Central Icon for Christians

A poor Russian peasant went out in midwinter to gather faggots of wood. This was the way he earned his living, by gathering wood and tying it in bundles and selling it to his more affluent neighbours for a few kopecks.

This time a blizzard came and covered him. He froze to death. But it seemed to the peasant that he had not died. He went on through the forest. And as he travelled the trees grew fewer. And at length he came to a hut of the kind they build in those parts of Russia. The peasant knocked on the door, but there was no answer. He tried the door, and it swung open to his touch. Inside the hut there were lights burning and three great icons standing.

As he looked at them a great awe came over him, for he could see that they were images of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. In the Russian manner the Holy Spirit was shown as an angel. It was plain to him that they were not ordinary images. He saw that they were alive. He knew that he was already dead. So he knelt down before them. He remembered the many times he had beaten his wife and cursed God and cheated his neighbours out of a couple of kopecks by selling bundles that were less than the proper weight. page 495 He feared the Judgment; and to gain time he began talking about the village priest:

‘Holy Ones,’ he said, ‘you made the world and I am nothing. But things aren’t fair. Look at the priest we’ve had in our village. He was useless – drunk every day and every night – in the end he died by falling into his own stove when it was red-hot. If a priest doesn’t live well, what can common men do?’

‘Don’t speak against the priest,’ said the Father. ‘We know him well. We know how great his suffering was. We do not judge as men judge. Look to yourself; not to him.’

Then the peasant began to despair. He looked back at his life and it seemed a black desert to him. There were a few good deeds he could remember. And with the boldness of his near-despair, he began to speak of his life as he had never spoken to anyone – of the misery, the endless hard work, the hunger, the cold, the weight of his own faults, the harshness of others, the death of children, family estrangements, sickness, anxiety about money – the yoke itself, the yoke that rests on the backs of the poor.

‘And now,’ he said, ‘I come before you. Your judgment may be just. You made the world and I am nothing. But why did you make people at all? Why did you make us and then leave us to live and die without consolation?’

When he looked up he saw with a great wonder that tears were pouring down the faces of the icons.

I set down this Russian Orthodox fable from memory; and I may have glossed it here and there. But its message is plain enough – that there is no obstacle between the poor and the mercy of God. The spiritual element in which they live is in fact God’s mercy. The mystery of physical and spiritual hardship – of poverty, sickness and death itself – is a mystery of mercy central to the life of the Christian believer.

When the pagans set up their images of a possible Divinity they generally thought otherwise. The Greeks show for our admiration the moment of physical and spiritual poise that belongs so briefly to the young, the strong and the beautiful. Our sense of beauty is certainly touched by it, but not our hearts.

The Buddhists show a greater thing – the moment of inner strength, of spiritual poise and serenity sustained by those who have conquered their own illusions, except perhaps the illusion that they are strong.

Our neo-pagans are no wiser than the Greeks, and less wise than the Buddhists. In front of our public buildings we are likely to set up those peculiar vacant images that show athletes or labouring people without the stigma of labour stamped on their bodies – or else monumental abstractions that mirror the natural world itself. I do not condemn these things. I say only that they are insufficient.

What use is it for an old, sick woman to look at the photographic image of a modern Venus? What use is it for a man whose mind and body have been page 496 worn out by mechanical industrial labour to look at the statue of a young footballer? They may, of course, not be envious. They may be pleased that images of outward strength and beauty survive in the world. But the central icon of the Christian is always the crucifix. For there we see the representation of our own central condition, laid open, made plain, by the image of our God who joined the destitution of the poor, the sick, the old, and even of the dead.

This is the darkest dimension of our Faith; and, I am inclined to think, the most enduring. From time to time in the lives of our saints we hear this deep bell-note struck of destitution accepted for the sake of love – as when Francis at the point of death had his body laid on the bare ground, and asked his friends to bury him in the grave reserved for common criminals; as when Bernard sat down among the lepers and said, ‘Let us talk together and wait for the coming of the Lord.’

