A Pilgrimage

When I was in graduate schools, years ago in the early 80’s, there was a place spoken of in the most reverent terms, Black Mountain College.  It was an artist retreat deep in the mountains of North Carolina where the great modernist masters of the 40’s and 50’s would go and make art, listen to the great thinkers of the day and delve into the great questions of life.  Artists like Kline, deKooning, Motherwell, Albers, DeStabler, Volkous would be joined by Einstein, Buckminster Fuller, Greenburg and others to grapple with the great philosophical and artistic issues of their day.  The school opened in 1933 and closed in 1957.  It has always been a dream of mine to make a pilgrimage there and to stand on that most sacred artistic ground.  Yesterday I did.  Betty, Chris Nadaskay and I found it yesterday.  The college is now a YMCA boy’s camp but all the old buildings still remain.  We walked through the hallowed halls of the main studio room, a long, lumbering building on massive pillars laid out of the mountains along the valley below.  I had seen pictures of this particular building, old black and white photograph of artist standing, frozen forever in time and in my heart.  Art seemed to hold great promise for a world battered by world war but here I was standing where the hope had long since been abandoned.  There was something profoundly sad about the place even though now it was brightened by the sound of young boys playing gaily in the meadow by the lake.  The promise had not been fulfilled, not panned out, not secured nirvana.  We left the studio, now a dormitory for all the camp counselors.  I wondered if any of them realized what genius had worked where they now slept?  No, their life and the lives of the artists who once worked there were as isolated from one another as the peace was from the high hopes of those same artists.  There was one last task that I had set before me.  We walked out into the mountains that surround the school, deep into the forest still bare from winter until we found a ticket of green mountain laurel and there began the end of my pilgrimage.  Stone by stone we built an altar until its height reached an appropriate point that I felt satisfied that God would know I meant business.  We then held hands around the altar and prayed that God would send a great awakening to Christian artists and the church that would bring souls too bring Him glory.  That at this point and this time we meant to mark the earth in a way that would ask Him for His help in renewing the minds and hearts of the church in the still great unfinished work of peace on earth and good will toward men.

The Altar of The Hope of a
New Great Awakening