04/09/2020

From the Reverend Richard Coles: 
On holiday in Scotland last week I visited a grand house only recently vacated by the family that had lived in it for hundreds of years. It felt like they were still there, portraits on the wall, alongside belligerent cutlery from the wars they’d fought in, and the antlers of beasts they’d bagged on moor and veldt. Most striking were the school photographs hung in a downstairs khazi, of boys in tasseled caps holding balls and bats, names handwritten underneath, staring out stiffly at us from the past. And one, PJ Mercer, not looking at us, but up, and off to one side. It began to puzzle me.
 What were you looking at PJ Mercer? What caught your attention so that - however many years later - your minor act of disobedience is the one detail that catches the eye? I posted the picture and the question on Twitter, and within a couple of minutes a friend of mine replied, “Why are you tweeting a photograph of my uncle Francis?” He recognised his uncle as the boy sitting next to Mercer, the photograph taken at their prep school in Broadstairs. “Is he still with us?” I asked. “Very much so, he’s a retired professor in Australia. Hold on”. Uncle Francis, on the other side of the world, was sensibly in bed, but when he woke he found an email from his nephew and a copy of the photograph, “Oh yes”, he said, “I remember it well.
 Summer of 1947. Mercer was looking at an aeroplane”. Apparently there was a scare then that the Russians were about to invade Britain, so schoolboys everywhere were on high alert. I tell you this not only because of the speed with which social media solved the mystery, by throwing a girdle around the earth; but because I think what’s most interesting often lies to the side, out of shot, and it’s often not the thing we’re meant to find interesting. Jesus got it. He taught in parables - the word parable means ‘thrown alongside’ - so instead of Creation and Salvation and Sanctification, he talks about lost coins, about old coats, about weeding, and ambitious parents, and dodgy builders. What we need to know might not be what’s in front of us. Actually, it’s never what’s right in front of us. Look to the side, like PJ Mercer, for the sketchy detail, the flickering shadow, the marginal note, where maybe something bigger and better than anything we could ever imagine awaits.