When I was a boy I went to school with boys in an environment where the cutting comment and the snide remark were regarded as the highest form of wit, or even art.
Also when I was a boy, I could not dance. Which put me in a very dangerous place in relation to snide remarks.
It wasn’t that I didn’t want to dance. But I couldn’t dance like no-one was watching. I danced like everyone was watching: painfully self-conscious, hopelessly inept, endlessly mocked.
Still, I tried. Once I tried so hard I fell over into a fireplace. My friends found it hilarious. Some of them still do. Forty years later. Thanks.
For me, the dance floor was the loneliest place of all. And my sister Rachel knew it.
Now Rachel also found it funny that my limbs were incapable of coordination. But instead of mocking me, she decided to teach me and eventually she and our friend Liz McGuiness brought me to a level of skill that was just about sufficient to stave off the clear and present threat of public humiliation.
Now this might sound trivial on the day when Christians remember Jesus death on the cross, but it’s worth remembering how we tell that story.
Jesus was abandoned. Peter, his best friend, denied knowing him. His disciples vanished. Even God left him.
And yet the bible tells us that, actually, he was not alone; because when everyone else ran, the women were still there. Mary, his mother was there. Mary Clopas, his aunt, was there. Mary Magdalen, his friend, was there. And standing some way off, many other women were there.
At the darkest moment of all, who was compassionate and kind enough to stay? The women were.
At Easter we see who is still standing at the darkest moment of all – and I reckon that, very often, we find in our own dark moments, trivial or life-changing, that the love that will not abandon us comes from our mums, our aunts, our sisters. It comes from the women.
Some might say that these days, despite my sister Rachel, I still cannot dance. They would be right. My partner, Susie, generally looks away, mumbling like Colonel Kurtz in Heart of Darkness, ‘The horror. The horror’. But she’s still kind enough to dance with me occasionally. So I’m not alone. And that, really, is what I need to know.
The image is a detail of the crucifixion from the triptych with Scenes from the Life of Christ by the Master of the Collins Hours, oil on panel, c.1440; Museo del Prado. Susie Nash has written a revelatory article about it.