Musings From Trafalgar Square

My favorite author in the world, Henri Nouwen, begins his compelling book The Return of the Prodigal with an elaborate description of his experience sitting in the Hermitage of St. Petersburg for hours entranced by Rembrandt’s epic painting of the same name. He even went on about getting permission to have a chair brought before the painting so he could sit at length before it. Nouwen, Rembrandt, and many others have plumbed with word and brush the depths of the story Jesus shared about the younger son of a wealthy landholder who committed the ultimate insult and asked for his inheritance early. This younger son then promptly went and squandered the whole of it on riotous living. What makes the story so compelling is the father’s unconditional love and acceptance of the son who was once lost and now found. It doesn’t seem that the motive of the returning son was a major aspect of the story. It was how the father received one who had been wayward and had cost him so dearly in emotional and material terms that makes the story bigger than life.

Today I found myself in a similar situation to that of Nouwen. In late afternoon I was sitting on a bench in the British National Gallery, transfixed in front of Peter Paul Rubens masterpiece “An Autumn Landscape with a view of Het Steen”. This large canvas depicts the country estate that gave Rubens so much joy. I found myself drawn into the profound sense of home, place and beauty that are represented in it. For one that has lived in fifty-eight places and never really had a secure sense of home, I can relate instantly to both paintings. In the case of Rembrandt, I can only slightly imagine what it would be like to have a father embrace me. In the case of Ruben’s pastoral image, I can barely conceive of what it would be like to have a magnificent physical place that I felt connected to as Rubens did.

For so many years I have had this unfulfilled craving for both of these things and more. My life circumstances are such that I doubt I will ever know either, even in a surrogate form. I have chased all about the world hoping to find something to scratch the big itch that is just out of reach. I sit here 6,000 miles from my familiar world, alone in a city of ten million where I cannot name a single person that I am even acquainted with. It makes me wonder why I am here. Co-incidentally, I note as I write these words, that my favorite painters and writers are from the Netherlands. As it happens, I am flying there tomorrow to see a long-time friend I met in the midst of crisis. Perhaps I am not as far from home as I think.

The late great British writer GK Chesterton and I are alike in that both of our lives have gone in circles. I think I am now realizing that the answer is not in a far away land but back at the ranch - just as the younger son did – in a spiritual sense in our cases. The younger son was more pragmatic in his wants – something better to eat than the bean husks being used to feed pigs. Chesterton was after the same thing in his life that I am now after in mine- something beyond sadness, despair, meaninglessness. In his landmark work Orthodoxy, Chesterton came to realize that what he was really after was right back where he had strayed from in the first place. Far from inventing something new and radical Chesterton declared, “I am the man who with utmost daring discovered what had been discovered before … I did try to found a heresy of my own; and when I had put the last touches to it, I discovered it was orthodoxy.”

T.S. Eliot put it best:

And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.

Phillip Yancey, a highly popular American inspirational writer, clearly describes having followed a similar circuitous pathway. Yancey and I both traversed the university scene during the late 1960s and even read the same oppressive books on the Holocaust and the Soviet gulag and we even read the same dark fiction – Camus, Sartre, and Nietzsche. As did Yancey, “I learned not to laugh or smile, and not to cry … I see now what I could not see then, that I was erecting a strong stone fortress against love, for I thought myself unlovable.”

He then discovered Chesterton. Chesterton was a breath of fresh air for Yancey. I know there to be an unread very old copy of Orthodoxy on my shelves. First thing I am doing when I get back to familiar territory is to remove this from its glass-fronted cabinet and take a deep breath from it. I could really use some of the great optimism that Chesterton so richly contributed to those on pilgrimage. As I do, Chesterton struggled greatly with despair, evil, and the meaning of life, and even approached mental breakdown. Chesterton emerged from his melancholy and realized that pleasure in any form could only be explained by the Christian message. Like CS Lewis, he found joy in a renewed faith. As Yancey eloquently puts it regarding Chesterton’s realization of the origins of pleasure, “Moments of pleasure are the remnants washed ashore from a shipwreck, bits of Paradise extended through time. We must hold these relics lightly, and use them with gratitude and restraint, never seizing them as entitlements.”

I should be grateful that I landed on a bench in front of Rubens today and saw a major bit of Paradise wash up on the shores of my life. Here late on a Wednesday in April in London when I spent the day in St. Martins and the National gallery, I can fully agree with Chesterton’s succinct poem of gratitude:

Here dies another dayDuring which I have had eyes, ears, handsAnd the great world round me:And with tomorrow begins another.Why am I allowed two?

Yancey says “Chesterton himself said that the modern age is characterized by a sadness that calls for a new kind of prophet, not like prophets of old who reminded people that they were going to die, but someone who would remind them they are not dead yet.” Perhaps they are sitting on our bookshelves already.