Here is the challenge, I believe, for the Christian artist, in whatever sphere: to tell the story of the new world so that people can taste it and want it, even while acknowledging the reality of the desert in which we presently live.

Our task [as Christians] is to be faithful to the calling of the cross; to live in God's new world as the agents of his love,and to pray that the cross we carry today will become part of the healing and reconciliation of the world. We will not understand in the present time how it is that our pain, our illness, our heartbreak, our deep frustration, is somehow taken up into the pain of God and the healing of the world; but if we offer it back to God that is precisely what will happen.

Even when Polycarp is on trial for his life, he is content to say, like Jesus before Pilate in John 19.11, that God has appointed the pagan governor who is about to [165] pass sentence.

But the early Christians—who themselves knew only too well that the world had not turned into Utopia overnight and that they still faced suffering, prison, and death—firmly believed that what had happened on the cross was the Messianic victory. That is why they told the story the way they did.

We expect to suffer, but we know already that we are victorious.

Take Psalm 73. The writer knows the 'normal' line: good things come to good people, bad things to bad. But it hasn't worked out like that. The wicked are flourishing, and the righteous are crushed under their feet. It's only when the poet goes into God's temple that a larger, healing viewpoint can be glimpsed.

The myth of purgatory is an allegory, a projection, from the present on to the future. This is why purgatory appeals to the imagination. It is our story. It is where we are now. If we are Christians, if we believe in the risen Jesus as Lord, if we are baptized members of his body, then we are passing right now through the sufferings which form the gateway to life.

When art comes to terms with both the wounds of the world and the promise of resurrection and learns how to express and respond to both at once, we will be on the way to a fresh vision, a fresh mission.

So, then, since the person you are and the world God has made will be gloriously reaffirmed in God's eventual future, you must be steadfast, immovable, always abounding in the Lord's work, because you know that in the Lord your labour is not in vain." Belief in the bodily resurrection includes the belief that what is done in the present in the body, by the power of the Spirit, will be reaffirmed in the eventual future, in ways at which we can presently only guess.

Even as a child I had a strong relationship with yearning and desire. And loss. Those things spoke to me.

Religion kept some of my relatives alive, because it was all they had. If they hadn't had some hope of heaven, some companionship in Jesus, they probably would have committed suicide, their lives were so hellish.

On a Wednesday in January, at seven in the morning, it's plain to see that the world was not made for Man, and definitely not for his comfort or pleasure.