gardener that he was too busy. Did anything short of a nuclear reactor exist that Ron couldn’t fix? He’d been at the zoo for twenty-one years and had married for the first time two years earlier—a younger woman with two children.

“I bumped into Betty at the primate exhibit. What rattled her?”

When Mr. Tanner didn’t answer, Ron shook his head. “You don’t have to say it—anxiety. Instead of having one wholesome disease, psoriasis or allergies, she has a new one every month. Like my Aunt Tilly.” The mechanic glanced around the butterfly garden, and said, “We’ll take care of you.”

“You always do, my friend.” The gardener removed his work glove and the two men shook hands.

Mr. Tanner looked at the clock. He’d be late for Jazzy Jingles if he didn’t get a move on.

MR. TANNER WAS SURPRISED TO HEAR someone moving about the exhibit as the zoo was not yet open for visitors, and Carla always attended to her frogs and snakes before she made an appearance here.

Carla’s assistant? Ron? But when the girl emerged from the lush greenery, he recognized her: the bear keeper Suzanne Wayne’s ward, as Carla had referred to her—Benji by name.

They had spoken once before without introducing themselves. Then, the exhibit had been busy with visitors, but unlike most this girl had not looked past the old gardener but had greeted him and asked several insightful questions—“What’s the rarest butterfly in the world?” “What’s the difference between a chrysalis and a cocoon?”

Today’s version of the girl looked troubled and wary, and Mr. Tanner wasn’t convinced she’d say anything unless he spoke first. Carla hadn’t told him much about Benji but enough to suggest the girl had come from a chaotic domestic situation and that Suzanne’s taking her in had been an act of mercy. She was wearing new clothes and shoes—not runaway clothes, and surely provided by Suzanne Wayne. He guessed she was in her early teens, though her eyes were older.

“Hello, Benji,” said Mr. Tanner.

The girl made a little wave, but her features remained cloudy.

He would keep talking. “Want to see who can find the stick first?”

He had surprised her, as he’d hoped. “We have several stick insects in the exhibit. People rarely notice them. Something Curator Carla dreamed up to keep things interesting.”

Benji shrugged.

“Is something wrong?” he inquired delicately.

Maybe she needed to release some of the emotion that fairly oozed out of her because the girl said, “Everything!”

“I’m sorry about that,” Mr. Tanner responded in surprise.

For a moment, he thought she was going to rush off, but a Monarch settling on her shoulder produced a meager smile.

“I want to stay with Suzanne,” she muttered.

“Does she know this?” asked Mr. Tanner, laying down his hand spade. Today, sunlight was rushing into this century old glass-domed building, the beams of light making the colors of the flowers and butterflies more vibrant.

Benji nodded. “But she said she doesn’t know if they’ll let her.”

“Does your mother or father object?” He didn’t think this question would be well-received but had decided to plow ahead anyway.

“I don’t have a father, and Destiny is worse than not having a mother.”

That docile butterfly finally ascended from Benji’s shoulder. Before the girl could step away, the gardener asked, “Why do you say so?”

“The usual…worthless men, drugs, yelling…” Her voice trailed off.

“I know what you mean,” he responded, and before she could fire back, he added, “Yes, I do. I’ve been in such places. But you’re here now, with Suzanne.”

“I love the zoo. I want to be a keeper like Suzanne and Stella.”

Mr. Tanner was acquainted with Stella, the other ursine keeper. “If I know Suzanne, she’ll do her best for you—”

“But will it be enough?” asked Benji, passion in her voice. “I won’t go back. If they make me, I’ll run away again!”

She expected him to caution her, but he didn’t. Mr. Tanner said, “You’re welcome here anytime. The more you learn, the better prepared you’ll be for a keeper’s or curator’s job…or to be a vet like Dr. Bogardus.”

“That’s what Suzanne told me,” the girl said, more engaged now.

“Who could ask for better training?”

“But why?” she pleaded.

Mr. Tanner knew exactly what she was asking—he had that sixth sense. Furthermore, he knew the question wasn’t directed at him. Rather, that question preyed on the girl. He said, “Would you help me clean up before the visitors arrive?”

When Benji hesitated, the old man pointed to the old-fashioned clock on the wall, and said, “Ten years ago, I used to finish all my getting-ready-for-visitors work in plenty of time. Now, those clock hands seem to move faster.”

