I get the sense that Camille Pissaro was always on the outside looking in for something new. This painting is titled, View Towards Pontoise Prison, In Spring. That may seem strange, a painting with a prison at the center. Pissarro's contemporaries might well have painted out the prison because it disturbed the bucolic interpretation of nature. Like the factory smoke stacks in another painting we viewed, a prison on a perfect spring day would spoil things.
Here, Pissarro boldly but gently includes the building. Ah! Right away there is a simple soul-place the painting might touch. Many people paint out from mind and heart what or who they don't like, disapprove of, are disturbed or threatened by. They frequently don't see the tendency in themselves. It isn't a Christly way.
Notice that we are looking at the prison building through the window of a new Spring: the leafed out trees, the sky of amazing color and cloud, the fullness of light, the field planted with young plants. It's a picture of hope and possibility. Our nation has a disproportionately large prison population. A chronic complaint about it is that it is more punitive than restorative. Our recidivism rates are high, which suggests that time in prison hardens people rather than evolves them. We love to say we are a Christian nation, but Christianity is about helping the new man, new woman, to emerge and grow into possibility.
We realize too that while looking at this painting we might think of prison and prisoner as something far off when in fact, we might all well be prisoners in our own right. Addictions are prisons. Being taken in by the culture of owning things is a prison: "I want it all and I want it now". There is the prison of anger, resentment, prejudice, pettiness, dissatisfaction, indifference to the plight of those far away. I can live in the prison of my own denials. Religion fails when it doesn't help us to see ourselves. At Easter, Jesus exits the prison of the cold, stone tomb. I'm supposed to follow. For us, that cold, stone tomb is an inner reality.
A final thought - though you may well have your own: Do prisoners have a place in my prayer? There are prisons for juvenile offenders, the criminally insane and women. I might pray for those who work in prisons who often lose heart and become embittered themselves. I might pray for the families of prisoners, those who have been victimized by terrible crimes, those imprisoned for life who are mentally and spiritually destroyed by incarceration.
There are prisons around the world that brutalize people instead of trying to help them. We send out rockets to the farthest reaches of space, but often don't try very hard to reach far inside prisoners. We might wonder whether we really believe in the converting power of Christianity. Or does conversion only mean getting someone to leave their old religion to join the "truth" of our own. That's a rather small view of conversion.
