Night's Bright Darkness: A Modern Conversion Story by Sally Read

Author:Sally Read [Read, Sally]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Spiritual & Religion
ISBN: 9781681497266
Publisher: Ignatius Press
Published: 2016-10-12T05:00:00+00:00

5

The Mother

The truth is that the Jewish doctor in London all those years ago had a girlfriend. He never left her. I had assumed that I would extricate him from her entirely—that I was the story and she the walk-on in the first chapter. She, too, worked at the hospital, and through that period of time I saw her everywhere—in the wards, across the street, in the park. She was beautiful and delicate-looking; her face had a barely sustainable perfection. As, appalled, I watched her put food onto her plate in the cafeteria, I was reminded of a deer before it knows the hunter has clocked her. What damage was done to her by me, I don’t know. But even after the doctor exited from my life, her smooth and undisturbed face lay across my inner eye—she reminded me of someone, some image, and one day, clearing out an old suitcase, I came across it: The Madonna and Child with Two Angels by Filippo Lippi.

Mary’s name has, so far, been largely absent from this story—and indeed she seemed almost absent in the early days of my conversion. But of course, no true mother is ever absent. In fact, the best mothers make us feel we are striding out boldly on our own; we are unaware of the watchful mother’s eye and continuous prayers that follow us. She was there, but only Jesus filled my gaze and heart and mind. I know she didn’t want it any other way.

The Lippi Madonna in the suitcase was, for me, where she began. My father’s mother was an Anglican, and she had a friend, a vicar, who for a while before he died was almost a part of the family. I was too young to remember him, but even now, at home in Suffolk, I’ll open a drawer and find a large wooden crucifix under old pairs of tights and my unopened mail. I’ll go looking for a pair of gloves and find a wooden figure of Saint Joseph from a Nativity set. The vicar liked art and liked to paint. He copied Raphael’s Madonna and Child in oils with quite extraordinary skill and tenderness. And as a young man he travelled to Florence and bought that print of The Madonna and Child with Two Angels in a dull-gold Florentine frame for his sister. When he died both these pictures, and many other treasures, were left to my grandmother, and on the walls of a small bungalow in Yaxley, Suffolk, they became icons of my childhood.

My grandmother would not have dared to pray with us children, nor to talk with us about God: my father would have been furious. He was given to berating her vociferously for far smaller transgressions of family law, like putting sugar in our tea or telling us scary bedtime stories. But far from the heat of the coal fire, down the hallway in a cold bedroom, in a bed warmed with hot water bottles, I remember staring at a

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