![]() While saying this, he began reciting passages from that Psalm, dwelling with special emphasis on, “The assembly of the wicked have inclosed me. Strangely, for a man who had fallen away from his Christian upbringing, he decried the loss of Christian belief in modern England, including particularly faith in the literal Resurrection of Jesus Christ. Much of our conversation, which went on through Easter, was about “art,” about “religion,” and about “art and religion.” (I, approaching my twenty-fourth.) He was a Baha’i, deeply committed to the marriage of East and West. On the first anniversary of that event, or more precisely, the next Maundy Thursday, I found myself in Saint Ives, Cornwall, with the great studio potter, Bernard Leach, then approaching his ninetieth birthday. It was very much in my thoughts, about the time I “lost my faith” in Atheism, some forty-one years ago while crossing a footbridge in London, England – curiously enough on a Maundy Thursday. It is an arresting Psalm, with its shockingly exact prevision of the Crucifixion, centuries before the event took place. “They parted my garments amongst them: and upon my vesture they cast lots.” Following hard upon this antiphon is the recitation of Psalm XXI, the Deus meus: “My God, my God, why hast Thou forsaken me?” ![]() ![]() ![]() As Christ was stripped of his garments, so the altars are stripped of their coverings in the traditional Maundy Thursday celebration. ![]()
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