Sister Wendy Beckett

Clad in my dazzling new Popsicle-colored Lilly retro outfit, I head out on this sunny Sunday to LACMA (Los Angeles County Museum of Art). I take a Twentieth Century art tour with Docent, Marilyn Thomas, a great gal who rivets my interest (not an easy task) for a full hour. ?Cutting-edge art is supposed to bother you,? she tells our group. ?Creativity is about being first.? Near the end of our tour, we gaze upon Hockney?s Mullholland Drive (?Not the name of the road but the act of driving,? Hockney has stated), and out of the corner of my eye I notice a nun. No, it?s not that little ninety-pound flying person from the convent San Tanco. (Ever since I was a child, what with my Catholic upbringing, I?ve always felt a kinship with these women. I mean, my favorite movie of all time is The Sound of Music! In fact, at one time, I seriously thought that I had the ?calling.? Imagine?Sister Ruby Louise!)  As I approach, I am delighted to discover that it?s Sister Wendy, the lovable art maven from the famed PBS art series (now available on video and DVD).

Raised in South Africa, Sister Wendy studied English at St. Anne?s College, Oxford, where she was awarded a Congratulatory First, then returned to teach for a few years in South Africa. In 1970, she made Great Britain her home, where today she still resides in seclusion at the Carmelite Monastery in Norfolk, England.  She is author of nineteen books, including her Meditations On series and The Mystical Now: Art and the Sacred.

Sister Wendy and I sit on a bench in the center of the museum gallery, visually pulled in a tug of war between Picasso?s ?Blue Period? in one corner and Braque?s pre-Cubist works in another. 

Ruby Comer: It is such an honor and treat to meet you, Sister Wendy!

Sister Wendy: You?re so kind. The pleasure is mine, Ruby. 

When did you first hear about AIDS?

I cannot remember when I first heard about AIDS. For so long now it seems to have been a tragic background to existence.

What has your involvement been with the AIDS epidemic?

My only involvement has been that of prayer.

Sister, have you known anyone who has died from AIDS, or who is HIV-positive? 

I have no friends with AIDS (only friends of friends), although I am very fond of a young and gifted musician who is HIV-positive?and seems to be doing well. But I have had some fleeting encounters. Once, in a restaurant, the waiters brought me a note from a fellow diner, who was having his last meal with his sister. He expected to die within a few days. I asked if we could talk, and I recall him very clearly. He seemed a noble young man to me, who said he had ?talked things out with God? and was preparing with hope and peace to die. May we all approach death as he did!

The other memory I cherish is of a young museum curator, who came from a small town where to be gay was to be treated with scorn and whose family, with mutual grieving, had cast him out. They brought him home to be buried and a busload of his gay friends came too. I am told the church served as the backdrop of a rather strange sight, with exotic mourners on one side and the sober narrow-minded townsfolk on the other. But they all loved the deceased, and in their sorrow came to see how wrong they had been: the family for rejecting their lovely son, and the friends for despising the family [she adds] instead of pitying them for their lack of understanding. Both groups wept together and the outcome was almost worth its tragic reason.

Life can sure take some strange twists sometimes. How do you deal with the loss of someone? 

There is no way to diminish the pain of loss, but loss is part of being human. I give it to God and ask that this death should be a means of blessedness for all who experience its sorrow. And I thank God for the life that has now left the confines of Earth for something infinitely greater.

I like that. How differently do you see Heaven and Hell as compared to their depictions in art?

Scripture explicitly tells us that ?it has not entered into the human heart what God has prepared for those who love Him,? and so art can only make the vaguest attempt at depicting heaven. The artist, Fra Angelico, depicts people dancing in flowery meadows, which is the least inappropriate image I know, yet, by definition, it is nowhere near. As to hell, it is Christian teaching that we need not believe there is anyone in it. I must admit I do not ?see? it at all, any more than I ?see? heaven, and I feel that what happens after death is so essentially a mystery that all we can sensibly do is trust God, who is Love itself, and wait with confidence to discover the joy ahead. [She ponders a moment.] Surely there will be joy for everyone?Jesus divided people into ?sheep,? who cared for others, and ?goats,? who only cared for themselves. But we are all a mixture. Has anybody ever lived who has not, even once, done something for another? That snippet of sheephood will open heaven.

If you could have any work of art in your room, what would it be?

Next door to Christie?s in London is a gallery that sells early Chinese art. They have a Buddhist stele, which, in its reverence and stillness, encapsulates the values that mean most to me. Here is prayer made visible. It could never happen but, if I could have a work of art with me always,  that might well be the one.

Of all the artists in history, which artist do you think could capture the emotional tragedy of the AIDS epidemic?

This is a very difficult question to answer, because the tragedy is not a simple one. Perhaps Rembrandt is the artist who best expresses human sadness. But if we think of the theme, the death of someone young, then there are some religious pictures that express that sorrow with terrible force. I am thinking of pictures that show Jesus being taken down from the cross or laid in the tomb. Rogier van der Weyden has a painting in the Prado that is almost unbearable in its depiction of grief over such beauty cut off, such potential ?wasted.?

What is your advice about HIV prevention, Sister Wendy, to the young kids who are coming of age today?

I have no advice that they have not already heard. Advice does not get us far, compared with accepting responsibility for what we do. No one can live life for us, and that loneliness is an essential element in growing into the courage and determination that mark one as mature.

Ah, so very well put. Any other thoughts or comments about AIDS?

It is worth commenting on the shortness of even the longest life and the absolute necessity really to live it, and not drift through it, zombie-fashion. To be careless with life is a crime.

Ruby Comer is an independent journalist from the Midwest who is happy to call Hollywood her home away from home. Reach her by e-mail at MsRubyComer@aol.com.

October 2003