Dave, Rembrandt, Julian and Henri

At Men’s Shed yesterday Dave was chatting about St Petersburg. He’d been there professionally; he’d returned for a holiday. He showed me a coloured brochure of the State Hermitage Museum…

Dave turned the page in the brochure. There was Rembrandt’s ‘The Return of the Prodigal Son’ that’s on display in the Hermitage Museum. The picture shows the son kneeling in front of his father begging for forgiveness…

‘What’s odd about the picture?’ Dave asked. I couldn’t see anything odd. Dave pointed to the father’s hands resting on the son’s shoulders. ‘Look carefully…’ The two hands were different – the left hand was definitely masculine, the right hand was smaller, looking more feminine. These hands seem to suggest both mothering and fathering…

I’m still enjoying reading ‘Julian of Norwich’, the fourteenth century recluse and mystic: ‘God rejoices that he is our father, and God rejoices that he is our mother, and God rejoices that he is our true spouse and our soul is his much loved bride…’

Julian returns to God’s motherly character frequently: ‘This fair, lovely word ‘mother’, it is so sweet and so tender in itself that it cannot truly be said of any bit of him… To the nature of motherhood belong tender love, wisdom and knowledge…’

Henri Nouwen was a Roman Catholic priest who left an academic career to share his life with people with mental disabilities in Toronto. A chance encounter with Rembrandt’s picture resulted in Nouwen writing his book: ‘The Return of the Prodigal Son’:

‘As soon as I recognized the difference between the two hands of the father, a new world of meaning opened up for me. The Father is not simply a great patriarch. He is mother as well as father. He touches the son with a masculine hand and a feminine hand. He holds, and she caresses. He confirms and she consoles. He is, indeed, God, in whom both manhood and womanhood, fatherhood and motherhood, are fully present…’

Musing… Dave, Rembrandt, Julian, Henri…