Welcome home!

Last week a new exhibition opened at the National Gallery in London of some of the works painted by the Dutch artist Rembrandt (1606-1669) during the last 19 years of his life. On the wall beside my desk at work, I have a print of one of Rembrandt’s finest paintings from this period which isn’t on show at the Gallery, The return of the prodigal Son completed shortly before his death.

It’s based on Jesus’ famous story about the son who demanded his inheritance from his still-living father, and went off to the far country where he squandered the money and ended up in abject poverty. His thoughts and his heart are drawn homewards, and he returns to the father’s farm, penitent. He is welcomed not grudgingly, but with open arms.

Rembrandt’s painting depicts the tenderness and love of the father’s welcome. The son kneels, resting his head against the father’s abdomen, and returns the embrace. The elder brother looks on, disapproving, unforgiving.

Rembrandt struggled financially in the final years of his life. He chose to paint works which showed reality as he saw it rather than adopting the currently fashionable style which would have restored his fortune.

Throughout his life the artist painted many pictures of biblical scenes, sometimes including self-portraits of himself as a figure in the crowd. But he was particularly drawn to the story of the wayward son. In 1635 as a young man he painted The prodigal son in the tavern, a self-portrait of himself and his wife Saskia.

In the picture the son is drunk and lecherous, and Saskia is depicted as a prostitute. It’s almost as though the fashionable Rembrandt, careless of morality, reckless with money, rejoices in identifying himself with the wayward son.

In the following three decades. The artist’s life was overshadowed by tragedy – the death of his wife and three of their children – but also by greed, arrogance, and a collapse into bankruptcy. He cruelly conspired to have a woman who had raised a law case against him certified of unsound mind and committed to an asylum.

The deep truth we see in the painting from the 1660s as the son is welcomed back lovingly by the father is so profound it must surely reflect a revolution in Rembrandt’s own life and thought.

When, sitting in the office I feel perplexed or disheartened, I only have to glance at the picture on my left to be reminded that I am loved by God unconditionally and for ever.

I am convinced that the fundamental truth about God is that God is love. No matter how far we feel we are from God, no matter how much we have messed up our lives, God loves us, God is willing to forgive us even if everyone else considers us unforgivable. God waits for us to remember our identity as the Father’s children and come home – for the first or the 1000th time, and when we come we find ourselves embraced by the Father’s welcoming arms.

But what about those of us for whom the very word ‘father’ has been impossibly damaged because of our experience of bad, destructive fathering? We can think of the person who has loved us most perfectly – an aunt or uncle, a grandparent, a brother or sister, a friend. In loving us as they did, their love, despite its imperfections, reflected God’s greater love for us.

We can identify with others in the painting too. With the elder brother, unforgiving, suspicious, offended that despite his faithful work on the farm over the years the father hasn’t ever thrown a party for him like the one planned in honour of his brother’s return.

We can understand his feelings. But his reaction reminds us it’s possible for our religion to become a task to accomplish, an empty ritual, a way of shoring up our sense of identity so that we don’t experience the wonder of the Father’s love for ourselves and others, the love in which our true identity is found.

And ultimately Rembrandt’s painting challenges us to become like the Father. To be a symbol of, and more than that, a channel for God’s boundless love, offering grace, unconditional acceptance, forgiveness and healing to God’s broken people. Saying little, with no personal agendas, simply expressing the Father’s love.

There are other figures in the background of Rembrandt’s painting whom we can hardly make out. They represent all of us who don’t believe, or aren’t sure, or feel we’re unforgivable, all of us who feel wounded and broken and in darkness. They challenge us to step in to the light which radiates from the Father and so experience the embrace which healed Rembrandt and set him free to speak truth in his final great works.

(Christian Viewpoint column from the Highand News dated 23rd October 2014)

On the right track

The film Railway Man is out on DVD this week. I missed it at the cinema, and having read the autobiography by Eric Lomax on which the movie is based, I’m looking forward to catching up with it.

