My house is full of boys and I have nowhere to go.
There are only three of them, but they are an uncontainable, terrifyingly extensive physical presence. My stepsons, Sam and Linus are 6’2” and 6’4”. My boy Silas, all wiry climber’s limbs and freakishly long fingers, is no bigger than me, but no less capable than his brothers of filling a room. And the room in question is my sitting room where the three of them graze on yoghurt, crisps and cherry bakewells, lounging extravagantly over chairs and across the sofa, such that it is no longer mine.
Although, five minutes ago, they were regular-sized children, the potential for the boys’ transformation into shambling giants has always been there. But it’s not the only kind of transformation they’ve undergone. When we argue these days, about football or the minutiae of the Marvel and DC multiverses, they are horribly well-informed. When they settle to work (and, very occasionally they do), it is to do things I no longer understand, with a facility at which I can only marvel. It’s strangely wonderful.
That the same possibility of transformation inhabits each of us is part of what makes it worth getting up in the morning. It can be wildly unlikely, like Seth being transformed into a suitable mate for Charlize Theron; it can be positively chosen, like Leo being transformed into an Australian; or it can develop slowly, out of the public eye, and then be gloriously revealed, like Kiefer emerging from his action-hero chrysalis as the new Hank Williams.
The key thing is that we can change.
Christians believe that not only does everyone have the potential to be transformed, but that God gives us the power to make it happen. It’s there most dramatically in the narrative of Jesus’ resurrection, but it’s there too in all the surrounding stories of his friends, changed from fearful silence to bold outspokenness in the aftermath of Easter.
And the thing is that if people can change, then so can situations. Jesus’ changed disciples set about changing the world and I reckon that if we can change, the world can be transformed again, whether by changing people’s minds on environmental questions or by challenging the status quo on issues of social and economic justice.
And who knows, if the whole world can change, then maybe, just maybe, one day I can get my sitting room back.
This Friday the guests were Seth Rogen, Leo Sayer and Kiefer Sutherland, who engaged me in conversation in the lift. He did not ask for the schematics of the building. He was very nice.
As a pendant to the Crucifixion by the Master of the Colloins Hours above the previous posy, the image here is a detail from The Three Maries at the Tomb, in the Museum Boijmans van Beuningen, Rotterdam. It has a knotty history of attribution but research undertaken at the time of the exhibition The Road to Van Eyck in 2012-13 has placed it securely in the workshop of the brothers Jan and Hubert Van Eyck, in the late 1420s or early 1430s.