THOUGHT FOR THE DAY varies in its memorability. Some you catch; some you do not. Recently I caught one that recreated a summer’s day, Box Brownie and all. It was about losing the nearness of Christ. Particularly in old age. To illustrate this loss, the speaker used a painting by Raphael, The Madonna of the Pinks. A handsome Italian woman sits for the great artist, but her son does not. Being a toddler rather than a baby at breast, he has to be kept still, and his mother achieves this by means of a flower.
Ages ago, in a Suffolk meadow, another lady arranges the four of us in a flowery meadow to take our photo. Unlike now, she poses us, a baby sister and three brothers in sailor suits, like a reduced cricket team. One of my brothers is chewing a bit of grass, and the other is, like the Lord, kept from wriggling by a bright object — a bunch of keys.
Tall August plants waver above us. A few yards away, and out of sight, there is a deep pit in which men dig clay for bricks. The men have been to the Western Front and to Gallipoli. The lady’s snaps will be sent to Chester to be developed for one-and-sixpence. After the holiday, she will return to London, to our grief; for we love her, although we have long forgotten her name. But the four children go on sitting in the grass for ever, the restless one stilled.
The Lady in the Raphael picture is as close as anyone can get to the Son, and the worshippers in the darkly rich church would have come close because of her. The artist, too, was youthful and beautiful, dying at 37 on Good Friday, the same day he was born.
He was able to reveal in his work the energy that lies in stillness. His mother was heartbroken when they sent him away to be a student, to paint other mothers as the Mother of God, but keeping them human. Like Mary. When Millais painted Jesus as a lad in the carpenter’s shop, with grubby feet and workworn hands, the Victorians went wild. But as they said in the synagogue after he had read the lesson so wonderfully, “Isn’t he the carpenter’s son?”
And wasn’t he the walker? Art tends not to show him striding out, on the move, travelling. But poetry does. One of the reasons we go to church is to catch up with him, since he is so out of sight at home. Liturgy causes us to put a spurt on, as do many “walking” hymns. We tramp through office, garden, the dreadful afternoon telly, the supermarket, the money, and he is a mere dot in the distance, far, far ahead, undiverted by what diverts us most, and strangely most out of sight when we are in the fast car or train.
The Queen in Alice in Wonderland says: “Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place.” Religion itself keeps on the go; yet it can get us nowhere. Often, in our country churches, I talk of John Bunyan (the congregations are tolerant of my heroes), a big man with a slow step who remapped Bedfordshire for Christ and the reading world. “Come, my Way, my Truth, my Life: Such a way as gives us breath,” wrote his near-contemporary, out of puff because of illness.