Lomax (1919-2012) was brought up near Edinburgh, and developed a passion for railway engines as a teenager. With the outbreak of war in 1939, he joined the Army as a Signals Officer. Taken prisoner when the Japanese captured Singapore, he was compelled (with cruel irony) to service the rolling stock used in building the ‘Death railway’ between Thailand and Burma, a brutal project leading to the deaths of 12,399 prisoners of war.

Having been caught building a radio receiver in the POW camp, Lomax and others were mercilessly beaten, waterboarded, held captive in coffin-sized cages, subjected to gruelling interrogations (‘You will be killed shortly,’said the interpreter, mercilessly) and finally imprisoned in ‘a place in which the living were turned into ghosts.’ Lomax survived the years of anguish, and returned post-war to an uncomprehending world. 

As a young man, he had come to Christian faith, joined an evangelical church in Edinburgh, attracted by their ‘fellowship and certainty’, and believed as they believed. He left for war engaged to a young woman in the church, Nan (who isn’t named in the book.) His faith and evangelical certainties sustained him during his time in captivity.

Returning from war, carrying profound psychic wounds, he married his fiancée to discover that neither she, nor the church, nor anyone else understood what he had been through or appreciated the nightmares and daylight agonies he was enduring. He tried to talk, was not heard, and clammed up for many years.

Lomax is very critical of the church, over-critical, I think in describing them as, for example, ‘certainly above compassion.’ But there are lessons for us. Lomax criticises ‘Petty divisions, petty anger, small minds.’ Does that ring true to our church experience? Are we inward-focussed, trivial, while the world aches for compassion?

How good are we at hearing people in pain, providing safe spaces when they can be open? How good are we at travelling with those whose circumstances have prompted deep questions about faith which we may never have asked? And how do we handle the questions which rise up in our own minds about, for example suffering, God, justice, the reliability of the Bible? Do we, as it seems the folk in Eric Lomax’s church did, bury them, rather than working through them? Is exploring, questioning, journeying actively encouraged in our church?

After many years, Lomax’s marriage finally disintegrated. Not just he, but his wife and daughters were victims of what had happened in Thailand. And then (on a train!) he met Patti who became his wife in 1983. Understanding of post-traumatic stress was growing, and Patti saw the pain he was bearing. 

In time found a measure of healing through counselling. But he retained a deep hatred of Japanese people. His future was still a ‘nursery of revenge.’ Then he discovered that the interpreter on whom his hatred was particularly focussed had a name – Nagase Takashi -  was still alive, had devoted his life to charity in an attempt to atone for his part in war-time atrocities, and had written a book in which he recalled, and deplored how Lomax had been treated. A Buddhist, he described a spiritual experience in which he had a sense of being ‘pardoned.’ Patti felt that he had found pardon too easily.

In the end, Lomax and Nagase met in the mid-1990s, the former still simmering with revenge. But he realised that ‘It was surely worth salvaging as much as we could from the damage to both our lives’ and so forgave Nagase. ‘Sometime the hating has to stop.’

Lomax doesn’t describe his spiritual beliefs at this time, but in offering forgiveness he demonstrates profoundly the very heart of Christian faith. The conviction that none of us is beyond redemption, that if we are humble, repentant, open to change we receive God’s forgiveness as a free gift made possible by the willing death of Jesus.

All this prompts deep questions. Is there someone I should be exploring the possibility of forgiving? Do I need to learn to accept another’s forgiveness, to forgive myself? Have I, in self-revulsion been repelling God’s freely-offered forgiveness?

Briefly in Kashmir en route to Singapore, Lomax described it as ‘the most beautiful place in the world.’ This vision he said later ‘went some way to keeping me whole. If I had had no idea of perfection, I don’t know if I would have come through.’ 

It seems to me that Christians are given glimpses of the perfection of God’s coming kingdom, glimpses which keep us on track through our dark days.

(Christian Viewpoint column from the Highland News dated 8th May 2014)