Word Craft

 I am a long time subscriber and for the past decade, at least, the recipient of an annual gift subscription to First Things, published by the Institute on Religion and Public Life. In the March issue I noticed the writing of Patricia Snow.

It is especially gratifying to find an author whose wordcraft concisely expresses what the author intends to convey. So, when I encounter an author who displays that talent I take notice. An example is the following quote from an article by Richard Neuhaus, First Things founding editor. The article speaks to the writings of Hans Urs von Balthasar.

“He went in for heavy-duty intellection that is sometimes ponderous and exhaustingly discursive, but always adorned with dazzling erudition and rewarding one's effort with scintillating insights of a frequently counterintuitive nature.” April 2006 issue of First Things

Patricia Snow’s essay relates an experience she had at her church, St. Mary’s in New Haven Connecticut. It is the church where she attended RCIA sessions. In her essay she describes St. Mary’s Church during one of the daily Masses she attended.

“… in St. Mary’s a soft natural light was continually in play, washing sequentially through the saturated membranes of the windows. Furthermore, everything was painted in St. Mary’s, saving the pews and the floor. The walls in those days were a drab yellow and the high pentagonal apse behind the altar was an English red, which in turn was figured over, like wallpaper, with a shimmering, gold-leaf pattern of fleur-de-lis. The tall pillars in the nave were the color of algae and the vaulted roof overhead was an azure canopy, fastened up with powder-blue filaments and gold medallions. Add to this the polychrome statues of saints – statues that, like the windows, were brought down within reach – and intricately painted and gilded bas-relief Stations of the Cross, and the colorful exuberance of the whole sounds almost too much on paper, yet it worked in the church, in the dim recesses around the altar especially, where the reds that were almost orange and the greens that were almost blue were at once resplendent and fugitive, overstating and vanishing, like the iridescent plumage of a tropical bird.” First Things, On The Threshhold, March 2022

" dazzling erudition" and “scintillating insights of a frequently counterintuitive nature”

“where the reds that were almost orange and the greens that were almost blue were at once resplendent and fugitive”

Neuhaus made me want to seek out in Balthasar those “scintillating insights”. Snow’s description of St. Mary’s Church makes me want to visit St. Mary’s to see those colors that “were at once resplendent and fugitive, overstating and vanishing”; fugitive colors, what inspiration!