A friend called inviting me to join her at an exhibition of religious art. No thank you appeared insufficient a response and somehow found myself ricocheting around the most dismally curated, hung and located show ever it was my misfortune to encounter.

Clattering out before the final room had fully smeared itself over my mind, I fell against a table to catch my breath: and then saw it.

John Brokenshire’s oil does not benefit, alas, from online reproduction. And it may be you’re entirely immune to the beyondness which seems to me to reach out from the canvas and rest the inner eye?

The eight or so years spent as a lapsed Agnostic – now returned to the fold – were not wholly wasted but did enlarge the bliss of allowing thoughts to roam with greater regard for the noumenal. Now that we’re amid the Whitsun, aka Pentecost, run-up which tends to be thin on the news front – notwithstanding the truly bizarre justifications of the fracking decision and the continuation of Forces’ Lariam prescription – I thought to share a picture which might give flight to all kinds of mindful soarings.