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Unwitting Pilgrim

Wounded

April 3, 2015, Published by

While I was in Paris last spring I had the pleasure of visiting the Musée d’Orsay to see a few exhibitions, including a retrospective of the work of Gustave Doré. One of the biggest pieces in the collection they were showing was his extravagant oil painting; Christ leaving the Praetorium. There, in the centre of the canvas, is a figure draped in the purest white; a halo offers a luminescent glow around a crown of thorns that seems to have barely left a scratch on the perfect hair it sits upon. The label may have said it was a painting of...
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No Other Name

June 27, 2014, Published by

The Passion façade of la Sagrada Familia is an awe inspiring sight. Eight and a half thousand letters, hand carved into imposing bronze doors, tell the story of the crucifixion of Christ from the Gospel of St. John. Every time the name of Jesus is carved it is raised higher than the other letters and picked out in gold. I stood for quite some time before these doors, captured by their power and beauty, and as I did so something awesome happened; the shadow from the top half of the door fell above the name of Jesus and, for just...
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The Least of These

May 19, 2014, Published by

I always visit the Place de la Bastille and I’m never sure why; of all the sites in the world of massive historical significance, it must be one of the duller ones. I emerged from the metro, remembered that it’s mainly just a big traffic intersection with a column, and decided to head straight back onto the metro to find somewhere to eat pastries. Priorities. No sooner had the doors closed than I heard a noise that made me shiver. It was the sound of poverty. There, coming up the centre aisle of the metro carriage, was the image of a person in...
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Beyond price

January 23, 2014, Published by

It’s funny what a glimpse of something’s worth can do. We were about thirty miles out of the city, at a monastery perched among the jagged, serrated edges of a Catalonian mountain, when we first saw the entrance to the gallery. It was a matter of simple deduction – there were plenty of free things to do and see, mountain walks, the basilica, the hermitages – there was no need to spend €10 of each of our travel budgets going into what could surely only be a small parochial gallery? And so we did all those other things until, on our...
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Catalunya t’estimo

January 9, 2014, Published by

We’d been in line for what seemed like an awfully long time to get up an apparently quite small staircase. Yes, it was narrow, but it wasn’t long and people seemed to be making the business of ascent far more time consuming than required. I snapped away taking pictures and waited, and eventually we got through. The staircase led us behind the altar of the basilica to what I’d assumed was just a really nice view across the church; it was only when we reached it that I realised I had become an unwitting pilgrim. There were few people who...
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