Coracle Trust E-Reflections
Beginnings and endings: The tremor of danger and the sense of promise (Week 2)
Sunday 17 January 2010
After the wise men left, an angel of the Lord appeared to Joseph in a dream. "Hurry! Get up! Flee to Egypt with the child and his mother," "Stay there until I tell you to return, because Herod is going to search for the child to kill him." That night, under cover of darkness, Joseph left for Egypt with the child and Mary, his mother, and they stayed there until Herod’s death. (Matthew 2:13-15)
Gentileschi, 'The Rest on the Flight into Egypt'
Hurry! Get up! Flee
From The Gaze of Love, by Sister Wendy Beckett:
There is always a danger of sentimentality with the Holy Family stories, of receiving only a babyish message that asks little of us, that does not challenge or console us. This scene, the Flight from Egypt, would often show them ‘embraced by welcoming trees, serenaded by circling flocks of angels and bathed in a tender warm light’. This honest, realistic painting harshly shows a family that are dog tired and exposed, jolted into an hasty and frightening exit.
Joseph has unsaddled the ass and fallen exhausted on the baggage. He has not even had the energy left to cover his body against the night chill. Mary has forced herself upright until she has fed her child.
It is an abrupt and bewildering ending to a magical period, a far cry from the electric swarm of trumpeting angels and the honour of a royal visit. It is also an uncomfortable introduction to a new life - an uncertain future and a very present strain. This is no pastoral scene, of fields, brooks and trees and of an easy pace. Here is a makeshift encampment, hard ground, broken crumbling wall, no roof… And there is a slight menace in the sky. The painter offers no trappings, no comfort, yet there is a promise fulfilled, in fact it is drinking from Mary’s breast, and there is the voice of God ringing in their ears.
Our new beginnings are just as likely to mean travelling with the tremor of danger as travelling with the lingering sense of promise. The dark night’s sky closes our day. And yet there is the onset of a new dawn.