The Fighting Temeraire

I popped across to the doctor today.

Not that I was feeling unwell. It was just in regard to a booking the doctor had made and a change to the venue he'd booked.

We had a cup of coffee and during the chat he asked if he'd ever told me about the way he used Turner's famous painting 'The Fighting Temeraire' as a sort of visual aid in his berevement counselling.

I didn't even know he did bereavement counselling. So the fact that he used a painting as part of the process was new to me as well.

I asked him to explain. I was really quite intrigued. I couldn't quite see what connection there really could be between this painting and the pain of recent bereavement.

Well, he explained all right. Fascintating stuff.

And it put me in mind of a book I read a while ago, by Henri Nouwen. It was called 'The Return of the Prodigal Son' and the book is really a lengthy reflection on the painting by his fellow Dutchman, Rembrandt, called 'The Prodigal Son'.

He looked at this painting and pondered the different nuances there were. And ... well, the book is the result.

These guys, Rembrandt and Turner and all of their ilk - they're not simply painting a picture. They're putting a message across. It's just they use colour where others use words.

'The Fighting Temeraire' is a case in point.

Here's a worthy old ship from the famous British Navy, a ship that was involved in Trafalgar - and in some ways expresses the essence of all that that Navy has been - and here is this boat being pulled by a tug to its final resting place. There to be broken up.

You can see where the doctor's coming from when he uses the thing as part of bereavement counselling. Especially when there's such a stunning backdrop of the setting sun.

Except, despite what the National Gallery blurb has to say about it all, it's not really setting at all. It's really a sunrise he's painted. So the good doctor informed me.

The geography gives it away. The south bank of the river Thames is on the right hand side. So the sun must be in the east. Which is sunrise.

The logic of the man's impeccable. Who was I to argue with the guy?

The old ship's demise. A new day's dawn. Well, it doesn't take a full-blown genius to get the picture!

This impromptu bit of education in the finer arts got rudely interrupted by a phone call that the doctor had to take. But he'd said enough already to have triggered whole new avenues of thought.

The visual side of communicating truth has always been a potent thing. And I guess in our age today it's no less so. Almost certainly more so than ever.

If I were an artist I'd love to try painting the passage we studied today at the lunchtime service. Jacob and his sons getting word that there's grain in Egypt. And Jacob seeing the look on all his son's faces and asking - why do you keep looking at each other like that?

Well, we know and they know why they're looking like that at each other. It's guilt. Guilt from some twenty years back. After selling their brother to traders who were going down to .. yes, Egypt.

And Jacob goes blindly on, unaware of all that they'd done, and tells them to go down to Egypt themselves, '...that we may live and not die'.

I'd love to capture that moment on canvas. The whole thing so full of such nuances.

Twenty years on down the line they're all going to end up in Egypt. And the whole thing is not about pay-back and judgment. It's all about healing and health. That they may live, and not be eaten away by their guilt in all its corrosive effect on all of their lives.

Well, I tried to paint that picture for the folk there at the service which we held today. And I hope they got the message, though a picture might have put it all more powerfully.

A lot of the time it's pictures I'm trying to paint, I suppose.

And 'The Fighting Temeraire' is a very graphic image that's remained with me throughout the day.

We were praying tonight again. And one of the ladies there was speaking about the way in which the supplies that we send to the West Pilton Christian Centre every week have been getting that much smaller over recent months.

Which is probably all to do with it being an older generation who've been putting the goods that way. And now that older generation is no longer quite so able to be out and about and doing the things they did.

'Temeraires' whose 'fighting' days are slowly coming to an end.

But they're doing so against the backdrop of a rising sun. And if you look quite closely at the painting Turner did, you see that there's a large, three-masted ship, her sails unfurled, heading off and down the river to the open seas.

A new generation carrying forward the noble tradition of faith.