Reliquary Vertigo
A collaboration.
Imagine, if you will, a Holy Beard Box of the Prophet Muhammad (pbuh) — or, if you prefer, the Hand of John the Baptist that dunked Jesus in the Jordan several millennia ago.
What does such an object mean?
That is, of course, a question of faith: which, what sort, how strong. Do you believe that Heaven intersected Earth in the object you regard? Was that intersection transitory, or does it remain a thinness in the veil? In short, can objects be sacred; if yes, how so? and how ought we comport ourselves around them?
I would class myself as relic-sceptical. Is this item all it claims to be? I wonder to myself as I stare at soft lighting and engraved metal. Certainly, the population average number of fingers for saints seems to be somewhat higher than for us regular folks. Part of that scepticism is then inextricably linked to an historian’s healthy regard for how often piety and power have intersected, with “truth” the loser as a result. Another part, though, cannot be resolved by ironclad provenance: indeed, reducing doubt to a question of verification is a convenient way to sidestep the discomfort of what one should think when the relics are real.
My Presbyterian faith accords me another layer of scepticism, albeit a more optimistic one. If the only way to God is through Christ, no finger-bone or gallstone will get me closer; if the Spirit already dwells in the world and in me, then that veil is pierced more thoroughly than any prophet’s staff or splinter thereof could contrive. That does not suggest that the miraculous happenings attributed to relics are impossible, merely that I do not believe the relic itself was the agonist: sola fide and all that.
The tomb of the prophet Daniel sits in Samarqand, Uzbekistan. It is black and gold and twelve feet long; surrounded by Islamic pilgrims; beautiful. My strongest experience of “reliquary vertigo” came as I stood alongside it, confronted the gulf between my tradition wherein it is but another tomb and that tradition where it means something more, and knew not how to respond. Seeing something suddenly from a different perspective is disconcerting, though your feet have not moved a step.
No relic brings me closer to salvation in and of itself; of this I am certain. But I think my hesitance to engage with the presence of these items has caused me to overlook ways in which they certainly matter. Regardless of their true origin, these are things that other people of faith, whether my own or another, have cared for, honoured, and cherished for many centuries, and as a testament of that faith they are powerful. When next I gaze through clouded glass at some fragment of a long-dead Church Father, perhaps I’ll think more of all those who have stood in my place and feel something of their belief, their certainty, their nearness to the sacred. If I believe Heaven and Earth are not merely tangent in the lives of saints, but once more drawn back together by Christ, then I would do well to sit in that nearness not only in shrines, but in all the rest of my life thus sanctified.