Meeting God
Elements of Hindu Devotion
American Museum of Natural
History
September 8, 2001 through March 31, 2002
Since shortly after the terrorist attacks that
destroyed the World Trade Center, New Yorkers have been creating impromptu
shrines, memorializing the victims. People have placed photographs
of the dead and missing, together with flowers and American flags,
in many places, including the walls in Grand Central Terminal, Pennsylvania
Station and the 42nd Street subway stop, some of the city's most heavily
traveled junctions. Often, the memorials draw clusters of people,
commuters who have broken out of their rush to pause in silence and
reflect on lives lost on Sept. 11.
In the opinion of Stephen P. Huyler, these shrines mean that small
portions of ordinary public space have become set apart, and sanctified,
by what people have placed there. Such "sacred spaces,"
he said, "bring healing, allowing us to bridge our grief or find
a form of solace, to be quiet at a time of turmoil." Dr. Huyler
is a cultural anthropologist who specializes in India and travels
there yearly from Maine, where he lives. He has visited New York frequently
before and since the terrorist attacks. He is guest curator of an
exhibition on Hinduism Ñ "Meeting God: Elements of Hindu
Devotion" Ñ at the American Museum of Natural History.
It opened the weekend before the attacks and will run through next
Feb. 24. The exhibition, which he said is meant to introduce people
to the intimacy of devotion as it is experienced in India, includes
11 small shrines like those commonly found in that country, including
one that incorporates the base of a tree.
The exhibition's shrines contain small statues and portraits of Hindu
gods and goddesses, reflecting different aspects of the divine within
the faith. The shrines, which Dr. Huyler built, have drawn a special
interest from many of New York's Hindu residents: religious figures
conducted a ceremony consecrating the tree shrine and some anonymous
visitors have left flowers and small amounts of money as offerings,
he said. "I think a shrine is a place whose sole purpose is to
honor the sacred, whatever the sacred is to that individual,"
he said. "Often shrines are simply collections of things personal"
to those who create them. In India, the variety of these shrines shows
that there is no single, "right" way to approach the divine,
that it is an individual matter, he said.
Dr. Huyler began studying the artistic craftsmanship of people who
live in Indian villages three decades ago. But he gradually became
interested in the religious consciousness behind much of that art,
drawn in, he said, by the spirituality of "everyday women and
everyday men." He is also a photographer, and his photographs
of Hindu devotional practices are featured in the exhibition and in
a book, also titled "Meeting God" (Yale University Press,
1999). He also has a family connection with Asia, as the great-grandson
of the first missionary allowed into Korea in the 19th century, a
man named Appenzeller, who was permitted to enter the country as a
teacher, on a strictly non-proselytizing basis.
Dr. Huyler says he regards his own work on India as a transformation
of that heritage, an effort to bring understanding of a historically
Asian tradition to the United States Ñ this at a time when
Americans can no longer think of themselves as separate from the rest
of the world. In India, he said, shrines can be, and are, created
anywhere. They appear in many places, especially in the wake of disasters,
natural or otherwise. Making shrines, he said, "is something
that's natural Ñ it comes from deep within. It's an archetypal
need of mankind to create sacred space at times of great need."
Gustav Niebuhr
New York Times