1 APRIL 2023
A Mass of Christian resurrection for Robert Joy was celebrated at Saint Joseph Parish in Ellinwood, Kansas by its pastor, Father Terrance Klein. In attendance in addition to many family and friends were many fellow artists and members of the Dominican Sisters of Peace. Robert's sister-in-law, Sister Rita Birzer, O.P. presided at a vigil service for Robert the evening before.
| Creating the world to come | Funeral of Robert Joy |
| Terrance Klein | 1.IV.2023 St Joseph Church |
Isaiah 25: 6, 7-9 1 John 3: 1-2 John 12: 23-28
When Isaiah prophesized a mountain where “the Lord of hosts will provide for all peoples” he wasn’t speaking of some paradise to come. The ancient Hebrews didn’t think anything followed death, neither reward nor punishment. Only shadows. No, the prophet had in mind the God of Israel’s powerful, loving, and definitive entry into human life.
The first Christians experienced God’s entrance into their lives in the resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth. For them as well, heaven wasn’t some distant, ethereal paradise. No, the life to come had arrived for them when they discovered their Jesus, utterly transformed—we might say glorified—yet still the same man they had learned from and learned to love. So, one might say that the idea of heaven doesn’t enter human history as a place. It’s a person.
Saint John assures us,
Beloved, we are God’s children now;
what we shall be has not yet been revealed.
We do know that when it is revealed
we shall be like him,
for we shall see him as he is.
It would be a mistake, however, and one we wouldn’t want to make this close to Easter, to think of the life to come as something cut off from the life, which we already live in the Lord. Again, returning to the experience of the first Christians, it was the very Jesus, whom they had loved, who stood in their midst and said, “Peace be with you.”
So, it would be better to think of heaven, our coming life with the Lord, as something already coming to be. Our experience of heaven, and of those who await us there with our Lord Jesus, will be one of both continuity and discovery. The world we fashion here, the loves that form us here, will be there, easily recognized yet truly revolutionized.
That’s where artists come in, whether they work with words, with images, or with lives. Art isn’t simply something that pleases the eye. It’s much more than something that represents the world to us. No, art is how we share God’s own creativity.
Artists brings something into being that wasn’t there before, something they alone can call into existence, using the natural graces God gives them. One might say that every artist hears a voice, or sees a face, begging him or her, “Bring me into existence. Let me, along with you, along with our Lady in her song of joy, magnify the Lord.” Inspired by God, artist create the heaven to come.
Bob was many things. Teacher, veteran, good friend, loving father, and soul-mate to Marcella. He couldn’t stop being these things and he couldn’t stop making art. Fantasies, visions, creatures of the world to come revealed themselves to him, begged him to call them into existence.
Bob saw his art as his vocation. He had no interest in charging great sums for it. Pittances were enough, because that ensured that others could possess his art, be possessed by it, see in it something of the world to come.
An artist doesn’t reject this world. It’s the canvas creativity requires. But an artist can’t merely accept this world, accept the way things are. He or she sees something struggling to be born, to express itself, to be itself once the artist has midwifed it.
That was equally true of the art, the beloved creation of God, that Bob was. What the world saw wasn’t enough. What the world understood didn’t go deep enough. Bob was more than that.
As Jesus approached his own death, he surrendered himself into the arms of his Father.
I am troubled now.
Yet what should I say?
“Father, save me from this hour?”
But it was for this purpose that I cam to this hour.
Father, glorify your name.
Then a voice came from heaven,
“I have glorified it and will glorify it again.”
In the face of death, Jesus surrendered to life, to his Father, the source of life. This wasn’t easy. It meant entering the darkness, yet Jesus trusted that life, beauty, and love were stronger.
The same was true of Bob. Of course, death meant no more dancing or long coffees with Marcella. It meant slipping beyond the sight of those who loved him. But the darkness of the tomb is the womb wherein something glorious, more true, more beautiful, more loving comes to be.
Bob the artist has surrendered so graciously to God the creator. Perhaps that is something he learned long ago. That the creation of all art, all truth and beauty, involves surrender, trust. Something that isn’t yet calls to us, summons us to itself, asks us to give it life, so that we and what we create can both glorify the Lord, the creator who, through us, still calls creation into being, into the glorified beauty of a life yet to come.
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