There are pictures, we never take. Pictures, that stay with us. Pictures we talk about.
Saint Christopher is the patron saint of travellers. We are not Catholics, we do not have saints in our sphere. That is not how we understand the world. There are no martyrs who sit somewhere between us and the kingdom of heaven and hold a special position in relation to higher powers. Or are there? If there are, it is not part of our framework of understanding.
What there is, are the stories that matter. A culture that carries us. The nuances are always more than we can contain. The layers more than we understand. The dynamics, the synergies. The truths.
Shaped by culture, our world created and creating itself in the stories and symbols around us and in the past we live within, we cannot do anything but let ourselves be carried by the narrative. Saint Christopher, patron saint of travelers, therefore speaks to us.
At the National Gallery for medieval art in Prague, one section was closed, the one with most of the masterpieces the medieval collection holds, and one cannot help but think they might have mentioned that when we bought the ticket. Just as they might have updated the reopening date on the website, given that it had not actually reopened.
One might also feel that the eager, almost stressed guards were doing their job in an inappropriate way, following closely behind us. As practically the only visitors in the museum, we apparently constituted an unreasonable source of stress, and in many cases the guards stood less than a meter from us while we looked at the artworks we did have access to. Some of them were very good.
And then we return to the images we do not take. For a long time we stood looking at the painting of Saint Christopher carrying the child across the river, all the demons reaching out toward him in all their forms, and the child shining there on his shoulder. Once home, I notice many other photographed paintings, the vase with the rare tulip, the unhappy bride, the icons, the resurrection. All of it speaks directly to something, and although the experience may have been more about Czech museum culture with eager guards and an almost aggressive cloakroom attendant, there was still something to take with us.
Especially the painting of Saint Christopher.
Which I did not take a picture of.
Saint Christopher carries the traveling child across the river. It is Jesus he carries, and Jesus carries the sins of all people, so even though Christopher is strong, he is close to collapsing under the weight of this particular child.
Saint Christopher has become the symbol of safety for all travelers in the world, and as a nomad I often think about this, that there is always a solution, that there is always someone who can and will help, and that sometimes one has the privilege of being Saint Christopher for others.
The sun is shining in Prague, and the days are open and long. Perhaps it is “just” the cultural layers that hold a hand over us, but perhaps it is rather a whole culture’s experience of travelers that keeps the spirit, not the hand, strong. Someone will carry you safely to shore, past demons, safely free of the current, and you will stand strong with dry feet, ready to continue.
Perhaps especially if you are also willing to carry something. Or someone.
Or boht.
It is the legends and the stories and the symbols that matter, both in an art museum and on a walk through the city.
I did not take a picture.
And now I am left with the image of Saint Christopher carrying the child across the river, partly reminding me of “Kringsat av fiender,” where the line as if we carried a child gently in our arms comes forward and tightens the throat, and partly leaving me with the question of whether Jesus could have carried the sins of the world without someone carrying him.
Is that what the story is about?
About community - again?
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