‘Processional cross depicting Our Lord at the center of the vine which depends on Him for life.’

I am the vine, you are the branches (John 15:5)

 

In the dim morning light

A simple brass cross stands on the altar,

Flanked by the minimum two candles,

In this otherwise austere Norman church.

 

The congregation slowly assembles.

The lights go up ready for the ‘performance’,

Transmuting the base metal into glistening gold.

 

In a trick of the light the flat surface of the cross

Becomes a bas relief of Our Lord, a crucifix.

This happens most weeks,

Nothing unusual.

Forcing your eyes to focus can make it disappear.

 

I look away, talk to a friend.

When I return, the cross is transformed once again,

This time to become a living thing –

Cross and vine and tree and Saviour

All indissolubly intertwined,

With arms as branches, torso as trunk,

And ripe grapes fruiting extravagantly.

 

Shocked at this hallucination, I blink and rub my eyes.

I invoke the minor gods of normalcy and routine

(We have reached the second hymn)

But they refuse to answer my call.

The Arcimboldo crucifix is apparently a reality, at least to me.

 

Later, I walk up to the aisle to test my eyesight.

The image remains intact until I reach the communion rail.

A month goes by, but the impact does not fade.

My conscious mind can neither absorb it, nor dismiss it.

At the moment of his death, the cosmic Green Man breaks

The laws of physics to become Dionysus?

 

I try to recreate the moment

But of course it will not happen again –

That door is closed for now.

Gradually the image becomes part of me

(But demands I attempt to share it).

 

Good Friday and Easter Day are one to the Lord of life?

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“We live together, we act on, and react to, one another; but always and in all circumstances we are by ourselves. The martyrs go hand in hand into the arena; they are crucified alone. Embraced, the lovers desperately try to fuse their insulated ecstasies into a single self-transcendence; in vain. By its very nature every embodied spirit is doomed to suffer and enjoy in solitude. Sensations, feelings, insights, fancies—all these are private and, except through symbols and at second hand, incommunicable. We can pool information about experiences, but never the experiences themselves.”

So said Aldous Huxley in “Heaven and Hell” (1954).

I am very conscious of the difficulty of communicating experiences of this sort, and I have of course failed. But sometimes it is impossible to resist the urge to try.

 

Epilogue on Easter Monday 2019

Looking through my Twitter feed before breakfast, I find this (hitherto unknown to me) piece by one of my favourite Christian poets, R S Thomas.

“Not the empty tomb

but the uninhabited

cross. Look long enough

and you will see the arms

put on leaves. Not a crown of thorns,

but a crown of flowers

haloing it, with a bird singing as though

perched on paradise’s threshold.”

 

R S Thomas