In an interview publicising his latest book, artist Charlie Mackesy described getting ready for school as a young child.
His mother would fasten his jacket buttons, giving him a look which said “I love you! Always remember I’m here, home’s here. If things are difficult, remember that you’re loved.”
At Christmas, many of us will have been given Always Remember: the Boy, the Mole, the Fox, the Horse and the Storm. It’s a sequel to Mackesy’s earlier book about the boy and his friends which encouraged and sustained us during the Covid lockdown.
The book encourages us to be hopeful, to value ourselves, to recognise our courage in making it through each day.
The sensitive drawings and wise captions focus our thoughts on the need to show kindness and affection, and on the huge amount of kindness in the world: “We often hear of the hatred, while rivers of love and courage pass by unnoticed.”
There are circumstances where a smile, a word, can save a life.
Storms come. The boy, who depends so much on his friends, is separated from them.
But in that separation he learns to move beyond negative thinking: “I need to remember who I am; that I am loved, I matter, and I bring to this world things no one else can.”
It’s a wonderful book – though if I were deeply depressed or very lonely its very wonderfulness might wound.
What gives Always Remember its power to reach much deeper than a prosaic self-help book?
Partly, it’s the concept, the brilliance and variety of the artwork, the thoughtful text, the author’s honesty about his own brokenness.
But Charlie Mackesy is a Christian, and listening to what he has said in interviews I believe he intends this book to be a channel through which a great love, the love of God, reaches out to us.
God, I believe, is the hope of which Mackesy writes: “the quiet song in your heart that can sing in spite of everything.”
Someone might say of this book: “This is not the Christian message! There is no mention of sin, no call to repentance.”
Mackesy’s point is that when our focus is on those things, we lose sight of the fact that God loves us unconditionally and unreservedly.
The gospel is a love letter to the human race, and believe me, to glimpse this love is to be forever changed.
At one point in the book the Horse, which Mackesy has said represents the soul, sprouts wings, carrying Boy, Mole, Fox, soaring into the perpetually blue sky above the storm clouds.
And morning by morning God says “I love you. Always remember I’m here, home’s here. If things are difficult, remember that you’re loved.”
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