Posted by If nothing else, the past couple of years has been quite a story. A story of all sorts of highs and lows, of dramas, of breakthroughs, of local heroism, national pride and international shame. It’s a story that the history books will fumble to represent fairly and a story that we will each tell in our own way to children or grandchildren. I have a new baby godson and I’ve decided that I’m going to write him a letter every Christmas talking about the year past and trying to offer whatever wisdom I have as he grows up. I wonder how you, the reader, would tell the story of the past couple of years.
Stories exist at various levels, don’t they.
We have the story of the world at large, the story of our communities, the story of our families, and then there is the story of our own lives. And all these stories make reference to different facts and figures, they make different emphases, draw different meanings. The stories interlock in some ways – but in other ways they don’t translate at all. You might be someone for whom the lockdowns were a benefit in some way, but chances are you’re someone who has been wounded in the last 12 months and your story is not at all aligned with increasing optimism in the world now that we’re all vaccinated and don’t have to wear our masks any more. Maybe there are parts of your story which are hard to articulate even to the most intimate of friends or family.
As the title image of this post I chose a 16th century landscape by the artist Pieter Bruegel. If you take a look, I wonder what you would say is the story of this picture? Well, there’s the story of the farmer ploughing in the foreground – he might be having a good day or a bad day, the shepherd in the middle – he has a completely different set of perspectives and experiences – he’s thinking about something else – all of the captains and the crews of the ships coming in and out to trade doing business. They’re all joined together in this society which has optimistic things in the horizon – the sun is rising – the world is carrying on as it does and as it must.
But also – someone in the picture is drowning. Maybe you didn’t notice those legs in the water at the bottom right. Amidst all the good news, and normality, there is unexpressed tragedy and someone is going under. This painting communicates the story of the world and the awkward, difficult interactions that that story of the world can have with the story of any particular person’s life – indeed, the story of our own lives. The painting is called Landscape with the Fall of Icarus, based on that legend from Greek mythology where Icarus flew too close to the sun – and the poet WH Auden was moved to write about it:
“About suffering they were never wrong,
The Old Masters: how well they understood its human position;
How it takes place while someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along.
In Brueghel’s Icarus for instance: how everything turns away quite leisurely from the disaster;
The ploughman may have heard the splash, the forsaken cry
But for him it was not an important feature;
The Sun shone as it had to on the legs disappearing in the green water;
And the expensive delicate ship that must have seen something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky
Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.”
It’s called landscape with the Fall of Icarus because of this horrible reality that our lives and our suffering always take place in a landscape of other things, and they are never the main thing in the world. They are the main thing to us but it’s removed from everything else going on. Someone lost to COVID is for the family and loved ones a great sadness and significant moment – but to TV News it’s just a statistic. The world just carries on as it does and as it has to. And we don’t really know what to do with that fact. There is something outrageous about it – that our pain and our dreams and the desires of our heart should matter so little to the universe as it keeps on spinning.
I take comfort in the fact that there is nothing which has happened in the past couple of years which has been a surprise to Jesus. Jesus referred to himself as The Alpha and the Omega – and I’ll write about this some more in the coming weeks – but it means that on the one hand, Jesus has the power to make sense of the story of the world and at the same time, make sense of the story of our lives. He is the only one who can hold it all together. Jesus keeps the universe spinning. But Jesus also cares about the intimate details of who we are and what we’re going through.
Living Telos 