In New Mexico, a scholar hunts for mysteries and monsters. An apparition in a 19th-century painting stirs another liminal experience: grief.
It’s summertime and I am hosting a field school for a group of Chicana/o Studies graduate students. On our journey to explore the mysteries of New Mexico, we have come to see a 19th-century painting housed in a small chapel next to the San Francisco de Asís Catholic Mission Church in Ranchos de Taos.
The chapel docent relates some of the history of the painting, then switches the lights off. We are left in complete darkness. Outside it is sweltering, but here it is cool and contemplative.
In the light, The Shadow of the Cross, painted in 1896 by Henri Ault, is a pretty traditional religious painting that depicts Jesus in front of the Sea of Galilee. After a couple of minutes in the dark, however, the background of the painting begins to glow faintly and Jesus becomes a silhouette. As promised, a previously unseen cross appears.
The docent explains that the painter did not intentionally create the now-legendary effect, and that the type of paint that could glow in the dark like this was not available at the time. Nevertheless, the church is insistent that the painting is not a miracle—but a mystery.
As I continue to stare at the painting something unexpected occurs. I am beginning to have the perception of moving and roiling shapes on the canvas. Everyone sees something a little different, but for me the painting is coming alive. This experience feels liminal, not arising from just me or the painting, but happening in an in-between space.
The optical effects of the painting bring to mind my father, who experienced hallucinations because of Parkinson’s and then died from the disease. I realize that this is a strange opportunity to experience what he experienced, if only in a minor way, and I feel the loosening of the hold grief has on me.
This experience of the liminal is incredibly important when we are dealing with grief. According to neuroscientist Mary-Frances O’Connor in The Grieving Brain, grief is the process that occurs when the death of a loved one creates a conflict in our mind: we know the person is gone and yet we continue to expect them to be there. A liminal experience reflects this cognitive dissonance back to us. A ghostly apparition in a painting makes a weird kind of sense to me—it is here and not here, like my father.
More generally, the experience of the liminal is vital in times of transition and becoming. In these moments, liminal figures such as aliens, monsters, and ghosts are, as author Rudolfo Anaya describes them in the essay “La Llorona, El Kookooee, and Sexuality,” “guideposts” on our journey of human development. From this perspective, it makes no difference whether the aliens of Roswell, New Mexico, are real or not. They are completely absent and remarkably present. A deep wisdom throbs at the heart of New Mexican cultures that preserve these liminal mysteries.
In the experience of the liminal, we finally see, with the clearest of sight, who we actually are. And that is a rare gift.
