Altar Pieces- Ruth Padel

Sombre colours, the unchanging pale and dark of naked human bodies
facing the shadows they must face, for a chapel whose wooden panels
have hidden hollows and shadows of its own.

A ladder and a cross - and a human figure on the ground, looking at them. A
young figure falling in a brown rush of air or perhaps water. Is it drowning? Or
struggling up to the surface, to some light we cannot see?

Together and separately, the two panels for Christ’s College Chapel will pose
important questions for us all to answer differently, at different times, during
prayer, music and service. Like Rembrandt’s portraits, or Goya’s figures trapped
in night, they ask us to think about the way we are all, in different ways, set
against the dark.

In our environment; in how we look at things (like that ladder, and the leaning
rungs we shall all have to climb in our time); and in how we live - headlong,
falling and struggling, up and down.
Christ on the Cross is present in each panel differently, as a reminding metaphor,
a future to contemplate, but also in the struggle we have now, living our
lives in our bodies and also in our psyches: a relation with the dark which W. H.
Auden evoked in his Elegy for Sigmund Freud, when he imagineed the figures of
the unconscious as creatures of night:

About him till the very end were still
those he had studied, the fauna of the night,
and shades that still waited to enter
the bright circle of his recognition…
but he would have us remember most of all
to be enthusiastic over the night,
not only for the sense of wonder
it alone has to offer, but also
because it needs our love…

Tom de Freston’s colours here match the serene browns of the chapel. But the
chestnutty tinge and bubbled texture give them a human warmth, and an energy
which speaks to the Chapel’s history, this building which has changed so much
in five hundred years to become the tranquil chapel and anti-chapel of today, but
which began as a much larger single space surrounded by bare pink brick. And
whose unique inward-looking window and secret stair, built for a woman to
observe and receive mass, reminds us of crucial chapters in the Ninth Book of St
Augustine’s Confessions.

St Augustine describes how he stood with his mother a few days before she
died, looking through a window. His words are wonderful images for what it is
like, to come and sit in a chapel, to listen and think, what one comes to a chapel
for - all the things which these altar pieces help us ponder. “Removed from the
crowd,” says Augustine, he and his mother were “resting after the fatigues of a
long journey.” His mother had been agonized at his apostasy and felt her life
fulfilled when he converted. They discussed wisdom, “just touching her with the
whole effort of our hearts.” Side by side, looking out of that window, they “came
at last to our own minds and went beyond them.” They imagined what it would
be like, if “the tumult of the flesh were silenced; and the phantoms of earth and
waters and air were silenced; and the poles were silent as well; indeed, if the very
soul grew silent to herself, and went beyond herself by not thinking of herself.”

Tom de Freston’s sketches for the chapel project fulfil brilliantly what we need
from any backdrop to an altar. Their images are about the flesh but also how
to go beyond it. How, as Augustine says, to “come to your own mind and go
beyond”. How one might picture “the tumult of the flesh silenced, the soul going
beyond itself, not thinking of itself.” The more you look, the more there is to
think about what lies ahead, how we live in our bodies and our minds, and how
we deal with the dark.

Ruth Padel, Resident Poet at Christ’s until Christmas 2009, marks a return
of the Darwin family to the college. She is a great-great grand-child of
Charles Darwin, Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and the Zoological
Society of London. She is a prize-winning poet, formerly a Greek scholar
and recently Chair of the UK Poetry Society. Her latest poetry collection,
Darwin - A Life in Poems is a journey in lyric poems through Darwin’s life
and work. Her non-fiction includes books on Greek tragedy, Greek myth
and rock music, tiger conservation and reading modern poetry.