No Knee Pads

“Muchachito, little boy, where did you learn to fashion the wick so skillfully?” I do not remember who said something to me to that end. The person in question was an elder, implying that I was versed in altar- making and in honoring holy beings. Besides the truth to that, the harsh reality was that we had to deal with constant power outages in the Dominican Republic and that we did not always have candles at home. Some cooking oil in a saucer, topped with a clump of cotton shaped into a pointy tip would do it for my family. Plus, I was fascinated with fire, and thus seized every opportunity to activate this element.

I have no first memories of religion because I was simply born into it. I could say this was the field I moved through every day, just matter of fact. However, familiarity did not spell ease. The uncertainty of having to face mystery at any given turn kept me on my toes, even when barely learning to stand on my toddlers’ feet. I was born lactose intolerant to the point that the house downtown my parents rented in the Caribbean was cleaned twice in preparation for my funeral. Before Dr. Pérez could change my diet to a non-dairy formula, the popular consensus was that I was the subject of mal de ojo, evil eye. I was meant to be fed some kind of milk substitute manufactured abroad, in the U.S. empire, and which would sooth my insides but upset our home’s budget considerably. While this “American” product came from overseas, the aforesaid cause of my illness was local. To this respect, the oral lore explains how praising without blessing can unknowingly become baneful. The same words that may have told my mother of how winsome her child was, could have prompted his early departure. My death was quickly dismissed thanks to science and Dr. Pérez’s diagnosis, as well as to the brujo who quickly sought help within his ritual repertoire. One of my lower extremities was longer than the other. That was a sign of the spiritual conundrum I was in, and so was the eye that was much smaller than its counterpart. I lived to tell my story and to make sure that every blessing I utter is followed by a “God bless it/him/her/them/us, since this phrase acts as the antidote to what had befallen me. No blessing / no praising, please, is what is expected by most Dominicans up to now. “What a beautiful child—God bless him.” And this pertains to houses, plants, cars and just about anything that can elicit unsuspecting envy or jealousy in any relational exchange.

The battles would be initially fought from my crib, once I got back on my stronger feet and could stand on the mattress. There were the bloody wars between Spaniard colonizers and the Taínos, the First Nation people of the Island of Hispaniola, where I was born. The reels would play during the night in what appeared to be the realm of my dreams, yet to me there were real as opposed to reels. So too was the disembodied hairy hand that would circle the area where I attempted to sleep. If I was born into religion, I was also born into an unfiltered conversation between dimensions.

Standing guard in our room—ours, because I needed company to deal with the night—was the chromolithograph depicting a holy being with a long white beard. This representation of an older, white and male God had built into it a pictorial narrative accompanied by succinct phrases. One of the vignettes in the composite was that of the death of the just man. He encountered his fate in bed, quietly, under pressed clean sheets and the visit of a blond angel. Another had to do with the death of the wicked man. He was being strangled with a rope by a black devil with spikey horns. The choices where limited: two. This commanding picture hung on the wall adjacent to my crib, with the understanding that it would protect the three of us who sought rest in the dark of the cinderblock room: my Lebanese-Dominican Mother, my Black presenting Dominican father and myself. But what about the harrowing nightmares? Or the time when the white guy in the chromolithograph came out of the frame to sit at my bedside? I could not believe this, and I opted for acting upon what I understood as a boundary rupture with a loud scream. We were Catholics of a sort, and my father and I would remain so after each other member of our family went a different way in their spiritual journey.

Later into childhood, as soon as I could extricate myself out of the neighborhood school, I requested to be enrolled in a Catholic one. The place was one my mother had attended during her childhood, and one of the many she did not recall with fondness. To her, this brought back memories of girls who, unlike her, could not pay the tuition to be in a private school and had to work cleaning the place and doing all kinds of extra chores after class. To this she added her knowledge as to the fancy parlor where the nuns would receive the families of the students who were well off versus the hallway or common areas where those of less means were allowed in when they came to settle any business with the sisters. At an early age my mother critiqued the trappings of a religion she knew too well. She would tell me about the girl who was prompted to confess that the nun and the priest she saw kissing was a figment of her imagination. The girl nonetheless would not give in to pressure. My mother has not told me about the outcome of this and I am left pondering on the fate of the #MeToo character in her school.