Without saying anything, Benji picked up a broom and began to sweep the cuttings on the floor.

“Where does your mother live?” Mr. Tanner asked her.

When she told him, he cringed because that area of the city was notorious. “How long have you been staying with Suzanne?”

“Two weeks,” she replied, emptying her sweepings into the plastic bin.

“Does Suzanne live near the zoo?”

“Not far. I sleep all night now. I never did before.”

With Benji’s assistance, the cleaning didn’t take him long, and when they put the tools away and removed the plant debris to the compost bin, Mr. Tanner said, “May I show you something before you go?”

The girl followed the gardener to a corner of the exhibit where the zoo displayed many of its chrysalises. Every day, Carla offered a half-hour learning session here, often accompanied by an emergence, where a bin of butterflies was released to the exhibit, an event that never got old to Mr. Tanner.

“I’ve seen these before,” Benji observed.

Undeterred, Mr. Tanner kept his eyes fixed on the display, as if he expected a butterfly to pop out any minute. Finally, he said, “I wonder what it feels like to be pupae inside chrysalises. I try to imagine how I’d feel…dark, confined, all alone and scared.”

“I don’t think caterpillars feel any emotions,” she observed.

“Probably not, but I imagine how I’d feel.”

Now, they were both gazing at the chrysalises, eyes close to the Plexiglass.

“A caterpillar could crawl from one end of the zoo to the other but until it goes inside a chrysalis—that dark lonely place—it can never become a butterfly.”

Benji’s phone rang. She looked at Mr. Tanner. “It’s Suzanne. I’m late.”

“Thanks for helping me,” he said to her back as the girl ran off.

Mr. Tanner made his normal rounds, less conspicuously with visitors in the exhibit, and tending the outdoor butterfly garden when the building was busiest. He spent at least an hour every day cleaning, sharpening, and repairing his tools. A while back, the zoo’s maintenance chief had been amazed to learn that the gardener had been using several of these tools for thirty-three years.

“Like old friends,” Mr. Tanner had told him. “Reliable. Predictable…don’t talk much though.”

When the Malachite chrysalises arrived, Mr. Tanner quarantined them in the exhibit’s reserve box, making sure the habitat was ready for Carla’s inspection. In the coming days, both he and Carla would be carefully watching their new arrivals for signs of distress.

Near the end of the workday, Ron showed up, asked a few questions, and made for the mechanical room, accompanied by Mr. Tanner.

Ron exuded competence, not because of anything he said but by how he took charge when something needed fixing. If Ron didn’t always think before he spoke, Mr. Tanner had never heard anything vindictive escape the mechanic’s lips.

“Not too many aches and pains?” Ron asked him.

“You know” was Mr. Tanner’s equivocal answer. These days, his left shoulder ached most nights, a different sensation than his normal aches and pains. Occasionally, the pain woke him at night.

Ron nodded. “I’m getting to know. I turned fifty last month, remember?”

“And the kids?” the gardener inquired.

“Yah. Hand me that wrench, please…no, the other one. Thanks…”

Ron worked in silence for several minutes but something told Mr. Tanner to keep the mechanic company. As it turned out, his instinct was good because, without looking up, Ron said, “Those kids are driving me crazy. Their own father left them for Christ’s sake, and I’m not good enough?”

“They’re teenagers, right?”

“It’s the water pump—a metal chip. David’s thirteen and Sara’s twelve. Always mouthing off to their mother, and when I say something, the conversation really gets ugly. I don’t care about honest mistakes, but I won’t stand for disrespect.”

Mr. Tanner could hear the suppressed anger in Ron’s voice—the very first time he’d experienced such fire in this even-tempered man. Mr. Tanner said, “Young people can’t always control themselves.”

“I don’t care about that,” Ron snapped.

Mr. Tanner let Ron work a while before he spoke again. “You have a few years with them before they’re grown. What you say and do will make a big difference in who they become.”

Ron dropped the wrench and looked at Mr. Tanner. “You have children, right?”

The gardener nodded in reply. Ron responded with, “Well, these aren’t my kids.”

Already, Mr. Tanner was shaking his head back and forth. “Not your physical children, but when you married their mother they became your kids.”

