Font cover, St Mary's Parish Church, Lindisfarne.
A marvellous time on Lindisfarne... tho' a horror-filled moment of trauma when I spied this font cover in the parish church.
It is more than faintly disturbing, no?
Is the bird trying to pluck out the eyes of the helpless child?
OR?
Is the child a monster in human form emerging from the waters and ready to eat whole the poor captured birdie?
Apparently it was kindly donated to the church. Remind me, when I eventually [hopefully] emerge from training and am thrust on an unsuspecting parish, to be very careful when it comes to accepting generous donations of gifts....
4 comments:
Oh my. Oh dear. The more I look at it ... no. It just scares me. No. No. All wrong.
[sorry to have missed you today - I was just in to see Prof F about next year's courses and then had to run down to the CA book sale to meet Justin and his mum. Last exam on the 20th. Let's meet soon (message me on facebook and let me know when you're going to be around)]
Really can't decide - the holy dove anointing a dear (but ugly) child, or Edgar Allan Poe's, The Raven visiting with a distraught child (ok, it was a grown-up in the poem, but hey)?
Or is it a duck, caught swimming in the font?
Just wrong, in so many ways.
Yup just the sort of thing to scare the weans! I would be tempted to ensure that it was gloriously obscured by flowers every Sunday morning :-)
Church furniture is a strange beast, my church has a rather unattractive and nondescript flimsy wooden font with ceramic bowl up on the edge of the chancel. In the entrance vestibule there sits a rather more lovely marble font with wooden cover which belonged to the Church that lost it building at the union over 20 years ago. I regularly wonder why that one is not up by the chancel steps instead. I suspect if I enquire I will find that the ugly wooden one was donated!
I think I would be tempted to go with JohnO's suggestion - this can only have been inspired by Edgar Allan Poe! I think I'd see about getting some sort of font cover cover for that...
Post a Comment