Covid Art 88: Church Portals

As long as I can remember I’ve been drawn to the doors and portals of churches throughout Europe. Their sculptures, columns, recessed arches, materials – all speak as loud as music to me. In my imagination I see people coming here to get married, celebrate someone who recently died, pray for sons at war or daughters too far away to hug. They carry the weight of the lonely human predicament up their stairs. Whether in Porto or St. Gallen or Nota or Lund, they are a magnet more than civic buildings from the same age or an art museum, repository of collections from the identical times. These portals represent hope whereas the others are merely administrative offices. And to be more specific, it is the love and labor of each local community, not the hierarchy of male-dominated Christianity, that represents hope– for me.