With all due respect to Luis of Reidarmas.com, I started picking at his lovely rendering, and you know what happens when you keep picking at something: it gets infected. What got the ball rolling was my curiosity as to whether the design was in conflict with established rules of heraldry.
(I do not mean to imply that Luis is unschooled in the rules of heraldry. Moreover, his designing skills in this regard are exquisite, taking what someone gives him, at the very least. This was more a problem of my lack of contentment. In many respects I am chaotic.)
New Direction - Which is to say, Any
I consulted someone who designs and comments on designs of ecclesiastical heraldry. He recommended several changes, not considering any of them particularly mandatory, but some more than others.
First among the issues was the two swords crossing the river. Second, the consultant discouraged the profuse representation of all these areas of my life, assignments, etc., a common practice in contemporary heraldic design. It becomes a two-dimensional version of those charm bracelets that were all the rage a few years ago. Overkill.
A coat of arms is more of a personal statement than a treatise on priesthood, which (unsurprisingly, intentionally) I was making it out to be. Not the first time I've been accused of trying too hard. Not that it has stopped me since. At any rate it's not improper (certainly not sinful) to ascribe loftier applications to heraldic components, even at the risk of abject eisegesis.
As I compose this post, I am awaiting reply from my consultant. But I would not wait to revise the heraldry according to my best attempts to simplify in ways meaningful and not gratuitous.
The good folks at Fleur-de-lis Designs (fleurdelis.com) incarnated what you see below on the right, substantially based on what you see below on the left, substantially based on the sketch I provided the original artist Luis. Hopefully that’s it now for revisions.
Here’s your hat: what’s your hurry?
As a bearer of ecclesiastical arms, I do not need any particular charge within the shield to represent the priesthood as such. The galero (hat) takes care of that. For a simple priest, the galero is black with one black tassel on each side.
This rounded style very much resembles one I fancied on the inter-webs. The new designer reworked it for my project.
Will you accept the charges?
“Look, Lord, here are two swords!” (Luke 22:38). And then there was one; and a single sword could represent to me not only my secondary nominal patron/first parochial patron Archangel Michael, but also the Lithuanian Vytis. The consultant suggested it could go inside the azure wavy, which I call the “blue river” for my purposes, provided it was metal-on-color.
As for that wavy, it had been stationed per pale (from top to bottom), but now it is per bend sinister (diagonally from bottom to top). Call it a tribute to writing with the sinister hand, which was no crime by the time I was taught how to write.
I switched out the argent (silver) flame with an or (gold) burning bush, following a long-held personal devotion to Moses’ encounter with a burning-but-not-consumed YHWH on Mount Horeb (Ex 3), with its Marian overtones in the Fathers. An icon of the Mosaic meetup appeared in a book on iconography that I consulted for a paper in college seminary. Love at first sight! I think it fed into my love of the color orange.
The plow had less personal significance (aside from my fond years at St. Charles Borromeo Seminary, on whose shield it is a heraldic charge), so I changed it to a blended charge representative of Saint Joseph, my Confirmation saint (and my late father’s first name). The argent (silver, kinda white) lily and or (gold) carpenter’s square fit fine against the gules (red) background.
That gules background is 1/2 the color of the Polish flag and 1/3 the color of the Lithuanian flag. Maybe I had just put a quarter into an online coat-of-arms composer, and it spit out two coats, one for Zelonis predominantly gules and one for Welker (Mom’s maiden name) azure. I didn’t think those families were important enough to merit their own heraldry, but who knows?
The name Zelonis is close to the Lithuanian word for the color gray, zilys. Aside from the cursory Google search of databases, I haven’t found any official meaning to my surname, which for all I know was an anglicization. If there is any connection to gray, my current shield shows it only in the sword and the lily.
Border warfare
The more-rounded shield is surrounded by alternating sable (black) and argent (silver, a heraldic fudging of ivory): perhaps a persnickety personal stamp but, to my mind, sharp. Not as “sharp” as the sword hashtag, I grant. Clever, but not contrived.
The most recent example is found around the shield of Bishop Timothy Christian Senior; the description of his coat of arms called it a bordure compony. If it has a fancy name, it must have some pedigree in the heraldry business.
Since the heraldry is meant to reflect the person of the armiger (bearer of arms) more than his office, it seemed fit to adopt this border as a nod to my love of performing and listening to music; better, too, as a border than yet another charge.
Taking Occam’s Razor to the Motto
The final changed component was the motto. Ever before knowing simple priests could “bear arms,” I would take note of Scripture verses as future mottos, as part of a fascination with ecclesiastical heraldry, vesture, etc.
My ordination holy card boasted a burning bush, and, below it (in English), Hebrews 12:29: “For our God is a consuming fire.” Soon after ordination, I had a local printer make me stationery that featured at the bottom a burning bush and the Latin version of that motto.
So why didn’t I choose that verse? Mysteries abound. It certainly factors into my conception and experience of God, and my esteem of the mystical tradition. It was one of many intriguing excerpts of Scripture and other Church documents that I have been writing down or highlighting over the years.
Settling on a single statement has proved difficult for me. I think that’s why I first chose Matthew 13:52 (“He brings forth from his treasury both the new and and the old”—qui profert de thesauro suo nova et vetera).
As I type, its appeal once again strikes me. That’s how volatile my fancies fly. I have old choices, I have new choices. One after another I bring them out of my storeroom, show them off, and put them back. That’s a good description of the preacher’s craft, come to think of it.
Can I take a moment to relish the pun on “thesaurus”? I love words: I love to use them, especially big ones, obscure ones, foreign ones. No meadow is free from my word-wantonness (cf. Wis 2:9). Preachers draw words from their treasuries, and the Church’s treasury, in their feeble attempts to express the Word Incarnate.
But Saint Paul’s intention expressed in 1 Thessalonians 2:8 also describes the minister of the Word: he said he and his companions wanted to share “not only the Gospel of God, but [their] very selves as well” (non solum evangelium Dei, sed etiam animas nostras). Not only a content, but a contender.
That phrase (from 1 Thess, not the one about a contender, though I could’ve been!) eventually replaced the one from Matthew, like another note from the treasury. How can the preacher not invest himself in his ministry, to the extent that he conveys much of himself in the process of conveying Christ?
Since the paradoxical inclusion of apparent opposites is much at the heart of Catholic theology and spirituality, I figured, why not abbreviate it to the relevant adverbs non solum sed etiam: “Not only, but also”?
Species of the Origin
Doubtless you may say, as did the bystanders of Zechariah and Elizabeth, “Nobody in your family has this name,” meaning “Nobody else has used this as a motto.” You’re probably right.
But forget about the novelty: does it even make any sense? Maybe not by itself, but as it can be applied to any number of aspects in Catholic life. So is it wise to blazon it by itself? I will let this rhetorical question ring out into the ether.
Everybody has been reminding me this is my coat of arms and I need not be exceedingly dependent on anyone else’s opinion. Well, that has never satisfied me. I will do my best to remain at least somewhat unsatisfied. It’s my nature, at least as of right now.
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