The Washington Post called Patrick Bringley’s memoir All the Beauty in the World: The Metropolitan Museum of Art and Me, “Exquisite… A beautiful tale about beauty.”
The memoir describes how Bringley spent a decade as one of 500 museum guards watching over treasures from Egypt to Rome and the wonders of the museum that we might miss.
He also describes interactions with museum visitors including, as he writes, “one day… a devout Muslim visitor asks me if we are facing east. He and I are looking at a prayer niche called a mihrab that orients worshippers in the direction of Mecca. I think about it a moment and tell him yes, we are.
He asks if he is permitted to pray. I tell him in stillness, yes, of course… He thanks me, folds his hands, and stares intently into the niche. I do likewise and think about how it must be to have a single central point, in this case an actual latitude and longitude, to orient one’s faith. For the visitor, this work of art is a gateway, on the other side of which lies holiness.”
Do you have “a single central point” in your life?
A direction, an orientation, a work of art, that points you towards holiness?
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