It is not a beautiful sculpture. Strips of steel are crudely welded together, suggesting a skeleton. Black paint has softened under decades of moss and pollen. The vaguely green face seems slap-dash, as does the red heart placed within the rib cage by one spindly, curved arm. A local stone dangles from the other arm.

But the thought behind it is beautiful: “I will take away your heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh” (Ezek. 36:26).

Sun lights the deepening green of early summer; mosquitos rise from damp undergrowth. Drawing closer to view the sculpture from a different angle, I dodge poison ivy. This is just one of many works of art at Pacem in Terris, a sculpture park in Warwick, New York, created by Frederick Franck.

Frederick Franck (1909–2006) was five years old when Germany invaded the Netherlands, just half a mile from his house, in 1914. The First World War’s carnage didn’t square with the values he’d learned from his agnostic father, whose maxim was to do good, nor with the appreciation for beauty he had absorbed from his family’s Catholic heritage. At twelve, he left Catholicism behind, but this break was just the beginning of a lifelong search for truth that would bear fruit in his art.

The teenage Franck began to create symbols of his own, such as his “cosmic fish,” with a face on each scale, representing “the oneness of the many, the many-ness of the one.” Worried that her son might starve as an artist, his mother sent him to medical school. He soon wanted out: practicing medicine wouldn’t leave enough time for art or philosophy. Luckily, he stumbled upon dentistry (only requiring six hours in the office) and was qualified to practice four years later.

Franck preferred the art scene in London to Brussels, so he set up his dental practice there. Soon it was bankrolling his artistic pursuits.

But we know that, already at this stage, he also found time on weekends to provide pro bono dental care for Welsh miners and refugees from Nazi Germany.

With a second world war looming, Franck moved to Pittsburgh in 1939, where he taught dentistry for some years, and won first prize at a Carnegie Institute art show. He eventually relocated to Greenwich Village in Manhattan, where he supplemented a moderately successful art career with two days of dental work per week.

Franck settled down enough to marry, and a son, Lukas, arrived in 1953. But the couple soon separated. Frederick met his second wife, Claske Berndes, on a trip back to Holland in 1955. They married in 1960, and she became his life partner, secretary, and editor.

I turn to face one of Franck’s most famous sculptures, which evokes six Russian nesting dolls, tapering down toward a vanishing point. The sixth and smallest figure has a transparent womb sheltering the unborn next generation. Seven Generations is based on the Native American saying that every decision should be contemplated in light of its effects on the seventh generation hence.

The work is so aesthetically striking that Frank was often commissioned to create copies; ten full-scale replicas exist worldwide. Bucknell University’s sixth piece was stolen shortly after its 1992 installation by someone who interpreted it as an anti-abortion statement. Franck sent a replacement without a fetus, and the sculpture – sans seventh generation – was rededicated by a Seneca chief.

The original piece before me is indeed pro-life in the broadest sense. Yes, unborn babies are human. But clearly a good life for that seventh generation requires more than protecting today’s unborn; it requires caring for the environment and preserving social harmony.

I met Franck’s son Lukas soon after bumping across the railroad tracks and parking in the tiny lot. He confirmed the place was open, contra Google. “First day this season,” he said. “But folks have come through anyway – at least twenty, according to the guest book.”

Although I lived in the same town, I would never have known about this place if my parents hadn’t mentioned it. They used to volunteer on spring cleanup days. Back then, they said, dozens turned out from the town. So I went online to see if I could volunteer, but there was no cleanup day this April.

On weekends, Lukas has been fixing up his parents residence, which is adjacent to the sculpture park. In the 1950s, they had purchased a dilapidated 1840s hotel and saloon and, with the help of local craftsmen, turned it into a livable home and studio. We enter the house, and Lukas tours me through rooms under restoration. The main floor remains as his parents left it: the writing desk, mainly used for correspondence, since most of Franck’s three dozen books were written in the barn; the bed, surrounded by bookshelves; the bathroom door with pictures of Albert Schweitzer, Pope John XXIII, and D. T. Suzuki.

Albert Schweitzer first captured Franck’s admiration at an organ concert Schweitzer gave in the Netherlands in the 1920s. They met decades later when a mutual friend mentioned that Schweitzer’s hospital in Lambaréné, Gabon, needed a dentist. After the horrors of the Second World War, Franck was seeking ways to recover reverence for life and build bridges between peoples. He also wanted the real suffering of others to inform his art. So Franck and Claske spent the summers of 1959, 1960, and 1961 in Lambaréné. While Claske worked as a nurse, Frederick fixed teeth and sketched people at the hospital. He wrote two books about this experience, one for children and the other for a general audience.

The following year, Pope John XXIII’s opening words of the Second Vatican Council, calling for mercy and an end to divisions, caught the attention of this lapsed Catholic. To Franck, this pope seemed so human, so humorous, a “lover of life.” So Franck traveled to Rome to observe the council and sketched the proceedings, its participants, and the streets of Rome. Franck received a papal thank-you medal for his drawings of the first session the same day he heard of the pope’s death. Material on the council and John XXIII filled another two books for different readerships.

Franck began creating Pacem in Terris in 1962, and named it after John XXIII’s last encyclical the following year. It was to be a “trans-religious sanctuary,” starting with a studio-theater-chapel built on the foundations of an old mill that had, more recently, been used as a garbage dump.

First Franck installed artworks of cement, metal, glass, and wood in the sanctuary. In subsequent years, he would fill the field with sculptures as well, most of blackened sheet metal: Saint Francis with Birds, Gestation of the Humanum, and The Hand of Suffering, a detail of the crucifixion wounds of Jesus. A steel Cosmic Fish hangs over the creek’s low waterfall, and a hand clutching a flower rises from spring floods. Over decades, another field across the tracks would come to hold dozens more sculptures, including The Unkillable Human, (a tribute to Hiroshima’s survivors, the hibakusha), Phoenix Rising, Iraq-Darfur Pieta, and Resurrection.

