🇩🇰 Originally published in Danish — automatically translated
There are photos you don't take.
Saint Christopher is the patron saint of travellers. We are not Catholics. We don't have saints in our sphere. That is not how we understand the world. There are no martyrs sitting somewhere between us and the kingdom of heaven with special access to the higher powers. Or are there? If there are, it is not part of our frame of understanding.
What there is are the stories that matter. A culture that carries us. The nuances always more than we can contain. The layers more than we understand. The dynamics, the synergies. The truths.
Shaped by culture, our world is made and making itself in the stories and symbols around us and in the past we live inside — we cannot help but be carried by the narrative. Saint Christopher, patron saint of travellers, speaks to us for that reason.
At the National Museum of Medieval Art in Prague, one section was closed — the one with most of the masterpieces the medieval art collection holds. And you can't help thinking that they might have mentioned this when we bought the tickets. Just as they might have updated the reopening date on the website, given that it had not, in fact, reopened.
You might also feel that the eager, almost anxious curators were doing their job in a somewhat excessive way, following us around the rooms. As almost the only visitors in the museum, we apparently constituted an unreasonable source of stress — the curators standing in many cases less than a metre away while we looked at the works we did have access to. Some of them were very good.
And so we come back to the photos we don't take. We stood for a long time in front of the painting of Saint Christopher carrying the child across the river — all the demons reaching out for him, in all their forms, and the child radiant there on his shoulder. Back home, I discover many other photographs I did take: the vase with the rare tulip, the unhappy bride, the icons, the resurrection. All of it speaking directly to the soul, and even if the experience was perhaps more one of Czech museum culture — eager curators and a nearly aggressive cloakroom attendant — there was still something to be found.
The painting of Saint Christopher, in particular.
Which I did not photograph.
Saint Christopher carries the travelling child across the river. It is Jesus he is carrying, and Jesus carries the sins of all humanity — so even though Christopher is strong, he is close to buckling under the weight of this particular child.
Saint Christopher has become the symbol of safety for all travellers 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 you have the privilege of being Saint Christopher for others.
The sun is shining in Prague, and the days are open and long. Perhaps it is simply the cultural layers holding a hand over us, but perhaps it is rather an entire culture's experience of the travelling life that keeps the spirit strong. Not the hand. Someone will carry you safely to shore, past the demons, free of the current, and you will stand dry-footed, ready to walk on.
Perhaps especially if you are also willing to carry something.
It is the legends, the stories, and the symbols that matter — both in an art museum and on a walk through the city.
I did not take a photo.
And I sit now with the image of Saint Christopher carrying the child across the river — which on one hand reminds me of Surrounded by Enemies, where the line: as though we carried a child gently on our arm rises up and makes the throat tight — and on the other hand leaves me turning over 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 being in community, again?
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