Portraits of Grace

Portraits of Grace: Images and Words from the Monastery of the Holy Spirit
By James Stephen Behrens, OCSO
Skokie, IL: ACTA Publications, 2007
Review by Carl McColman

Windows feature prominently in this luminous collection of photography and pithy meditations from Trappist monk James Behrens. In this striking and singular glimpse into the multivalent world quietly hidden within a third millennium cloister, Behrens eschews stereotypes and clichés. Instead of pious images of monks praying or studying, he lingers over a heap of old tires, mops hung up to dry, an old street sign overgrown by kudzu. Like many religious communities founded anywhere from fifty to fifteen hundred years ago, Georgia’s Monastery of the Holy Spirit — where all of these photographs were taken and presumably all these words were written — is rich with the splendors of nature; the community owns over two thousand acres of mostly undeveloped land. Behrens celebrates this bucolic treasure with his singularly unromantic eye: his gaze finds an autumn leaf caught in a spider web, or ominous clouds rolling in over a lonely old barn. But I don’t mean to suggest that this collection of images lacks beauty or warmth: far from it. Tenderness erupts in a candid snapshot of a dove huddling in her nest with her young, while technically gorgeous images of a bumblebee or a preying mantis are almost breathtaking in their loveliness. Pansies, stained glass, green leaves and red bricks, all dance through the book, giving it a colorful, almost kaleidoscopic feel.