The Prayer and the Pot

The monks who established their monasteries atop the high pinnacles of the Meteora rocks, in northwestern Greece, were not lured, as are modern urbanites, by the possibility of a commanding view from the summit, nor did they see themselves as up in the air as opposed to on the ground. Rather, the monastery speaks to the interpenetration of earth and sky. It was the monks' calling to mediate the relation between the two, in the dialogue of grace and gravity. In this lies the essence of what we define as ‘meteorism'. But ceramics, too, in the gesture that turns a clay deposit into a vessel that holds, gives and receives, draws grace out of gravity. Like prayer, it is a practice of meteorism.