Now, over the course of my pilgrimage here on Earth, I have been in many different churches—Baptist, Foursquare, Pentecostal, and non-denominational—and, inside all of them, the one thing they have in common is the complete absence of art in the main sanctuary. This is the general rule, which appears to be obeyed with such regularity that any deviation from the rule, precisely because of the extraordinary rarity of such a deviation, will appear to be even more remarkable. As far as I can remember, at the most, there might hang, usually in the foyer, a framed reproduction of Warner Sallman's famous, kitschy portrait of XP, the painting which depicted Him with long wavy brown hair and beard and tanned skin, with indistinct lighting that seemed to come from somewhere below, or above, or wherever. And in some churches, I remember occasionally seeing amateurish trompe l’oeil landscapes painted on the wall behind the baptistry tank, often depicting a phthalocyanide green river seeming to empty its swampy waters into the tank, never to reach the sea.

The one remarkable exception to this rule, that I can remember, is Angelus Temple in Los Angelus. I had been inside of it on about a half dozen occasions, it being built by Aimee Semple McPherson as the focal point for the Foursquare denomination, which she founded back in the Roaring 1920s. She was a flamboyant lady evangelist, who herself would make an interesting subject for a book, and indeed many books have been written about her. For example, she once dressed as a highway patrolman and rode a motorcycle up the aisle, parked it at the mourners’ bench, dismounted, rose to the pulpit and announced “I arrest you all for breaking the Laws of God” (or something very close to that effect). But one thing is certain, she had no qualms about art appearing in the main sanctuary. Angelus Temple is about three stories high and is topped with a shallow round dome. Inside, high and directly above the dais, where the pulpit is located, there is an enormous mural, close to the dome, depicting the glorified XP, and to His left and right are long lines of angels bowing in worship of Him. It was a startling mural for me to see, mainly because it was so uncommon, and it was also, artistically speaking, not too badly done, other than the fact that over the years the mural needed cleaning to restore the colors to their original brightness. Angelus Temple is itself an unusual building, especially when I compare it to the type of architecture commonly used by evangelical churches nowadays. While Angelus Temple might be said to reflect a vague Roaring 20s sort of grandeur, nowadays church architecture is more like Great Big Boxes, and, more than anything else, they resemble high school auditoriums and basket-ball courts. In fact, the church I'm currently attending is precisely that. On the outside it looks like an gigantic warehouse, and inside it is a basket-ball court, the hoops on Sundays being pulled up to the ceiling by complicated mechanics. Visually speaking, the place is an aesthetic desert.

I am not saying that evangelicals have no art whatsoever. Not so. I can distinctly remember the illustrative art that often was found in the Sunday school literature, and some of it was fairly competent, and often vividly conveyed to my imagination various episodes in the Bible. I can never forget one picture showing the aged Jacob finally meeting again his son Joseph, whom for years he had given up for dead; or the picture showing the paralyzed man being let down from the ceiling, whom XP looked upon with compassion, telling him that his sins were forgiven. Yes, evangelicals do have art, but it is not ostensible art. Generally speaking, it's just never allowed to protrude into the main sanctuary, into the main activity of the church.

There is one thing that does protrude and that is “multimedia.” It seems lately that churches have mounted computer display projectors and white-screens. All manner of multimedia is employed on Sundays. Hymnals have been done away with: Now the words that go with the music is projected on the white-screen, and behind the words there is often graphical “eye-candy,” some of which can be truely ghastly; and when it is animated, it can be downright distracting and irritating. But fortunately, most of the time, it is merely barren. Then there are the topical multimedia “presentations,” montages of video clips often combined with music (usually “contemporary” xtian music), designed to be motivational kick-starts. A multimedia presentation now and then is fine, but when it is used every Sunday, well, it can get wearisome. In any case, despite the abundance of multimedia, there still remains a paucity of beauty, largely so.

Now, inspite of all this, I was somewhat prepared ahead of time for what I saw inside St. Ignatius, and that is because my college education focused mostly on art and English literature. In fact, for a while I thought of pursuing fine arts as a possible career, and even did some painting and drawing. (My teachers gave me good grades, so I must not have been too bad at it.) But during the process, I took at least eight semester units of Art History, in which I did very well. I seemed to have an ability to remember paintings and artists. So I knew what Xtian art was capable of, the heights it could reach. And sometimes I wondered why so much of it was in the past.

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We arrived and saw a red brick church building, which was hundred and twenty feet long by sixty feet wide. The brick give it a heavy, almost weary, ambience, but the building was smaller than what I was expecting. It was compact and inert. In front of it was a large green lawn. The property on which it stood, and the lawn, were enclosed by a chainlink fence, and the church rose at its belfrey to a height of a hundred feet. There was a narrow asphalt parking lot on the right side of the structure. We drove by once, but were concerned about the gate if it was locked, which would have shown that it was not the time for visitors. But just at that moment two ladies came out of the church doors, and by their demeanor, we concluded that they must have been tourists like ourselves. One of them had a camera and was taking pictures. So we turned around and parked the car and got out. There next to the sidewalk, that came from the gate, which had a small sign on it saying “please keep closed”, was a very large sign which briefly explained the history of the St. Ignatius mission. One of the ladies stepped back and took a picture of it, and the both of them then left without saying anything to us. My wife needed to find a restroom, and fortunately there appeared to be one unlocked, apparently just for visitors, on one side of the broad concrete stepway that rose up, about ten feet as I recall, to the brown wooden front doors that led into the main level of the sanctuary. That the main level was so elevated above the ground suggested that the building had a very spacious basement. Now that we both felt more sure that the building was open to visitors, we mounted up the concrete steps, which here and there had small chunks broken off, leaving various edges showing nicks, a testimony to the years they had spent being walked on and being weathered by the harsh Montana winters. We came to the wooden doors and walked boldly through into a small, square foyer. Although St. Ignatius was open to the public to receive visitors, it being an historical landmark in Montana, as well as being on the list of historical places in the United States, it was still being used as a place of worship. There on the bulletin boards in the foyer were various church annoucements, and, as I recall, I took special note of one that had pictures of three young children who were scheduled for confirmation, one of whom was apparently a young Indian girl, or so I judged by her wide face, her dark hair, and her smile. I spent a minute looking over the bulletins, perhaps feeling still a little hesitant about entering. The last Catholic church I was ever in was the very dark and dreary and old, but still used at least back then, sanctuary of California mission San Juan Capistrano. But this had been many years ago. My wife was much bolder than myself and was already inside. She had already been in several Catholic churches on different occasions, the last of which was a funeral mass for her girlfriend’s mother, who had died recently after a long struggle with ovarian cancer. I could hear my wife calling me from inside. So I stepped in.

