The Record Online

Spring/Summer 2001

Listening to the Stone

The Scriptures tell us that if we do not give an adequate expression of praise to God, the very stones of the earth will cry out. In the last years, I have discovered the profound truth of that statement. Steve Heilmer has taught me that lesson, and his latest work “Gratia Plena: Mother’s Milk” demonstrates it well.
Anyone who will spend a moment or two with the stone that Steve has given himself to for the past four years will hear its voice and join in the hymn of praise. This artist has helped me to hear voices that have been sounding all around me for years, but to which I had been deaf. They are the voices of nature, the past, my own mistakes, the quiet outcasts of our society; they are the voices of God.
Like the prophets of old, Steve Heilmer has heard God’s voice, and his work resounds with “Thus saith the Lord” to any who have ears to hear. I have heard the echoes of that voice and it has transformed my life. I too have become an artist.

Most of us see a work of art and marvel at the unusual talent of the artist declaring that we have no artistic talent or ability to interpret the strange world we see before us. But to those who have “ears to hear” (a statement that most simply means the desire to listen), a world of meaning begins to open up. If an artist takes years to create a work, shouldn’t the viewer take possibly an hour or more to observe it? It is not the esoteric nature of the artist’s world that renders his work odd, fabulous, and often inaccessible, but our unwillingness to sit quietly before it, to ask questions of it, or to engage the artist.

Coming to know Steve Heilmer helped me to overcome my slowness to hear. Through my friendship with him and his colleague in the Greenville College Art Department, Guy Chase, I have come to understand that true art is always Christ-like in the fact that it takes radically normal, earthy stuff and creates something radically other-worldly through juxtaposition and presence. In these simple acts we discover the possibility that we too might become a child of God or even an artist. Steve Heilmer has created a spectacular sculpture at the price of giving four years of presence to a simple stone. What might we produce with the same kind of presence?

As a minister, I began to understand the power of rare presence when I was dealing with the seriously ill, the dying, and the grieving. The extent of suffering they experience made anything I might say seem hollow. Such suffering, however, demanded my presence. I could not simply turn away.

The long history of religious tradition teaches us that in the helplessness of that mute presence, God appears and often speaks. Since I know Steve, I know he gives that sort of presence to his work, and as a result, it comes alive. Steve has resurrected a seemingly lifeless stone and given it a voice, movement, and personality. When I first saw it, I was compelled to embrace it. I heard its voice.
Long before I heard a single syllable, however, Steve had been listening to stones. A student of stone carving, he had traveled to Italy to find and purchase some of the finest marble in the world. Michelangelo had seen and heard this marble speaking, and responding, gave us some of the most enduring images of Western Civilization. Steve wanted to hear those voices too.

Arriving at an Italian quarry, he witnessed a scene common to our contemporary ethos. Giant cutters stripped the mountain of its flesh, producing rectangular stone clones that could be taken all over the world where the technical powers of our machinery would impose preconceived shapes and images upon them. The only sound that a stone produced like this could manage would be a scream. On that first visit, Steve simply could not bring himself to purchase one.
Eventually he discovered in a heap of rubble a stone that had proven unwilling to yield to the power of the huge saws. It had broken free and rolled to the bottom of the mountain. Though it lay rejected, Steve heard it and inquired about a price. The stonecutters gave it to him free of charge.

Returning to Greenville, Steve set the stone in the studio and for ten years worked and walked around it. In that time he listened. His own experience of being set aside as an eccentric artist, the lactose intolerance of his body, the birth of his children, and the continued exam-ination of his own experience forced him to develop a new language with which he could speak about his faith.
That new language gave him both a voice and ears to hear. Those ears heard the stone, and in what seemed like moments to anyone who does not understand the necessity of presence to a work of art, he produced the “Nativity Stone: Mother’s Milk,” the forerunner of his new statue of Mary, which resides today in the Museum of Contemporary Religious Art at St. Louis University.
As a teacher and student of the Bible, I use biblical terms and metaphors, and under those terms I qualify Steve as a prophet. Prophets are persons with the gift of seeing. Like a prophet, Steve sees the hand of God in things like stone or wrecked cars. As an artist, he becomes the voice of God pointing His presence out to the rest of us. Prophets often speak a different language than the populace, and their dramatic and stunning works of art capture our attention before our understanding.

Many might ask the artist/prophet to change his methods or language, but that would be tantamount to asking him to betray his gift. Merely engaging Professor Heilmer in conversation requires openness to conversion. This is a rare commodity at Greenville College, where testimony to previous conversion sometimes leaves us closed to new conversions.

His recently completed piece is one of many that continue to be born out of this prophet’s vision. I too have been reborn because of it.

Rick McPeak is assistant professor of philosophy and religion at Greenville College and a member of the pastoral team of St. Paul’s, a Free Methodist Fellowship in Greenville. In May 2001 he completed his Ph.D. in Historical Theology from St. Louis University. In 1998 McPeak began doing what he calls “artistic meditations,” culminating in his own art show at the college’s Archer Hall Art Gallery around Easter 1999. Some of the works were collaborative efforts with his son Matt, a GC student.

Last updated: July 17, 2001