You may have by now noticed that Stephen Cottrell is one of
my favourite writers, and it should be no surprise that I am going to wax
lyrical about this book…
I have a great fondness to Stations of the Cross, there
seems to be an extra richness that comes from an artist responding across a set
of works. Stanley Spencer’s pictures, which
form the basis of this book, might not be stations in a formal sense but they
are of the same family.
The pictures have an innocence and yet also multiple layers
of meaning - and I think I should take a moment to give due credit to them as
the starting point of the book. To
encounter the pictures on your own would be a rich experience, but to have
Stephen Cottrell alongside you gently offering some thoughts on, and around, the
works takes the encounter to the next level.
I think one of the great things is the way that he mixes the
theological and academic with incidents from family holidays or other everyday
events. This really embeds a truly
incarnational understanding of life – “incarnational” is such an overused word
in the church today that it is largely a worn out word and means nothing much
at all. But with Cottrell the essence is
recaptured, holding the whole range of human experience in the presence of God.
Of the paintings I think the one I keep coming back to is
“Consider the Lilies” in which a rather fat Christ is on his hands and knees
looking down at simple daisies – this is the Genesis 1 moment, “God saw that it
was good”, but captured in a way that brings it from the supernatural into the
realm of our own experience. And this is
perhaps the overall achievement of the book.
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