“I don’t see it that way.”

“Then, try to see it that way for their sakes…and for yours. Your wife will honor you for it.”

“She’s just trying to keep the peace.”

“Someday, she will honor you for it. She’s worth it, isn’t she?”

Ron’s face was red, and his jaw was clenched, but after a bit the color receded.

“What are you working on for fun these days?” Mr. Tanner asked to lighten the exchange.

“I’m rebuilding a twentieth century military radio…using vintage parts. I’ll bring the radio in and show you when I’m finished.”

Mr. Tanner did his best to conceal the alarm he suddenly felt. His heart started thumping. He took several deep breaths and tried to concentrate on Ron.

The mechanic didn’t seem to notice. He returned the wrench to his toolbox, and said, “No more water problem.”

MR. TANNER DIDN’T KNOW WHY the zoo’s chief operating officer had summoned him but he had a funny feeling about it. He’d been tempted to confer with Carla but in the end had decided to see it through on his own.

Not that Art McLeod had a bad reputation. If he wasn’t as congenial as the zoo director, the COO enjoyed the respect of the staff all the same because McLeod was known to let people do their jobs so long as their work was satisfactory.

“Sit down, Mr. Tanner…please.”

Mr. Tanner did as instructed.

The COO’s office wasn’t ostentatious. Rather, it oozed efficiency, having a large primary desk with a computer facing McLeod, a side desk with a smaller laptop, and nothing on the bare walls. Not a binder, folder, or piece of paper in sight.

“You’ve been here for thirty-three years, Mr. Tanner.”

“Thirty-three years last month.”

“You’ve given superior satisfaction.”

Why didn’t this make Mr. Tanner feel any better?

“Carla told me you’re a man who can handle things…anything. So, I’ll be straight with you.”

Straight with him? Mr. Tanner was on guard now.

“You’ll be seventy soon, and starting on that date the zoo’s landscaping company will take on the butterfly gardens.”

Mr. Tanner overcame a pardonable confusion in his ordinary way, by silently repeating McLeod’s words until they sunk in. “I had hoped to work a few more years,” the gardener mused rather than complained.

The COO said, “Carla insisted that you receive a lifetime pass to the zoo. That’s a rare honor, Mr. Tanner. We hope to see you often. And you can be a docent if you desire. You certainly are an expert on many of the animals.”

Was Mr. Tanner listening? All he could think about was waking in the morning and not having his zoo gardens to tend, not seeing Carla, Betty, Ron, and the others who had become dear to him.

Mr. Tanner lifted his head and looked across the desk at McLeod. “Don’t think I’m not grateful because I am. Hardly seems like thirty-three years.”

McLeod was clearly uncomfortable with the message he’d delivered, and Mr. Tanner didn’t like to make anyone feel uncomfortable. He stood and extended a hand.

The COO took the gardener’s hand and mumbled a few more words of praise.

Mr. Tanner closed the door behind him. The end of the month—eighteen days. No more lively times in the butterfly gardens, no more spectacular butterflies emerging from chrysalises, no more conversations with Carla, Betty, and Ron—no more shoe-leather commutes, no more Jazzy Jingles.

You’re seventy, or almost, he told himself. What did you expect? A blue ribbon? Part of him was grateful and part sad. Like a lot of things in life—his wife, that heart scare ten years back, even the war when he’d managed to forge friendships amidst those horrors.

Carla was there when Mr. Tanner returned to the Gallery. It was after hours so she could have gone home. But not Carla.

“I was against it” were her first words.

“It’s alright,” Mr. Tanner said.

He saw tears in Carla’s eyes. “Will you be our docent? Betty will still have the primates.”

“Make sure they do the job right,” Mr. Tanner told her.

THE DOOR BURST OPEN and in came Benji like a storm cloud. She scowled at Carla, ignored Betty and Ron, rushed to Mr. Tanner and gave him a big hug. When she let go she was crying. And in a flash, Benji rushed out of the Gallery office.

Carla had intended a small retirement celebration for Mr. Tanner, but in a matter of seconds Benji had soured the mood.

The girl’s display didn’t do anything to assuage Betty’s worry. Only in recent days, with Mr. Tanner’s retirement looming, had Betty come to realize how much she relied on him. Who would she go to now when she was anxious about something?

