File talk:LEAP INTO ARMS OF ETERNAL NUMBER 2 2009.jpg
The image of sorrow is a site of affirmation where we remember the souls of those torn from life and from us. By coming before it we perform a rite and a prayer. It is here that we must resolve ourselves in all faithfulness to them and in all faithfulness to faith in the mystery that we cannot fully explain but in which we must resolve to believe in with all our hearts.
In this we renounce adamantly the concession to the finality of this tragedy and affirm belief in the possibility for its victims to reach spiritually a place of sanctuary. In this we do not give up our sadness and our mourning, but neither do we give in to utter despair.
Such painting is an icon for reflection, symbolic as the icon is and so not partaking of or submitting to a barbarity beyond the unthinkable, beyond comprehension itself. Instead we seek within those impossible confines some place to perform the work of mourning for it is the required work for us.
But it does no good to tear at our flesh. Better to enter this zone of reflection with compassion for ourselves that we may in equanimity find a capacity for compassion for those lost souls and not partake of the stain and contamination of the unthinkable but let it pass obliquely to the shadows from which it hovers nearby but does not belong to them, our lost ones, can not claim them the way it claims its perpetrators. And so we leave that horror to the margins that we in all our empathetic capacity devote ourselves with love for its victims. Only then can we celebrate the souls of those we wish to remember as they deserve.
So this rite of remembrance is performed before the icon, whose beauty, if one can address it as such, renders the unthinkable to the background, and so distanced, allows us to find composure to reflect on the great affirmation we owe those souls by our resolve to understand that at the end it was only their bodies that could be broken.
So it is that the paintings are beautiful within that parenthetical affirmation. We pray that, at the last, those souls could make that leap into The Arms of The Eternal. And so coming before these paintings is our asigned task to affirm that that was possible, that there is a soul, and that that soul individually and collectively was at the very last, and speaking figuratively, poetically if you will, taken into The Arms of The Eternal. That is the act of faith, the affirmation and the communion that the viewer performs before these paintings.
- Richard Rappaport, The Icon of Sorrow, Preface, "Portraits & Passages", www.richard-rappaport.net.
