Saint Andrew and the Cross
A sculpture for St. Andrew's Church, Much Hadham
Currently, I am working on a life-sized sculpture for my own parish church, which will be installed at the entrance to the churchyard. The maquette (destined to go to the church school) currently stands as a small sculpture at the side of the altar.
St. Andrew's is an unusual church, in that the church building has been shared with the Roman Catholic church of St. Cross since the 1980s, when the then Anglican vicar, Michael McAdam, invited the Catholic community in the village to use his church while they were in process of building their own. The sharing was so successful that the Catholic church advanced no further than the footings before the sharing arrangement became permanent. The two church communities retained their own church names; the Anglican church, St Andrew's, and the Catholic church, Holy Cross, and both names appear on the church name-board. I decided that I would like to commemorate this significant act of ecumenism by including both Saint Andrew and the Cross in the sculpture.
Michael McAdam told me that he would like to see St Andrew depicted in the moment of joy when, after seeing Christ baptized, he rushed to tell Peter that he had found the Messiah, but I could not initially see how I was going to relate this joyful Andrew to an image of the Cross. World events decided my procedure as the significance of the Cross took on new meaning for me after Russia's invasion of the Ukraine (St. Andrew is a patron saint of both countries); Hamas's act of slaughter and the ensuing horror in Gaza; as well as the current problems in and around Iran. My thoughts have resulted in an image of the maquette being included in a book called Poems on Conflict published by a writers' forum at St. Edmund Hall, Oxford. A fuller description of the sculpture's meaning is described in the conclusion of my book, The Road to Emmaus (see Newsletter) and further thoughts in this summer's edition of the Fairacres Chronicle, published by the Sisters of the Incarnation in Oxford. It is hoped that the sculpture will be completed in time for an unveiling on St. Andrew's day (30th November.)