Knowing that Mr. Tanner preferred printed photographs to digital images, Betty had prepared him an album filled with her own pictures of the butterfly gardens. And she had embellished the album with her elegant calligraphy.

“Open it,” Ron said to Mr. Tanner, handing him a package. It had been all the mechanic could do to refrain from critical comments about the COO and director. And though Carla had intimated that she’d fought the decision, Ron hadn’t been convinced. Only the sure knowledge that Mr. Tanner didn’t share his critical views held Ron back.

The mechanic had wrapped the present himself, and it showed. Mr. Tanner set the wrapping aside and displayed the book—a thick field guide to butterflies.

Mr. Tanner grasped Ron’s hand and smiled broadly at him.

He looks older, Ron said to himself. Then, he said to Mr. Tanner, “This book has real meat, the way we like it, not…” But glancing at Betty’s gift, Ron bit his tongue before he said, Not just pretty pictures and a few words.

Carla had felt guilty from the day she had grudgingly acquiesced to the COO’s and zoo director’s decision. Oh, she’d pushed back, but ever since that uncomfortable meeting in the executive office Carla had felt that she’d given in too easily. Yes, Mr. Tanner was well past normal retirement age, and yes, his duties had been curtailed in recent years, but who could deny all that he had contributed to the zoo—and was still contributing? She had witnessed Betty’s and Ron’s veiled suspicion of her own complicity in this action, and Benji’s opinion of her had been less subtle. What had Mr. Tanner once told her about the illusion of control? We have so little control that when the matter comes to our own hearts, we cannot so much as make the patter follow the pitter.

“You’ve been an ideal employee…and—” Carla was finding speech difficult, but she bore down—”and a dear friend to all of us.”

“I’ve been blessed to know you,” answered Mr. Tanner.

Carla dried her eyes without shame. “All your children still in town?”

Mr. Tanner smiled benignly. “Oh, yes!”

The curator suddenly realized how little she knew about her gardener’s private life because he preferred to talk about what interested or concerned the person he was with, and also because she—Betty and Ron too, for that matter—were naturally reserved when the subject involved a colleague’s private affairs. “You will be our new docent,” she told him.

“Give me a bit of time to think on that.”

“What’s to think about?” asked Ron.

What was there to think about? Plenty. Earlier in the day, an old memory had come back to Mr. Tanner while he was wiping down his empty locker—the day he’d opened the locker door and discovered a snow monkey perched on top of his backpack, eating his bagged grapes. The two had stared at each other for a moment—not belligerently, as Mr. Tanner remembered it—before the gardener half-closed the door, secured the office door, and went for help. As things turned out, the monkey had escaped from the Animal Health Center on a cold day and had found its way into the comfortable Gallery. That memory had transformed the doleful task of cleaning out his locker into a cheerier one. Mr. Tanner thought he still had the former zoo director’s letter of praise for his “compassionate and measured handling of this sensitive matter.” He didn’t need to be reminded that even those who receive praising citations and give superior satisfaction must one day clean out their lockers or their large offices.

Mr. Tanner said, “Keep an eye out for that girl—young Benji. Suzanne Wayne’s trying to help her and any support you can give Suzanne will be appreciated, I bet.”

“She’s a runaway,” Betty countered. “She won’t be here long.”

Mr. Tanner gave Betty the look she knew she was going to miss. “How long the girl is here doesn’t matter. What matters is what Benji experiences while she’s here. I know your hearts so I needn’t have said that,” he quickly added.

“Here’s your lifetime pass, Mr. Tanner,” Carla said. “We had it specially made. Betty helped with the butterflies.”

Though the day was Friday, Jazzy Jingles had been canceled. Mr. Tanner placed the gifts in his backpack and lifted himself to his feet. He kissed Betty and Carla on their foreheads and shook Ron’s hand, but he didn’t say another word.

The door closed on Mr. Tanner’s ninety-nine-hundred and fortieth day at the Detroit Zoo.

ALL THREE IN THE CAR were thinking about the same thing as Carla drove east—the brief notice from Pastor Simmonds: A mighty oak has fallen. A funeral service will be held for our brother, Cletus Tanner, this Thursday at ten a.m.

