I had to go into the Ashmolean Museum Reserve Collections yesterday, to choose some objects to teach with next term.
Now this is mostly very good.
First of all, without giving away any crucial security secrets, the reserves are in a deep, dark basement, so it was relatively cool.
And second, museum reserves are fundamentally exciting places to be, full of unseen treasures.
However, they are also, very often, the last resting place of stuff we’ll most likely never display; things just don’t cut it as ‘art’ or are just too knackered. Odd little bits of sculpture, indeterminate fragments of pottery. Frankly terrible paintings.
Think of the box lurking in the loft or the back of the wardrobe, full of the stuff you don’t need and doesn’t work but that reminds you of something or someone, and that you can’t bear to part with because it might come in useful.
These are the Museum reserves.
And that was the stuff I was after.
Now, one of the most consistent threads in all the wildly disparate books we call the Bible is the way they speak of God dealing with that stuff – the small, the broken, the disregarded.
Because the Bible isn’t a collection of hero narratives, like so many ancient stories. It’s a jumble of flawed, fragile individuals who are made useful in spite of themselves, in response to being loved.
And, like my odd little bits of sculpture for teaching, it’s the flaws that are often the most important parts; because it’s in the crack that you see what something is made of. It’s in the break that you see how it was made. And it’s in the repair that you see how it has been loved.
Also yesterday, I watched my friends Tim and Kevin frame a poster advertising the Tokyo Olympics of 1964 and I marvelled at the care and skill they lavished on it, keeping this fragile piece of paper safe and secure so it can be seen how beautiful a piece of design it is.
To be kept safe and secure. To be cared for despite being fragile, small and broken. And then to be made useful.
If we can do that for an obscure, damaged piece of sculpture, or an old advert, I reckon it’s the very least we can do for each other.
The image is of a copper-alloy corpus from a 15th-century English crucifix. At some point in its life, it was torn from its fixings and its arms were broken off.
In subsequent centuries, it was held and touched so much that the rough broken edges were made smooth again.