Near the sculptures lie the unmarked graves of Frederick and Claske, who died in 2006 and 2013 respectively. And near them stands the work Resurrection Cross. A Zen face, which appears frequently throughout Pacem in Terris, fills the Christian symbol alongside an equally syncretic message: “Do not seek me here, for I am risen. I am the living center of the heart.” It is framed by a steel enso, the Zen circle that represents completeness when closed, and the future perfection of all things when open. This one portrays the latter, wabi-sabi, the beauty of imperfection.

Franck discovered D. T. Suzuki in the 1950s and met the famed scholar and practitioner of Buddhism in 1955. But it was in the late sixties that Franck’s writings took a decidedly Zen turn. He was drawn by Zen’s appeal to universality, oneness, and harmony. Through meditation, people can perceive the human essence and become incapable of hating, let alone harming, others. The cry “To be human against all odds” runs through Franck’s work in this period. For him humanity, in the sense of being humane, is the ultimate goal of earthly existence. But before you can see the human in others, you must see it in yourself. The true and false selves, depicted frequently at Pacem in Terris, appear in some of Franck’s more interactive works. On one sculpture, the false self opens on hinges, revealing the true. On another, a mirror hides beneath the outer layer (or once did; the rusted fastenings still complete the picture).

Some sculptures, such as Face of Buddha and Mahayana Buddhist Trinity, are clearly Zen. Others, like the Resurrection Cross above, blend Christian symbols with a Buddha-like face. This face even appears on Franck’s rendering of the stations of the cross, which he recast in stained glass in the 1990s. The works are displayed alongside stained glass versions of his Oxherder pictures, illustrations of a Zen enlightenment tale that ends with the sage returning to town, externally unchanged but smiling serenely, to spread wisdom quietly among his people. At least half of Franck’s books include Buddhist themes. Though he himself cites the adage “To talk about the Zen is to destroy the Zen,” he clearly could not stop sharing the enlightenment he had found in this tradition.

In Pacem in Terris’s tiny museum I find the original of my favorite Franck sketch. Evoking a sword stuck in the ground, it portrays a wayside cross surrounded by weeds, and a Dutch village behind. Lukas tells me it was created during the five years the family spent in Holland in the early 1970s. Why do I like it? The change of perspective: mundane weeds and a forgotten wayside cross seem more important than the village steeple. And yes, it’s aesthetically beautiful.

Before Franck was a sculptor, he drew – thousands of sketches, many of them brilliant. People, places, animals. Holland, England, United States, Gabon, Rome, Japan. At first, he drew for fun, always seeking to capture the subject’s essence, not its photographic likeness. Schweitzer’s thoughtful visage glowers from the page, while John XXIII’s humor and Claske’s elegance sparkle.

Eventually, Franck’s philosophy would crystalize: “The meaning of life is to see.” Looking is superficial; seeing is deep. Art was his way to touch the essence of a subject, to caress and love it. This act connected him to humanity, rendering him incapable of harming fellow creatures.

Franck taught his meditative drawing method, “the Zen of seeing,” to hundreds of people, through books and classes. Stare at the subject – say, one wayside weed – for several minutes. Then move your pen lovingly, tracing its contours, without glancing at the paper. Only look when you’re done. It’s about the process, not the product. Franck had a penchant for using this method on nude women. Since he aimed to portray the subject’s true self, he said, he preferred older, more “interesting” models with longer stories to draw out.

Looking around, it’s easy to conclude that Pacem in Terris has fallen prey to evolving tastes. The items in the gift shop are dusty. I only meet one other visitor. But solitude is appropriate for a sanctuary, and gems lose no value through concealment. Perhaps it’s not fading with time but maturing. A one-star review on Tripadvisor rightly notes “overgrown weeds all around;” film footage from the 1990s shows Franck strolling across manicured lawns, past new steel sculptures that are sharper, starker, here more sophisticated, there more violent. Those attention-grabbing protests are now becoming invitations to contemplation.

We approach the sanctuary, lingering before Franck’s minor, yet deliberate, works of art that brighten utilitarian surfaces. Buddhist and Christian phrases intermingle, as in this flagstone: a cosmic fish that could be read as a symbol of Christ covered in Tau crosses.

We descend stone steps and pass through the sanctuary’s wooden door. It doesn’t feel like a church, nor is it designed to. But it calls to contemplation, to prayers occasionally expressed in words. I stop and pray to the God I know.

As a Christian, I believe the triune God is not the same as the gods of other religions. That Jesus was not just a wise teacher, that his words are more than philosophy. That his death was necessary atonement for real sin. Still, at Pacem in Terris, many themes salient to Christianity shine in uncustomary light: suffering, compassion, sight, rebirth, unity, peace.

Franck’s vision of humanity finding harmony, “May the spirit soar and make us creatures see our unity,” inscribed on the sanctuary’s façade and present throughout Pacem in Terris, is enthusiastically utopian, and perhaps hopelessly humanistic. But the sculptures remain, solid and steely, persistent. We still lack peace on earth. The loudest voices seem blind to our commonalities. Scant quarter is given to contemporaries, let alone the seventh generation.

Franck’s artwork gives pause. It demands reflection: on the piece, on history, on life’s meaning. Looking long enough, we see the message through the unpolished exterior. And Pacem in Terris encourages silence and prayer, whether for strangers or friends. It inspires openness to the power of the Good to transform us, to do beautiful things through us. Though we be rough-hewn, mossy, and not particularly beautiful.