After 30 years, my husband and I still take part in the Goschenhoppen Festival each August. You will find I have mentioned it in many an August blog.

The photo at left is from 2010 or thereabouts, when the festival had newly moved to the park in Perkiomenville, PA, which is where the beautiful Antes House (ca. 1736) is located. My daughter and I were enjoying funnel cake. The park’s trees have grown considerably since then, and there’s more shade for demonstrators (and visitors). We were grateful this past weekend that the sunny days were not as humid as some years and that there haven’t been downpours to churn the parking areas into mud. And though neither of my own offspring could participate this year, it was lovely to see their festival-friends now grown, married–some having kids of their own–and still showing up to volunteer at the two-day reenactment of Pennsylvania German folk life of the 18th & 19th centuries.

My demonstration is in the 19th-c household and foods area, and each year I am assigned a couple of young “apprentices,” girls ages from 12-17 in gingham work-dresses. This year a friend’s daughter was thrilled to be old enough to officially participate. She is full of wondering about life and is the sort of child who poses her questions and speculations aloud. She’s also at the age when she’s taking church classes for confirmation, and she’s interesting to talk with when she wades into her thoughts about Big Subjects. I often find myself telling her that the things she wonders about are puzzling even to grownups. Because it’s true.

Yesterday she asked about someone we knew who had died: “Do you suppose they went to heaven?” Yikes. While it might have been a good opportunity to throw a wrench into religious indoctrination, I felt her parents might not appreciate that. I merely responded that I didn’t see why not. But this little exchange reminded me of my own wrestling with the idea of heaven and hell when I was her age. From fairly early on, I just couldn’t imagine that the cartoonish heaven of winged souls wearing halos was in any way real; and though hell was also mentioned frequently in church liturgy, prayers, and hymns, my dad’s belief in a god who was forgiving made hell seem unlikely. So the information I took in was confusing.

It is no less confusing to me now, but I no longer sweat over it the way I did as a child. Anyway, the conversation with my little friend called to mind a poem I’d drafted after returning from a visit to the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s exhibit “Siena: The Rise of Painting, 1300-1350” which reminded me of how I loved Medieval and early Renaissance art when I was a youngster. All those saints and crucifixions. All that gold and iconography. I must have had a gothic tendency!

This draft may be more about art than about heaven, and more about envisioning than about anything else. It's not a finished poem, but who cares on this bright, late-summer morning?
~


Halos

What interested me most about
paintings of Jesus was
the glow around his head
because I saw such auras everywhere 
when sun silhouetted our cat
in the dining room window
or lit up dew on tall grasses.

In later years I studied art 
and learned the problem of cheating
light from solid pigments 
the paradox of density layered
so some artists applied gold dust
to depict the nimbus gleam.

Yet even my little sister’s
fine blonde curls or the hairs
on my own skin could shine
that way illuminated like crowns
of hickory trees some autumn
morning long in brightness
no art to it at all.