An oak they had seen and talked to almost every day and had too often taken for granted was gone. To Carla, he had offered protection from the workday gales, the precious sense that with Mr. Tanner on the job, nothing too awful could occur. Betty had received shade, a respite from the blazing heat of a life that all too often scorched her. For Ron, Mr. Tanner’s gift was the quiet beauty of changing leaves that enlivened drab days and offered him fresh perspectives on people and events.

Only six months after Mr. Tanner had retired.

“Why do you suppose he never came back?” asked Ron.

“Not what you think,” Carla rumbled, immediately sorry for her brisk tone. “He wanted Betty to continue as butterfly docent and he didn’t want to hear that the landscaping company wasn’t giving satisfaction.”

“Did he tell you that?” Ron pressed.

He had, but in the gracious words that had been her gardener’s trademark.

Mr. Tanner may have gone but his footprints were all over the zoo, like the paint-stamped elephant tracks on the lanes that guided visitors. Why, only last week a visitor had told Carla how she missed Jazzy Jingles, and when the curator had remarked that Mr. Tanner was devoted to popular tunes, the visitor had related how a serious jazz quartet on 8-Mile Road sometimes sent a car for Mr. Tanner when their regular saxophonist was indisposed. “And those cats don’t do popular tunes,” the woman had emphasized.

Why did Carla still feel bad about Mr. Tanner? Didn’t his seven children live nearby? But then again, didn’t she have a nagging memory—about the time she had started working at the zoo—when that number had been four, and hadn’t Mr. Tanner been a widower when they first met?

Betty was remembering how Mr. Tanner had asked them to look after Benji. Betty and that girl couldn’t have been more different, but the older woman had shown Benji some of her photos and let the girl use her cameras. And now? A friendship had been kindled based on their mutual love of animals and the art of the camera. Benji’s occasional vulgar eruptions still startled Betty but at those moments she did her best to picture Mr. Tanner, and that shielded her.

Ron hated funerals and he avoided them whenever he could, but both Betty and Carla had seemed quite forlorn when they’d talked to him about the funeral, and that was out of character for both women. Anyway, Ron wanted to whisper a thank you to the man who had helped him adopt a new attitude toward his wife’s children. While he and the kids still exchanged sharp words, and while he still grew frustrated with them, Ron was slowly changing, and he believed they were too. Could all this have transpired without those few words Mr. Tanner had offered him?

Mr. Tanner’s pastor had asked them to come a bit early.

The King Street Praise and Worship Church was nothing special to look at, just a small street corner building that needed some attention, though the yard was a thing of beauty. The visible neighborhood consisted of a mixture of smaller and larger houses, all intact while exhibiting signs that upkeep was a constant challenge. Nonetheless, most of the yards boasted small but lush gardens of Black-eyed Susan, Butterfly Bush, Phlox, Coneflower, Lily, and more.

Pastor Simmonds was a round man with a cluttered office. By the time Carla, Betty, and Ron settled themselves on unmatched chairs, they were shoulder to shoulder.

The pastor’s eyebrows were thick and the hair on his head was closely mown. The desk in the center of the room had seen plenty of use but wherever it had been chipped or scratched, a matching stain had been carefully applied. A homemade bookshelf was propped against one wall. A vibrantly colored rug covered much of the floor. The pastor’s one window looked out on a block wall.

“How did he die?” asked Ron, provoking a gasp from Betty and a frown from Carla.

The pastor took no apparent umbrage at Ron’s question. “Mr. Tanner loved working in our church yard. A week ago, he just tipped over. I saw him out the vestry window but he was gone when I got there…bless him!”

A large woman wearing a blue and yellow dress and expansive yellow hat somehow squeezed into the room behind Ron. Pastor Simmonds stood and said, “I want you to meet our cantor, Sister Ruth.”

When Ron made an attempt to rise, Ruth put a hand on his shoulder and pressed him back into his chair. “We’re happy to have you with us today. Brother Tanner loved you all so.”

“We loved him too,” Betty stammered, surprising Ron and Carla.

“And he loved his work at the zoo,” added the pastor. “Oh, how he loved his work. Why, Sister Ruth, how many in the congregation offered to drive Brother Tanner to work and back, but he wouldn’t hear of it.”

A moment of deep silence ensued when Carla, Betty, and Ron looked from one to the other.

“He didn’t have a car?” Carla asked the pastor.

