FRANCISCAN BROTHER ROBERT LENTZ is a contradictory blend of traditional and tradition-challenging. That same surprising mix could be said to typify his contemporary approach to the ancient art of iconography.
Brother Robert’s work adorns cathedrals, churches, and homes of many faiths, though his name may not ring a bell, even among his fans.
But describe his icons of Martin Luther King Jr. or César Chávez, his portrayals of Jesus as black, Korean, and Navajo, and his non-Christian subjects including Mohandas Gandhi and the Sufi mystic Rumi, and the response may be “Oh, yes! I have one of those.”
Icons—religious paintings used as aids in Christian prayer—have been called a “doorway into the kingdom of heaven.” Brother Robert’s icons are striking, often for the contemporary twists in classically structured images, such as the army canteen held by St. Toribio Romo, a 20th century Mexican priest who is revered as the patron of migrants crossing the border. His Chávez image carries a copy of the Constitution and wears a sweatshirt with the United Farmworkers logo. “Icons may contain anachronisms,” he said, “when there is a great truth at stake.”
Brother Robert’s work—and his life—seem often to focus on such anachronisms in pursuit of truth. At 67, he is a Roman Catholic Franciscan brother in the New York-based Holy Name Province, living and working in a studio created for him in the order’s seminary near Washington, D.C. A religious brother is not a priest, though he lives by the vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience and dedicates his life to charitable service. It’s Brother Robert’s second stretch as a Franciscan, the order founded by St. Francis of Assisi. But it’s his third stint in religious life, having also come close to ordination as a priest in the Russian Orthodox Church Outside of Russia.
LENTZ WAS BORN and raised in Colorado, where Orthodox churches were few and Russians even fewer. The Lentz family’s Russian Orthodox history was downplayed in the interest of fitting into the Western way of life, he said. In the midst of the Cold War, Brother Robert grew up with Orthodox traditions at home, but the Catholic Church in practice.
At 17 he joined the Franciscans, spending 10 years as a friar in the New Mexico province. Just short of taking final vows, he left the Franciscans to pursue religious life among the Orthodox.
“I was Orthodox because I felt it was the true church” reaching back most directly to Jesus, Brother Robert said. The Orthodox Church sent him to work in an orphanage in the Andean foothills outside of Santiago, Chile. The church wanted him to marry as part of his path toward ordination, and it helped him find a wife. “It was a loveless marriage,” Lentz said. But since he sought to serve as a priest outside a monastery, he needed to marry.
Then there was a 5 a.m. raid on his home by the Chilean secret police. Six armed men, part of dictator Augusto Pinochet’s greatly feared “security forces,” broke into Lentz’s home, questioned him briefly, and tore the place apart in a sloppy search, mistakenly accusing him of being a communist. His wife, fearing that she would become one of the thousands who were tortured or disappeared under Pinochet, fled to the United States. They divorced soon after.
Ironically, Brother Robert learned through this incident (primarily by how quickly he was released after being detained) that some Orthodox Church leaders had uncomfortably close ties to the dictatorship. He began to think the church had “messed with my mind.” He said he saw that “people who claimed to be part of the one true church” had attitudes of hatefulness toward Catholics and Protestants and dangerous political alliances, such as those with the Pinochet regime. “Seeing myself in the mirror, I didn’t want to be that.” This started him on a lengthy period of spiritual searching.It also opened a path to seriously pursuing his talent as an artist. Before his break with the Orthodox Church, he spent six months as an apprentice in the
school of renowned Greek iconographer Photios Kontoglou at Holy Transfiguration Monastery in Brookline, Mass. “They also taught me to pray,” he said.
THROUGHOUT HIS HIATUS from vowed religious life, Brother Robert continued to have an active private prayer life, and he created a lot of religious art. Coming through periods of physical and spiritual wandering, including even a few months of homelessness, he built a successful career as an artist in New Mexico.
It was art that brought him back to the Franciscans of his youth. He’d heard that a monastery being built for the Franciscans was to include outdoor Stations of the Cross. The friars were searching for an artist to create images for the 15 niches. A meeting was arranged with the province superior. “We met at the building site. I had no intention except getting a job,” Brother Robert said. It turned out that the superior had been a classmate from Lentz’s decade as a novice. They spent time catching up on where their lives had taken them.
“We were going up some stairs when I blurted out, ‘I would like to end my life living in vows,’” he said, explaining that he had no idea where the declaration had come from, but knowing it to be true. “Within two weeks I was back in,” he said. “Part of me was repelled by the idea. I worried whether there was room for my art” in the religious life.
He has indeed found room for his art. He has been back with the Franciscans since 2003. “I struggle,” he said, “but I have made my commitment to the Franciscan order and I will stick with it. The friars have embraced me and I have a home among them.”
Some of his pieces are criticized for using the traditional Orthodox art form to portray people who not only aren’t canonized saints, but aren’t Christian. That is part of the apparent contradiction of Brother Robert. By some he is seen as a liberal, for painting Catholic Worker founder Dorothy Day, Harvey Milk—one of the first openly gay public officials in the U.S.—scientist Albert Einstein, an Apache Christ, and a Navajo Madonna. But his icons revered by more conservative Christians—such as St. Faustina Kowalska, a Polish nun who had divine visions, and Mary, the mother of Jesus—are hugely popular as well.
CRITICS’ OPINIONS ASIDE, Brother Robert takes quite seriously any variations he has made in the classical icon form he learned at Holy Transfiguration. “People accuse me of all sorts of things,” he said. “But any change I’ve made to the art of icons has been painful for me.”
Surprisingly, his first difficult request to paint someone outside the iconographic tradition came more than three decades ago when he was asked to paint Martin Luther King Jr. At that time, still active in the Orthodox Church, he said, “my ecclesiology didn’t include Protestants as saints. Thirty-two years ago I was not willing to paint him.” But then “I had the good fortune of having a Roman Catholic friend in San Francisco, Daniel O’Connor, who ran an urban retreat for the marginalized, people who were gay, divorced, or otherwise at odds with organized religion.
“He became my friend, and dialoguing with him—and getting to know the people who came to the retreat center—helped me to stretch my reality.”
A subsequent challenge came over whether to paint Gandhi, a Hindu. Brother Robert said he was influenced by missiologist Robert Schneider, a retired faculty member at Berea College, and by Orthodox Metropolitan John Zizioulas of Pergamon, a noted theologian, in coming to think of the “kingdom of God” in larger terms than just the followers of Christ who formally belong to the Christian faith. At the moment of the resurrection, Lentz explained, Christ became head of the “body of Christ”—the entire people of God—whether or not those people think of themselves as followers of Jesus. He considers Rumi, Gandhi, and some other non-Christians as simply a part of “the kingdom.”
“I’m not being rebellious [in who he portrays as icons], but I want to be theologically just. Gandhi and all the others are members of the body of Christ, even though they are outside the church.”
Now, part of Brother Robert’s ministry among the Franciscans is to mentor a new generation that wants to learn the art of making icons. His latest protégé, Michael Reyes, will soon be making his solemn vows, putting him on track for ordination as a priest.
“I expect great things from him,” he said of Brother Michael. “He has come to an understanding of what sacred art is all about.”
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