Marking the cross

It is Good Friday. The lonely bleakness of this day takes me back to an experience I had in Norwich Cathedral a month or so ago. I was with friends and colleagues and family of the late Andrew Anderson. We had gathered for his funeral. Leafing idly through the service order while waiting for things to begin, I had been brought up short by the shape you see here, a shape printed on the inside front cover.

Andrew was an architect. He had, over many years, cared for the cathedrals of both Norwich and St Albans and it was in the context of the latter that I first met and got to know him a little. So it was that I became one of the many grateful recipients of his famous Christmas cards – often simple line drawings, sometimes colour-washed, always brilliantly quirky, humorous, thought-provoking. I had never before, however, seen anything of his as disarmingly simple as these two black streaks, yet knew instantly that they had come from Andrew’s hand, from Andrew’s soul.

Two lines.

That’s all.

Cruciform.

Two brush strokes on an otherwise empty page.

Void of everything except pain.

A pair of stark marks underlining the intense isolation of the cross.

How do we know that we are looking at the crucified Christ from behind?

But we do.

How has Andrew conveyed the weight of the world which Jesus is bearing?

But he has.

How can an almost bare page pulse with pathos?

But it does.

How does he share with us his deep love for the dying one?

But he does.