“Not for twenty years or so. Spent every spare dime he had prettying up the church and neighborhood homes. Don’t think we didn’t try to convince him otherwise, but…well, you know Brother Tanner when he made up his mind.”

Ron said, “Then, how did he get to work?”

“Walked,” answered Ruth. “Two miles each way, in all kinds of weather.”

“Said he used the time to think and pray,” Pastor Simmonds remarked.

“I tried to pick him up on Woodward,” a new voice intruded, “but Brother Tanner just waved me on.” This new voice belonged to a tall lanky man in his later forties who stood just outside the doorway.

“I was hoping you’d look in, Brother James,” said the pastor. “Brother James teaches physics at Cass Tech and sings in our choir. Friend of Brother Tanner’s since he was a boy.”

James bowed his head. “Will surely miss him,” he whispered. “Mr. Tanner was like a father to me.”

“Amen to that on my account too,” Ruth concurred.

The pastor addressed the trio from the zoo. “Brother Quincy, our organist, and Sister Mazie will want to meet you after the service. They were special to Brother Tanner too. We all feel as if we know you because of what Brother Tanner told us about you…his dear ones at the zoo…Oh my, past time for me to robe. Sister Ruth, would you and Brother Quincy kindly assemble the musicians and choir? And Brother James, please have the pall bearers collect in the rear. I’ll signal when you can come forward, and then you can join the choir.” He looked at Carla. “Please sit up front.”

“We couldn’t—” she began, but Pastor Simmonds raised a hand and the rest of Carla’s protest caught in her throat.

They were preparing to move to the worship area when Betty, of all people, spoke up. “Why do you think he loved to garden?”

This innocuous question froze Pastor Simmonds, Ruth, and James in their tracks.

Finally, James answered Betty. “Brother Tanner never spoke to me of his time in Vietnam but my uncle served with him and we talked about those days in Uncle’s later years. Brother Tanner was a radio man who saw plenty of dangerous action—ugly things. He was also assigned to gray missions in Laos, even worse duty. Brother Tanner told Uncle that when he came home he made a solemn vow to live in decency and beauty. He began by helping neighborhood families to beautify their yards, and he took on gardening duties at the church. Then, he became a zoo gardener, but that didn’t slow down his neighborhood beautification efforts. Most of us have a quantum of generosity we use up early in the day, don’t we? Not Mr. Tanner.”

Betty could no more imagine Mr. Tanner amidst the field of corpses than she could imagine a butterfly in a volcano. Ron and Carla were equally stunned.

Betty thought she detected a few suspicious expressions as the three made their way to the front pew. Carla was too deep in thought about what she’d heard from Pastor Simmonds and James to pay much attention. Ron didn’t often concern himself with what other people thought, but seeing the men in suits and ties and the women in fine dresses and crowned with gorgeous hats while he was wearing an open-collared shirt and dress slacks gave him pause.

Dozens of potted flowers: lilies, tulips, honeysuckle, daffodils, and roses bordered the pulpit and a bricked baptismal font. The variety of pots made Carla wonder if the congregation had brought these plants from their homes and yards for the funeral.

On the front wall hung a large picture of a dark-skinned Jesus teaching from a hilltop. To the right were an organ and a dozen chairs for the musicians and choir, with a saxophone resting on a front row chair.

More and more people entered until the church was full. The side windows were then opened so the overflow could at least hear the ceremony. The zoo trio tried to give their seats away but the congregation wouldn’t permit them.

Pastor Simmonds was standing up front in anticipation of the coffin when the sending-off program was distributed.

Carla’s, Ron’s, and Betty’s eyes were immediately drawn to the last line: Mr. Tanner is survived by his beloved daughters Carla, Betty, Mazie, and Ruth, and by his beloved sons James, Quincy, and Ron.

James and the other pall bearers came forward with the coffin. Carla wept. She had prepared herself for all of this, but when the time came, she was overwhelmed by grief. How her world had been changed by this quiet, almost invisible, man.

Pastor Simmonds walked to the coffin, looked out at the congregation, and said, “Mr. Tanner and his wife were unable to have children, and he never remarried when his dear wife passed. So, his beloved daughters and sons were children of the heart, those for whom he had special affection and to whom he gave special care.” The pastor placed his hand on the coffin and lowered his head for a moment before saying, “Shall we begin, Brother Tanner?”

