VICAR'S LETTER
17
Sundon Road
Streatley
July, 2007
Dear
All
Those of you who know Margaret Rhodes may have noticed that she is suddenly looking a lot older. There is a reason for this. She has taken on the utterly thankless task of trying to teach the Vicar the rudiments of painting. The current project is a scene in Tuscany, and it is the preparation for that project that prompts this month's reflection.
The starting point was a slide taken on our walk through Tuscany last year. The picture itself is satisfactory. You couldn't have a more Tuscan scene. A white road, lined with cypresses, leads the eye down to the rows of vines that occupy the valley in the middle distance. Beyond these rises a hill crowned by a walled village.
There is, however, a problem. To draw from a slide is not easy. You can't project it onto a screen because it will burn out long before you're finished. On the other hand, a slide viewer is rather small especially when it comes to drawing the detail.
The solution seemed to be supplied by the use of a rather fancy computer controlled printer (so much for a return to the simplicities and carefree days of a pre-technological age) which could take the slide, process and enlarge the image, and print it out, to manuscript quality, on watercolour paper.
The print solved one problem but, sadly, it created another. It provided a clear picture of an appropriate size but the picture itself was dull. It had colour but no light. All the liveliness and sparkle that came from the light shining through the slide had gone.
It struck me that the print and the slide offer an analogy between what contemporary culture encourages us to be and what we are actually called to be. Contemporary culture urges us to be ourselves. It urges us to be uninhibited, even forceful, in putting across our views and projecting our personality. In doing so, however, it produces the equivalent of a print. The onlooker sees a clear image but it is opaque. One cannot see through it to what lies behind. By contrast, what we are actually called to be is transparent. We are to be people through whom the light of God shines. We are to be people through whom others catch a glimpse of what lies beyond.
It is perhaps the recognition of this calling that has helped to make stained-glass one of the principal forms of Christian art. In stained-glass windows one sees the figures - Jesus, Mary, the disciples, the prophets - but one sees the light shining through. They offer the perfect image of what al l of us are called to be.
All best wishes,
Roger