OPINION: The Olympics’ ‘Last Supper’ scene demanded our attention

As the great Fran Lebowitz has said, “Being offended is the natural consequence of leaving one’s home.” If the Opening Ceremonies of the Paris Games were offensive to various purported spokespeople for Jesus, Donald Trump or Harris Faulkner of Fox News, then they better avoid the Musée d’Orsay, train stations and the public streets. When it comes to art, they should stick to calendars.

The Opening Ceremonies clearly aspired to be art, as designed by theatrical director Thomas Jolly, who has staged works for the Paris Opera. You may debate among yourselves whether he achieved it. But you may not tell me what should offend me. You know what does offend me? Paintings titled “Untitled.”

The Paris Games have been a glory so far — the athletic spiraling against those spectacular ancient plein-air venues qualifies as artistry in and of itself. The acrobatic, vivid Opening Ceremonies in a way set the tone for your perception of all of it, persuading the audience to look at spangled bodies bounding through the air as art and athletes as artists, painting the air in their own way. And if they’re ephemeral, they’re nevertheless painted on our minds. Jolly’s creation referenced art in almost every phase — music, literature and painting, literally “framing” the Games.

Why some church leaders are so often hostile to experimental art and treat it as anti-faith is an unanswerable question. But it’s certainly not a modern phenomenon. Those flogging the Opening Ceremonies over one fleeting pagan tableau in a spellbinding four-hour ceremony belong to the same dry line of self-appointed judges left in the dust of history who misjudged works in their own day for not being properly venerating. The ones who scolded Delacroix, for his “Christ in the Garden of Olives,” because he gave the body too much “ochreish flesh modeling.” Or Manet for his “Dead Christ,” excoriated as “audaciously bad taste, the negation of scientific anatomy, spoiled color.” Religious critics seem to reserve the right to be censorious not just in the use of paint but in depictions of physique.

If you think Jolly’s tableau of vampers and drag queens was unsettling to your Christian sensibilities, for God’s sake don’t go into the Musée d’Orsay and see Jean Delville’s “L’Ecole de Platon,” a monumental canvas that appears to portray Jesus surrounded by voluptuous, naked, androgynous disciples with limbs wound sensuously around each other. Offensive? Maybe, until you learn the painting is actually of Plato, meant to signify the transition from the pagan world to the Christian one, and the hermaphrodites were considered by the painter representative of purity and evolution toward divinity. Then you pay closer attention.

The purpose of art is to command your deep attention — not in a narcissistic way but in a self-reflective one. Just like athletics. Or faith. The great Presbyterian minister, writer and theologian Frederick Buechner, who began his adult life as a novelist before entering the seminary, believed art was not hostile to faith but its mimic. “From the simplest lyric to the most complex novel and densest drama, literature is asking us to pay attention,” he wrote. “Pay attention to the west wind. Pay attention to the boy on the raft, the lady in the tower, the old man on the train.”

If we are to love our neighbors, Buechner preached, we first have to see them, attend to them. That is all Jolly asked you to do in his spectacle: to see. All the religious police see are phantom insults. That drag queen sequence was meant to refer, like Delville, to Greek pagan celebrations — not, as some Christian leaders insist, to mock Leonardo da Vinci’s “The Last Supper.” Regardless of the intention, how on earth do Christian sensitivities justify making DJ Barbara Butch — who appeared in the center of that scene — the focus of vileness, death threats and antisemitism?

Buechner wrote this: “Rembrandt puts a frame around an old woman’s face. It is seamed with wrinkles. The upper lip is sunken in, the skin waxy and pale. It is not a remarkable face. You would not look twice at the old woman if you found her sitting across the aisle from you on a bus. But it is a face so remarkably seen that it forces you to see it remarkably.”

Perhaps, just perhaps, Jolly is a better, truer worshiper than his critics. At the least, he did something they have failed to do: He saw faces and framed them with interest, rather than hostility. Buechner continues: “Is it too much to say that to stop, look and listen is also the most basic lesson that the Judeo-Christian tradition teaches us? … And when Jesus comes along saying that the greatest command of all is to love God and to love our neighbor, he too is asking us to pay attention.”

Critics of the Opening Ceremonies certainly have paid attention — to all the wrong things. Buechner also wrote that it’s not quite enough just to stare at something. We also have to see, “with our imagination as well as our eyes, that is to say like artists, we must not see their faces but the life behind and within their faces.”

Sally Jenkins is a sports columnist and feature writer for The Washington Post. She began her second stint at The Washington Post in 2000 after spending the previous decade working as a book author and as a magazine writer.

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