It is the song of the Trappist and the Poor Clare; it is the joy of Damian on Molokai and the central meditation of the priest who wears a prisoner’s clothes in a labour camp. It was what drew me to the Faith as iron filings are drawn to a magnet; and I think that without it the Faith is not truly the Faith – for it is the voice of the Lord’s Passion speaking in the hearts of the faithful.

If we are not in some sense poor we are not Christians. We must, however, be prudent in the company of our neo-pagan friends – if we say that we love pain, they may think us perverts; if we say that our expectation of the hour of death fills us at times with a strange and all-but-indefinable joy, they may think that we are merely tired of life.

They have not yet looked at the face of the Crucified God and seen in it the key of life and death – the human sorrow that hides in its ultimate depth the smile of the Divine Liberator. Without the crucifix to remind us, we might have fallen into the childish error of supposing that Christ had come to make us safe, rather to share with us his own colossal freedom in which even calamities are a cause for joy.

The barrier has also been broken between the living and the dead. I heard of one wise pagan on a Melanesian island who held the skull of his grandfather between his knees and blew tobacco smoke into its jaws, and said tenderly: ‘Grandfather, does it not taste good?’

But we have better gifts to bring every day at the altar – we are allowed to influence the conduits of God’s mercy, so that our beloved dead share with us in the fruits of the Sacrifice. This is a better thing than tobacco. Yet the pagan was still wiser than his neo-pagan descendant who turns away from the crematorium with a grief and grinding avoidance that are perhaps wholly sterile.

It is hard, though, for the multitudes in our century who have no icons. They are perhaps poorer than the peasant of the Russian fable; for they are destitute without knowing they are destitute. The Cross, perhaps through no fault of their own, has been taken from them; even the sentimental tinted page 497 print of Christ the Good Shepherd that hung on the bedroom wall above the photographs of family weddings has long since been taken down and lost. Who can deliver those who do not know they need to be delivered? I think those who believe have perhaps to share in the mood of their neighbours. There is something ungenerous, discourteous, in those who know the joy of the Cross flaunting it before those who lack it.

The best kind of destitution for us may be to learn the language of the agnostics and speak it with them, and reserve the expressions of joy for our private prayers. I suggest this with some trepidation – and obviously it cannot be applied directly to those who have the teaching authority within the Church – I am thinking rather of lay-people; yet I feel that there is some support for the view in the saying of St Paul that he was a Greek among the Greeks and a Jew among the Jews.

If someone were to say to me, ‘Where shall I find God?’ I think I would be inclined to answer: ‘In the jails; in the hospitals; at deathbeds; wherever the soul is touched by destitution. . . .’ I would not say, at least to begin with, ‘In the Blessed Sacrament; in the Holy Scriptures. . . .’

It is necessary not only that our arguments for the Faith should be true; it is also necessary that they should be acceptable. I think the inward destitution of our society is so great that those who even mention it will provoke an immediate response in their neighbours who do not yet consciously believe.

Once I would have given a friend a crucifix; now I would be more inclined to give a cigarette. Have I then slid back into the shoes of the pagan holding his grandfather’s skull? I think not. If I am not crucified, the gift of the sacramental will probably not be helpful; if I am myself crucified, the cigarette will become an effective though unorthodox sacramental. These paradoxes seem to me real enough. They are connected with the meaning of destitution.

But how does one share Christ with neighbours who do not even know they are destitute before God? – those who believe that doctors will preserve them from death, that their money has already preserved them from poverty, that life is a kind of box inside which they can live in safety? They are likely to be at a deep level the most miserable and solitary; but somehow this has not come out into the open; they imagine that those in hospital or those in jail or the drunk sleeping in the park are in some way radically different from them, a different species almost. This is a problem which haunts me; and I doubt if I am anywhere near wise enough to solve it.

There is, of course, the obvious help of prayer. And one can at least try to get near this kind of neighbour and share those spiritual cramps. This, though unrewarding, is a beginning. Perhaps the only difference is that the destitute God whom we love is hidden more deeply in them. Or one’s eyesight may be at fault. One has to learn patience.

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