Met up at the Met with my favorite museum buddy, Sophia, and we took in the Byzantium: Faith and Power 1261- 1557 Exhibit. It seemed to have been a Sunday outing for some younger members of a local Eastern Orthodox Church. And we tried our bestest to trail the Russian Orthodox priest who, overwhelmed and misty-eyed, made the Sign of The Cross as he paused before each artifact. He spoke passionately in Russian, but we eavesdropped and discovered that he spoke fluent—if accented—English and was happy to talk (he had the bearing of a visiting professor) to just about anyone on a topic so close to his heart.

My favorite of the 11 galleries that comprised the exhibit was probably Gallery IV: Miniature Mosaics and Steatites. “Miniature” here refers to the eensy-weensy little tiles that are each no bigger than the head of a pin; steatites are (and this is my own simple description) insanely—I mean INSANELY!—intricate soapstone carvings. The kind that you don’t know whether the monk went mad creating it or had to have been mad to begin with. In either case, what a demonstration of devotion to sit and execute such micro-detailed work! What devotion to their religion. (How much nicer than certain 21st Century demonstrations of religious devotion.)

And then there were the books: Bibles, Gospels, Epistles, and at least one fable (taken from a Buddhist story). To me, it wasn’t so much the artwork (sometimes embellished with gold or chips of precious stones) displayed, but the fact that many of these were produced by hand. Before the invention of the printing press. The lines of text were perfectly straight. Any one of them—particularly the giant tomes—might have been some devout person’s life’s work.

I didn’t notice anything that was identified with a particular artist. Some were attributed to workshops; but for the most part we were lucky if we knew what church they had been found in. How many individuals life’s works did I see? Each an uncredited (well, un-earthly-credited) offering to someone’s god: the books, the mosaics, the carvings almost vibrated with the eternal devotion of their unnamed creators.

Art and spiritually have no clear boundaries between them.