Nautical Research Journal 323
3. L’ex-voto (Henri Royer, 1898). A parishioner installing a votive model in a Catholic church in Brittany. Musée des Beaux-Arts de Quimper, France, via Wikimedia Commons.
generally placed in the center or along the wall of the nave, among pews in a church’s sanctuary, and typically pointed toward the altar to suggest another metaphor: the entire congregation’s journey toward their heavenly home.
After an offering of a votive ship model, sailors eventually had to face seaward and venture back into the open water. Much of the spiritual appeal of the votive model is that it intimately connects the disparate spheres of work and worship. These separate spheres of life are thus symbolically enjoined. The daily vocation of the sailor—in all of its peril and glory— is brought into the sanctuary and is a reminder of the gratitude for survival in the workplace, a vast and ever-changing sea of life’s challenges.
Today, ship models are found throughout Europe where churches are close to the sea, so it has become more than a Scandinavian tradition. Ship models are in churches of all main branches of Christian houses of worship. And there are now votive ships in
4. A nave model suspended in a Northern European church; some of these models are quite large and many ‘ex voto’ models are warships, a puzzling contrarian fact. From
www.ex-voto-marins.net.
Protestant churches in New York, Texas, Wisconsin and Minneapolis. But no other country has as many church model ships as Denmark where nearly every church has one or more models.
Not a warship: selecting a nave model for St. John’s Lutheran Church
In keeping with the spirit of this centuries-old tradition, a votive ship model was commissioned by St John’s Lutheran Church of Mamaroneck, New York in early 2015. This article’s author was hired. After an eight-month build, a large sailing ship model was temporarily displayed and then permanently installed in the fall of the same year. Across the nineteenth-century sailing ship model’s stern and on its prow, it was christened and subsequently blessed with a single word: Godspeed
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