T.M. Doran is a Catholic, a novelist, a member of the College of Fellows at The Engineering Society of Detroit, and one of the most exciting voices in Catholic literature. His novels Circling the Turtle, Terrapin, and Iota represent a bold breadth of thematic storytelling, while his novel Toward the Gleam has launched an entirely new series of Tolkien-related literature which teems with life and originality. His conversation with composer Mark Nowakowski appeared in Catholic Arts Today on November 7, 2020: https://benedictinstitute.org/2020/11/doran/.

Mater Dolorosa in Via Crucis

Roseanne T. Sullivan on March 29, 2021

Through her heart, His sorrow sharing,

all His bitter anguish bearing,
now at length the sword has passed.

I. As He Leaves the Palace of Pilate

In agony she can see, He is almost dead already
Lashed, mocked, weakened, pale, unsteady.
Rivulets of blood from thorns in His crown trace
Along his supernaturally patient face.

Skin and flesh in tatters and dried blood adhere
To the seamless garment woven for Him by her.
No one else on earth, but she alone, can hear
His moan as the cross is thrown onto His raw shoulder.

Soldiers scourge Him again, rain curses shrill
To drive Him along the sorrowful way
Towards Calvary, the hill of Adam’s Skull.
The crowd engulfs her, she is torn away.

II. After His First Fall

The crowd now somehow parts for her.
The centurions turn aside for her.

He meets her eyes, in com-passion and love.
Words cannot express the inseparable mix
Of shared anguish and a firm resolve
in the long deep gaze they mutually fix.

This day has redeemed you already, my mother.
To save all Our Father’s children, we will not shrink.
You and I together, only us and none other—
We’ll share this cup between us, to the dregs of its bitter sweet drink.

Roseanne T. Sullivan writes on art, culture, and liturgy for Latin Mass Magazine, the New Liturgical Movement, Regina Magazine, National Catholic Register, and the Dappled Things blog. She serves as a Facebook page editor at both the Benedict XVI Institute and Catholic Arts Today. The drawing accompanying this poem is also Roseanne T. Sullivan’s work.

The Love Song of Our Lady of O

Roseanne T. Sullivan on December 10, 2020

Expectans Expectavi

With expectation I have waited for the Lord,

and he was attentive to me.— Psalm 39:2,

Douay Rheims Bible

Knowing you so near, I yearned to know you,

O Wisdom.

Trembling, I bent and bowed towards you,

O Lord.

Searching the Scriptures, I sought you,

O Root of Jesse.

Awaiting David’s son, I awaited you,

O Key of David.

Longing for light, I long longed for you,

O Dayspring.

Hoping, I hoped with all who hoped for you,

O King of Nations.

Expecting now, I expect you, tomorrow,

You are coming—through only human me—

Long desired One, to make your people free.

O God with us—Emmanuel.

Roseanne Sullivan writes on art, culture, and liturgy for Latin Mass Magazine, the New Liturgical Movement, Regina Magazine, National Catholic Register, and the Dappled Things blog. She serves as a Facebook page editor at both the Benedict XVI Institute and Catholic ArtsToday.

Editor’s Note:

On December 18, in the waning days of Advent, a feast was dedicated to Our Lady’s expectation of her son’s birth. Because an ancient law of the Church prohibited the celebration of feasts during Lent, the Tenth Council of Toledo in 656 A.D. transferred the feast of the Annunciation from March 23 to December 18. Eventually, Annunciation regained its former day. So December 18 later came to be known as the Feast of the Expectation of the Blessed Virgin Mary, commonly called Santa Maria de la O, even in the liturgical books. Though seemingly related to the O Antiphons (of which O Come, O Come Emmanuel has become the most well-known) the 1909 Catholic Encyclopedia states that name “Our Lady of O” stems from the custom of the clerics in the choir after Vespers on that day to utter a loud and protracted “O,” expressing the longing of the universe for the coming of the Redeemer. The statue above, presenting the roundness of the pregnant Virgin, naturally represents Our Lady of O, although its provenance is unknown. Our Lady of O was chosen for honorable mention in the Catholic Literary Arts Advent Sacred Poetry Contest in 2020.

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