I was free to choose as I wished, my mother would affirm, and anyways, “all roads lead to the same place,” she would say. “It is all the same.” I was allowed to attend what I thought was an evangelical summer camp, it was a Seventh Day Adventist church. I went there lured by the coloring books and the particular waxy smell of the crayons given to us to fill in the biblical characters in the books. No idea of who they were. At home, the Bible was more of an ornament that, open on a table or stand, freed the house from evil; a prop. I would get my kicks from collecting the chromolithographs of saints that would go to populate the Catholic and Afro-Caribbean altar in my room. We never spoke of Vodoun because the word was taboo. It was “poor,” “Black,” and backwards. We simply engaged many of its practices and theology and pretended we were still covered by the Catholic cloak. Religion was my candy store. I would grow up to be aware of all of its accoutrements and shortcomings, but not to be intimidated by it. Not in the least. I was told more than once that I was a child of the Loas, the African mysteries, and I knew that I was also baptized Catholic. Entering the playground of the sacred, even with these credentials, was a whole other thing.

“I am from the generation that burns the candle at both ends,” discloses Monet Clark, a friend with whom I sit on the tiny porch of the house I rent in the U.S. Southwest. I am a middle-aged man with hair the color of the God in the picture of my childhood, but with a crew cut and no beard. I am neither as pale as he was. “I am not German,” I tell the guy in Austin who runs after me speaking in this language after hearing me say “hello.” Monet and I sit on red metal chairs, comfortable enough to help us plow through an array of themes in which the spiritual is at the center. Like her, I am of the generation that still lights the wick top and bottom, while holding the candle in my hand like a projectile. Just an image. I am of the times where my religious education included bleeding saints and relics, some of whom would expose body parts with no self-consciousness. Organs radiating beams of light, wounded feet to be touched or kissed by devotees. I did mind the candle in my hands when both lit ends reached my fingers. I had to explain to my Protestant cousin that the open heart was not a liver. My father used to call his Methodist side of the family, the “converted” ones, with disdain. His alliance was to Catholicism. My mother, on the contrary, would go to eventually see herself as Evangelical, a rather progressive one. With Monet in Texas, I am able to see my own passage along the spiritual road.

In 2010, I decided to enter Union Theological Seminary. At this school I would have the most radical, as in progressive, conversations I can remember. Having pursued an MFA in the late 1990s, what I was experiencing at Union had nothing comparable to my education in the visual arts. I had joined Union after Elia Alba suggested the place to me, and following an urge to push deeper into the creative work I had been doing then for 15 years. I had hit a wall in terms of dialogue and spaces where I could unpack the bundle that I had been carrying with me through the arts. Where else could I talk about prayer academically, but also as lived experience? Where else would professors inquire whether or not we thought souls were gendered? Mujerismo was new to me, and I felt enraptured by the lectures shared by Professor James Cone on the subject of Black Liberation Theology. Dean Daisy Machado would literally walk us to the US-Mexican borderlands to hear the distressing stories of those who had crossed the dividing line that separates two nations that had been one land.

Setting foot in Texas to see the hidden, and not so much so, realities unfolding daily in this state would open my curiosity as someone who has been working with communities. I could start to feel the limitations imposed upon me by the arts. Union would allow me to do research on praying aloud at home in the South Bronx and to subsequently write a thesis about it and produce a solo performance directed by Cecilia deWolf. I was free to experiment with developing creative work for spaces deemed as sacred, something I had been wanting to test for a while. But at times, it felt the focus was all in the head and that I needed to play again, to dress up in costumes, and to tickle the heavy-duty theology I was sipping non-stop. Linda Mary Montano visited me at Union from her home in upstate New York, so we could sit for three hours chanting in the chapel from the writings of Santa Teresa of Ávila of and San Juan de la Cruz, the Spanish mystics that have informed a great deal of our private communication about performance art. We dressed in orange and red and Linda donned a bright wig that touched her shoulders gently. A Christian orthodox collection of saints surrounded us as if taking in our presence in their home with extreme interest.

I was the moth in the dark Caribbean night. Lured by a burning candle I knew better than to fly into it. Instead, I collected the dripping wax and fashioned long nails out of this that I attached to each one of my fingers. I too played with swaying my fingers through the flames. I was puzzled by the section that is said to be the hottest part of the fire; the blue one. This is the layer representing full combustion. Monet Clark and I were then decades away from meeting, yet her comments about candles is somehow resonating in the akashik records, or in Jung’s collective unconscious, that repository where symbols, archetypes and experiences reside. Linda Mary Montano would appear to me before Monet and, as it often happens, with like-minded souls, they knew each other. Linda would become mentor and friend, the Saint of Performance Art that I would connect with in New York City more than a decade after leaving my dangerous interactions with hot wax and burning fire in the Caribbean.

