蜜芽传媒

Good morning. Sitting in the tube I sometimes enjoy just looking at the faces of those around me in the carriage. I wonder what kind of person they are and occasionally even make up the first line of a short story about them. Faces can reveal a great deal. As Simon Schama's current TV series and related exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery, "The Face of Britain" shows, portraits do many different things-those in power for example want to present a particular image of themselves to the public, whilst those in love want a lasting likeness of the person who means so much to them. Yet faces can only reveal so much. Faces, like words, as Tennyson put it "half reveal and half conceal the soul within" . Some people like Nadia Hussain of Great British Bake Off fame have wonderfully expressive features. Others of us appear impassive or even poker faced, outwardly giving nothing away. But whether our face is expressive or dead pan, there is a hidden life behind that is never fully shown- our secret longings, fears, shame and sadness, perhaps. Even in the most intimate relationship there is a core part of our identity which can never be fully known. And according the all the major word religions it is here, within us, that the Divine Spirit touches the human spirit.

Sometimes an artist has so penetrated into the psychological mysteries of the person before them that you can see something of their inner struggles and suffering-or perhaps their vanity and arrogance. But how could any artist capture that spiritual dimension of a human being? I am not sure they can. Nevertheless the religions of the world have wanted to indicate this reality, and they have tried to do it by the symbol of light. Some people, they have wanted to suggest, are lit up from within by a kind of inner light.

One of my favourite stories from the New Testament describes how Peter, James and John went up a mountain to pray with Jesus. The Gospel writer Mark, in his homely way, continues "And he was transfigured before them ,and his clothes became dazzling white, such as no one on earth could bleach them.(Mark 9,2) The Icon of this scene shows Jesus in this way, with a triple circle or mandorla of light behind him. What is no less amazing, is that all human beings are called to be transfigured into his likeness, from glory to glory, as St Paul put it. Heady stuff, and all seemingly far removed from the daily business of getting up and going about the day. But it is in that getting up, travelling on the tube, and responding to the demands of the day that this process of transformation begins to take place, perhaps first by the way we see other people. As George Fox, the founder of the Quakers put it, we are to "walk cheerfully over the world answering that of God in everyone."