Love made Vince Mazzuchelli a calligrapher. He first turned the words of scripture into fine art in the 1970s, he said, during The Episcopal Church’s arguments over the new prayer book and women’s ordination. Vince was in favor of reforming the church he loved to make sure that all were included. For his first work, he chose a passage from First Corinthians, chapter 13, which, in the risen Christ’s words, conveyed through St. Paul, reminds us, over and over again until we get it through our heads, that love never insists on its own way.
Art and science weave together in his life. His father worked in cast stone, helping build churches and other great buildings. In the backyard of the neat little Hollywood bungalow he and John Thornbury have shared since 1976, where Canon Bob Williams and I visited the couple this week, Vince showed us a bench in the garden that his father had made.
The path to Vince’s vocation led from war games to his beautifully illuminated visions of Christ’s peace. His family was living in Fresno in 1944 when Vince was inducted in the U.S. Army. At a weather station he helped set up at Fort Bliss in Texas, he exhibited a knack for interpreting aerial photography. When the war was over, he enrolled at Fresno State. Too many late nights reminiscing with buddies about the war were bad for his grades. He recalls a D in physics.
Concerned administrators sent him for a round of aptitude tests. “They said I should be a cartographer,” he said. They were right. He went to work for the RAND Corporation in Santa Monica in the fifties and sixties. For a while, he said, defense planners running simulations of Soviet air attacks stopped commercial air traffic for hours at a time. They realized this was unsustainable. Vince was part of the team that designed less impactful computer simulations.
I’ve read a lot about the Cold War but had never heard about the Pentagon grounding civilian aircraft for tests. I asked Vince if he was permitted to tell us. He just smiled. I was relieved when a Google search confirmed it was public information. As for private information, he is proud to say that, when getting his security clearances, he never lied directly about his sexual orientation.
John was raised in West Virginia coal country. His parents were divorced, and his mother suggested that for graduate school, he try Los Angeles, where she’d come to live. His masters degrees in history and library science are from UCLA. He was working in the campus library when he and Vince, by then a college professor, first met in 1963. John had been planning to return to West Virginia and actually did. But he couldn’t forget Vince, and after a month, he came back. They’ve been together ever since, in sickness and in health, in the bosom of the better church they always believed in and struggled to help make.
They are long-time members of Saint Thomas the Apostle, Hollywood. Vince is 98, John 83. Vince’s beautiful work has long adorned the walls at St. Thomas’s. In recent years, Vince has donated illuminated passages to the diocese and several parishes. He told us he was inspired to do this by a conversation with my spouse, Canon Kathy Hannigan O’Connor, at Mount Calvary in Santa Barbara, when she was on retreat in 2019 with a group of spouses and partners of our deacons and priests.
He recalls telling the Rev. Canon John Crean once that his calligraphy was an outgrowth of his cartography. He said Canon Crean demurred, insisting that cartography had been training for his divine vocation. Vince is prepared to accept that he has been made and saved for God’s purposes. He offers two examples of earthly salvation. During his military training, he happened to cover his eyes just before some badly mixed gun powder exploded. Years later two vehicles collided on the 118, and one of them, flying through the air, missed John’s Camry by half an inch.
Thus was he preserved for all the work that still remains. As Bob and I prepared to leave, Vince showed us around his workshop in the backyard. For a few hours most days, he sits at a drafting table he built in 1943. His delicate pencil sketches become beautifully illuminated first letters. Though his eyesight isn’t what it was, his hands are strong and sure. He said it’s relatively easy to fix errors on parchment. Another couple from St. Thomas brings it to him sheet by sheet from Italy, where they have a home.
As you’re reading this, Vince may be out in his little room, surrounded by books, listening to Bach and Purcell, mixing his colors, scraping away the errant bits when he crosses one of the thin black lines he had drawn, all for the glory of God and the joy of God’s people, all for the sake of love.
