His Suffering and mine

Maundy Thursday - Last Supper and foot washing, Gethsemane and arrest, Trials and torture....

A review of a television play from last week's "Church Times" seems relevant to today's blog.

Television: Vincent’s Gethsemane
by Gillean Craig
In a culture that is supposed to know nothing and care less about the central images of the Christian faith, I wonder what the programmers thought the audience would make of The Yellow House (Channel 4, Thursday of last week)?
This was a dramatised account of the extraordinarily productive couple of months in 1888 when Vincent Van Gogh and Paul Gauguin shared a house in Arles, trying to lay the foundation of a brotherhood of artists — a kind of secular monastery devoted to painting, not religion.
I don’t know how accurate a reconstruction it was: the depiction of Gauguin as a kind of Hausfrau carefully doling out the housekeeping is not quite how I imagine the great colourist of Tahiti. But as one of his savings tins was labelled “hygienic visits”, by which he meant frequent attendance at the local brothel, perhaps it wasn’t too far out.
In one respect, the experiment was very close to its conventual model: the enforced intimacy of living so closely together in penury drove them mad — especially with each other. The drama presented a somewhat schematised pattern: Van Gogh was the naïve genius, Gauguin shallow and venal, putting up with the situation only because he was paid to do so by Vincent’s brother. He was trading on his maturity and greater fame to crush the spontaneity out of the younger man, and interested only when he saw an idea he could pinch.
Van Gogh’s descent into mania was handled with loving tenderness; his identification of himself with Christ was linked to his original deep faith (his first doomed attempt to find a vocation was as a preacher among the impoverished miners of northern France). He saw the final rupture with Gauguin as a Gethsemane experience, thus making sense of cutting off his ear — a re-enactment of the mutilation of the High Priest’s servant.
I have treated this programme at some length not just because it was creative and provocative, and especially moving at this liturgical season, but because it is a good example of a general truth: despite all that is said about our anti-Christian age, the media take it for granted that quite detailed references to our faith not only still have life left in them, but will be comprehensible and potent to an audience.

Comment
I have always believed that, awful as our Lord's physical suffering must have been, his greater suffering during his Passion was mental and spiritual. Not in substance or degree do I compare my own suffering to his but I do in terms of analysis. My Gethsemane is at its deepest inside not outside. It comes from my love of others and concern for them and from the way I am perceived and treated by others. When the Lord invites me to take up my cross and follow him the shape of the cross is usually relational.