A week before our recent trip to Jordan, Lois and I had been on a retreat at Mirfield in Yorkshire. The theme was meeting God in the garden. The context could hardly have been more different from our visit to the Wadi Rum wilderness. But while in Mirfield, I had been deeply moved by a Stanley Spencer painting of Christ in the Wilderness.

 

The Scorpion is one of a series of 18 drawings and 8 paintings completed by Spencer to give some expression to his understanding of Lent.

We didn’t encounter any scorpions during our time in Wadi Rum, but being in that place, surrounded by the untamed wilderness, it was not hard to imagine the struggles Jesus must have gone through as he faced his own demons.

I had somehow been drawn to this painting; something in it spoke to me. There was a wildness in the harsh reality of the terrain, and the sinister form of the scorpion that disturbed me. But, more than that, I was struck by the vulnerable tenderness with which Christ was holding the scorpion and seeming to gaze on it, not with horror or dread, but with sorrow and compassion.

 

That day in the wilderness…

Did you sit there, in stillness, holding a scorpion in the palm of your hand?

Did you wander, barefoot, among the rocks and the sand?

Confronting the harshness of the reality of life? Holding it,

tenderly;

gazing with compassion?

This creature that you had made. Why?

 

And God saw all that he had made, and it was good.

 

Poisoned. Dark.

Something to be feared.

Hunted.

Crushed.

 

Your eyes –

eyes of sorrow for what it has become,

for what we have made it, and

for what we fear.

Twisted.

Poised to strike.

An angel of death.

 

What is it that we have taken and so twisted?

Affection, affirmation, ambition?

Goodness and beauty?

Comfort?

Security?

 

You see, also, the scorpions in my life.

The hard shells, the poisoned barbs.

 

And you look with sorrow.

And compassion.

 

You hold us, too, in the palms of your hands.

Gazing –

Seeing beyond our hard shells.

Drawing out the goodness within.

Not afraid, not shying away.

You hold that reality.

In love.

 

Can I, too, hold the scorpions in my life?

Without fear, or running away?

Not denying their existence, or

shrinking back from them.

Can I confront the harsh wilderness of our world?

The evil, the suffering.

And somehow hold it

In love.