Electricity in New York City is a given. Talk about the conveniences of the so-called first world, the one that keeps everyone’s head under its boot. But the stars in the city would disappear from the sky, and the dark at home where power outages would prompt neighbors to gather to tell ghost stories were unheard of in the Big Apple. In New York, the lights would go out when I decided to maneuver the switch or when Con Edison turned the electricity off. For lack of payment. It happened once to me while living in Washington Heights. So, I dusted off a candle and the light casted previously unknown shadows in our apartment.

Linda Mary Montano comes from a long-line of performance art practitioners who have invited the sacred into their work and whose wisdom I would search. At the age of 18 she became a Maryknoll sister, deciding to exit life in the convent after a too close encounter with anorexia. Another sister in the community inspired her to take on the study of art, and from there on her name and actions have become part of the history of this field. In the 1980s, Linda, together with Tehching Hsieh, entered a performance during which they were tied by the waist with an eight-foot long rope for a full year. They called this an endurance. This was part of a larger archive of creative commitments that Linda went on to bring forth. Like remaining blindfolded for several days, something that she will be exploring again at store window in Manhattan for a week. In this artist’s universe, Catholic theology and rituals have remained in a steadfast flow, this being the main reason I felt a pull to contact her in 2006. With whom or where else in the Arts could I dialogue about saints and sacraments?

If the arts in the US were open to an aestheticized display of Buddhism and Zen, there were not at ease with forms of Christianities that were perceived in Protestant US-America as pagan, strange and off-putting: The bleeding wounds of martyrs, the cross with the practically naked dude showing suffering in erotic ways—for all to see—for all to find it difficult to look the other way. No empty cross with images of resurrection to assuage hypertensive-prompt hearts. No kneepads when launching the most sorrowful prayer upon becoming aware of the unavoidable in life: suffering, pain, aging and dying. Trigger warnings become useless in the scope of all of this—of blood running through my veins, no matter how good of a job my skin does to keep this hidden—and wrinkles forming, independently of how well I care for this mortal body. With Linda I would revisit some of the Catholic rituals of my childhood and go to confession to tell a priest about my call to incarnate the Holy Infant of Prague in the Czech Republic, within the context of art and religion. Linda would keep me in tow after my passage through art school and into Union Theological Seminary.

Other members of the family would show up. It became clear to me that, when one is ready, the teacher will materialize. My investigations into the sacred demanded weaving in and out between art and religion. When the arts would stifle me with its emphasis on ego, fame, making it to the top of the pyramidal scheme that this industry can be, I would make a beeline into a convent, a monastery, or embark upon pilgrimages—some of them sacred and others not—but all of them highly spiritual in essence. I wanted to be with the questions that institutionalized art was not letting me entertain. Candle in-hand to traverse the dark at MacDowell, the artists’ retreat I was attending. A pilgrimage through the night. Careful to place the flame in a glass hurricane lantern, as I traveled the forest and into the realm of nocturnal beings and energies.

Billy X Curmano came introduced by Harley Spiller at Franklin Furnace. I always wanted to meet the man who was buried alive for three days to commune with the other side. Billy’s performance elicited in me one of my greatest fears, that of being put into a graveyard by mistake, while I was not dead yet. With Billy I have been learning as to the relevance of art that engages life’s mystery face on, knowing that a too close encounter with the sacred can burn the locus and experiencer down to the ground. It might be about gauging the distance without avoidance, and throwing a couple of guffaws into the boiling cauldron.

“Are you religious or spiritual?” an artist asked me. I am both. Silence. I have become well aware that religion is the many ingredients that make up the candle, and that spiritually is the fire that ignites the wick. Billy is my go-to when churches are locked or lock me out due to the nature of my quest. And I am content to live his extreme endurances vicariously and derive meaning from them, with him, afterward. Like his 40 day fast in the desert.

Lighting mental candles is how I have named the conceptual act of which I partake these days. Fire prevention. Ecological consciousness. Even then, I still burn my candles at both ends. It is my way of getting to the core of things. It takes significant juggling to extricate myself from the scene unscathed.

