Inversion
You know those optical illusions which on first look seen to be a vase or an old woman, but then your perception shifts and you see two faces or a rabbit? You remember how the first impression seems so obviously right until that moment of shift, and then suddenly it's hard to unsee the second image and get back to the first? I had one of those moments yesterday in our morning Eucharist at Launde. We have a row of icons along the east wall featuring eight saints, some well known and others very obscure (any big St Guthlac or St Keyne fans reading this?) Until yesterday I'd always seen them as intriguing devotional representations of holy men and women: images to inspire faith. Something for us all to look at. Windows into heaven, if you like. But yesterday that flipped, although I'm not sure why. I suddenly saw them as a row of holy saints looking out onto us, as though I was the one being seen, not the one doing the looking. I saw them as the cloud of witnesse...