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It’s about 32 miles up state highway 93 to the town of St. Ignatius, and along the way one drives through a short pass which connects Jocko Valley, on the southern end of the reservation, with the Bitterroot Valley, where Missoula is located. Once inside the reservation, one can see off to the east the Mission Range mountains, and off to the west the distant folds of the Bitterroot mountains, which divide Montana from Land-In-Between. The air that day was somewhat hazy with moisture because it was overcast, and it had been raining sporadically all that morning. Some people find such weather depressing, however I don’t. I enjoy cool drippy weather, which may be because of the many years I spent enduring the unending desert heat of Southern California where I grew up.

After a short drive, we arrived in St. Ignatius. It was a small town and mostly had the motionless and run-down appearance common to rural towns going through the end-game of economic decline, although I did note that apparently a new business of some sort had opened up just south of the town beside highway 93, something called “SK Technologies”. But we had driven past it too quickly for me to be sure of the name on its outdoor sign, and a later search on the Internet yielded no definite information about any “SK Technologies” located in Montana. With only a few exceptions, many of the homes in St. Ignatius seemed neglected and worn-out, as though their inhabitants had lost hope and given up and now had become too insensible to maintain their houses. A large sign marked the turnoff to go to the mission just before on enters the main segment of the town.

Originally the St. Ignatius Mission was not located in St. Ignatius, Montana. Named after St. Ignatius of Loyola, the spaniard who founded the Jesuits, the mission at first was set up in the Land-In-Between in 1845 by Jesuits Peter DeSmet and Adrian Hoecken, near the border with Washington. However, the original location was later deemed unsuitable for a variety of reasons, and it certainly would not have been easy walking distance to get there from Montana. In any case, by the year 1854 the mission was moved to the placed called “Snieleman”, which is a word in the Salish language meaning “rendezvous.” This is the present day location of the town of St. Ignatius. Due to a sudden spurt of urban development, by 1855 the mission had grown to consist of a chapel, two small log cabins, a carpenter shop, and a blacksmith shop. I would imagine that, hopefully, the log cabins were warm and comfortable, because sometimes winters in Montana can be truely fearsome. It is estimated that during this time there were as many as a thousand Indians camped near near the mission.

It was also in the same year of 1855 that the territorial governor, Isaac Stevens, representing the United States, made a treaty with the combined tribes of the Flatheads, the Pend d’Oreilles, and the Kootenais, for the establishment of the Flathead Reservation. The occasion of the enactment of this treaty was called “the Council of Hell Gate”, which took place near the site of present day Missoula. But what it was about the location of Missoula which associated it with an infernal “Hell Gate” is somewhat unclear to me. The treaty stipulated that the Federal government was to make provisions for the reservation to have schools and a hospital, along with other financial assistance. And the treaty, along with subsequent stipulations made by the President and Congress, required the Flatheads to relinquish their occupancy of the Bitterroot Valley and to relocate to the Jocko Valley in the present day reservation. However, not all of the Indians found this agreeable. One group of Flatheads, under the leadership of Chief Charlot, long resisted making the move, but by the year 1891, they were finally compelled to relocate to Jocko Valley. And for its part, unsurprisingly, the federal government didn’t fully live up to the terms of the treaty either. The severe distraction of the Civil War had probably made it difficult for the federal government to budget resources for the provisioning of obscure tribal peoples living in remote territories. As I have said earlier, many times Montana gets ignored by the rest of the country. But no matter whose side one takes in the story, or where on wishes to assign the blame, the outcome was what it was.

All during these ups and downs, the St. Ignatius Mission expanded, beginning with the addition of a flour mill and a saw mill. The saw mill was particular important because it made it possible to produce lumber needed for further construction. The first church was built in 1864. Also in that year, as the Civil War was reaching its conclusion, four Sisters of Providence came all the way from Montreal, Canada, to start a girls’ boarding school and a hospital. The Providence Holy Family School, as it was called, became the first Catholic school to be operated in Montana, and it continued in existence until a fire destroyed it in 1919. During the years running from 1875 to 1900, the mission continued to expand its work, leading to the creation of a school for boys for the teaching of industrial and agricultural arts and sciences. A printing press was also set up, which produced various books written in the tribal languages. The presently standing church building, a tall structure of red brick which I and my wife had come to see, had its foundation laid in 1891, a year which might be said to mark the zenit of the mission, for after that time, various setbacks overtook St. Ignatius. For over the years that subsequently followed, with the cutting of federal funds, the ending of help from the Catholic Indian Bureau, and the various disasterous fires, the mission was reduced to a bare relic of its former self. The only things now left are the red brick church building, a small rectory behind it, and, to the side of it, the original log cabin built in 1854, which now serves as a small museum.

[to be continued]