Beth Stephens, Annie Sprinkle and I crossed path through an introduction from Linda Mary Montano. I was working on an essay at Union on sexuality and theology and I needed to hear from Beth and Annie about their weddings to different elements and beings: Moon, charcoal, fire, water, and snow, to name a handful of them. This led me to study with them and Dr. Luke Dixon outside of London. I was one of the pupils in the First International Ecosex Symposium. Our cohort included sex workers from different locations on our planet, masseurs, pole dancers, a couple who worked making sexual fantasies a reality for others, and a photographer who registered the most intimate moments of couples. I was the recently graduate seminarian getting to try a collective orgasm with the moon as it appeared in the UK on a dark night, in the wilderness of the resort where we were. I also found myself anointing fistfuls of sensuous wet mud on the participants in the wedding our teachers staged with Earth. Teilhard de Chardin, would have smiled at this prospect. This was the Catholic theologian who articulated a vision of a Mass as a cosmic event involving our planet: A Mass on the World. I could see as well Professors Janet Walton and Roger Height, with whom I had been investigating through readings a Catholic theology that went beyond orthodoxy and tenets.

For a while I took contemporary art seriously, at face value, in its claim to want to be in dialogue with other fields. While there is some truth in that, I would come against one more wall, the part of art that remains incestual, as Mary Ting would point out to me. That is, the art that rewards creative gestures that add another layer to the scaffolding provided by the institution and what it sees as its canonical history. Actions that strayed into the void or went out too far off the road, and where this became unpaved until there was no road, were looked at suspiciously. It seems that everything had to be brought back into the fold of the progenitor on its own terms. Refusal to do so, or to run away with the grail into the forest was frowned upon. If the freedom of art and the creative process was what enticed me into the arts, art would point my way back into religion. Call it spirituality. Mystery works fine to me. I have spent enough time dealing with institutions; art and church, not to be aware of their hierarchies. “De mis amigos me libre Dios, que de mis enemigos me libro yo; From my friends spare me, God; so that from my enemies I can spare myself,” says a phrase in a holy scene painted at the entrance of a house in Santiago, Dominican Republic.

Today, I stand at a juncture on the road that leaves me stranded in transition. Where do I go next in the search is a question that does not appear to expect an answer. In the spirit of performance art I am called to move into the unknown and forget the soothing elixir of validation. The distance I am gauging is simply not measurable horizontally, and proposes more of an excavation deep down into the same place Billy X Curmano was buried and exhumed, into the element that was used sacramentally to anoint in Beth’s and Annie’s wedding in the UK, and into the field that Linda Mary Montano walked with Tehching Hsieh as they thought to make visible an extreme proximity to each other by way of a rope. The spirituality that whistles me to come closer is one that does not necessarily favor the heaven and sky, but that offers reverence to all creatures and life manifestations including those under my feet: moles, and worms, lava and muck, as well as death and renewal.

I hear the crickets chirp, “art chaplain, art chaplain, art chaplain.” How in the Earth I do that? I might have some ideas but no blueprint. I do ask myself how to go about the naming. How do I get rid of “art” and “chaplaincy,” and what am left with? Do I call upon the oil, wick and the fire and take it from there again?

The story goes that the person who freed me from evil eye died by fire. I do not know the details and thank this healer for assisting me when I most needed him. May his soul be at peace. May he be free from suffering. May I honor his memory with a life well lived, beyond art and chaplaincy, and into the field of service, one which knows no names or institutions and that entertains burning the candle, consciously and cautiously, from both ends, por las dos puntas— unfrazzled by a plane of existence that does not offer the luxury of trigger warnings.

I thank Linda Mary Montano, Billy X Curmano, Beth Stephens, Annie Sprinkle, Luke Dixon, and my professors at Union Theological Seminary for the trust with which they have allowed me to wander. With gratitude to my elders who have agreed to mix and mingle in me with openness. I appreciate them dearly at a time when the world is falling apart due to intolerance, not to mention misunderstanding of each other.

May religion be at the forefront of social justice and break away from any oppressive and excluding tenets. May art be the liberating agent that it purports to be, and that it aspires to be, one outside of the trappings of ego, fame and celebrity.

Your art chaplain (that is, until I can un-think of these two words)

Nicolás Dumit Estévez Raful Espejo Ovalles Morel

I dedicate this essay to my cousin Sahira Raful

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