Читать книгу Blessed Peacemakers - Robin Jarrell - Страница 52

17 February 1919—29 November 2004

Jonah Wrestles the Angel

The son of Welsh parents, Jonah Jones knew about the brutality of war from an early age. His father, a coalminer, was invalided in World War I, and Jones’s earliest memories were of the suffering his father endured from his wounds. When the next world war erupted, Jones declared himself a conscientious objector. But even though he refused to kill in war, he volunteered for medical service with a parachute field ambulance. He was with the Allied troops who liberated Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in the spring of 1945. Although he never abandoned his personal commitment to pacifism, the horror of the camp persuaded him that some evils were so powerful that violence might be needed to defeat them. Jones was never comfortable with this possibility, especially after his conversion to Catholicism in 1955 following a near-fatal bout with tuberculosis. But he believed it couldn’t be ignored.

As a youth, Jones had dropped out of school at the age of sixteen and attended night classes in the art of lettering. Later he studied sculpting and the art of staining glass. After the war he returned to his craft, specializing in church decorative art. His religiously themed carved stone and wooden statues and windows can be found throughout England and Wales, but he was especially known for his skill in lettering.

Jones often said that he was intrigued as both a man and an artist by “that great, flawed [biblical] character,” Jacob. In Jacob, Jones sensed someone who shared his own ambivalences and struggles. Jones too had wrestled with an angel when it came to remaining loyal to pacifism in the face of the unmitigated evil he had encountered at Bergen-Belsen. Like Jacob, he came away wounded from the experience; nevertheless, he spent the rest of his artistically fruitful life trying to give expression to the peace and tranquility of God in wood, stone, and glass—and, toward the end of his life, in novels and memoirs as well.

One of Jones’s loveliest pieces is a 1989 marble sculpture called And David Danced before the Lord. A young David, in the middle of a flowing pirouette, looks heavenward with an expression of longing expectancy, as if he waits for God to reveal a great secret to him. Perhaps in capturing David’s deep need for a sign of assurance from God, Jones was also communicating his own tension between his dismay at the evil humans commit and his longing to stay the pacifist course. It is a tension that all peacemakers surely feel from time to time.