Me Non Praetermisso, Domine

There are two images, or rather depictions, of the Lord that touch my mother like no other. The first one is a verse of an old Italian Christmas carol which always moves her to tears:

Ahi, quanto ti costò

l’avermi amato!

The second is an image from the Pre-Raphaelite movement: William Holeman Hunt’s The Light of the World, a picture of Jesus with a lantern in his hand, knocking on a door. The picture is beautiful in its own way, but it is an inscription above that cuts to her heart.

The writing is in Latin and the handwriting is surprisingly unskilled, considering the beauty of the painting proper. It reads Me non praetermisso, Domine, which is to the effect of “Don’t pass me by, Lord.”

The painting as a whole refers to the passage from Revelation “Behold I stand at the door and knock” (Rev. 3:20). The door is our hearts, noticeably overgrown with vines in the painting, unopened for a great while. The door has no visible handle on the outside, it must be opened either with force or from the inside, and the knocker has refused the first, as he will “woo but not ravish,” as C.S. Lewis says.

Hunt described the inspiration for the painting, saying, “At that date, arriving by the last train from London at the Ewell station on the other side of the village, the stationmaster shut up his office and came out with a lantern to walk home. I accompanied him, being glad of his light. When we had entered under some heavy trees I cautioned him that some white creature, probably an animal, was advancing towards us. ‘It will be sure to get out of our way,’ he said, and walked on unfalteringly. Yet I kept my eyes riveted on the approaching being. When we had come nearer I interrupted our idle chat, saying, ‘But it is steadily coming towards us.’ He turned up his gaze and was stopped by what he saw. The mysterious midnight roamer proved to be no brute, but had the semblance of a stately, tall man wrapped in white drapery round the head and down to the feet. Stopping within five paces from us, he seemed to look through me with his solemn gaze. Would he speak? I wondered. Was his ghostly clothing merely vapour? I peered at it; it seemed too solid for this, yet not solid enough for earthly garb. We both stood paralysed and expectant. Then the figure deliberately marched to our left, making a half-circle around us, till he regained the line he had been travelling upon, and paced majestically onward.”

Hunt believed that the painting was more than an expression of art; he wrote that he felt it was divinely commissioned, and that he was unable to do elsewise. The piece greatly influenced all art. It was said that four fifths of the Australian population had seen the picture, albeit hung in a college on the opposite side of the globe. The picture is indeed still at that distant-from-Australia location—viz. the side chapel at Keble College, Oxford.

I have looked at this image for several years now in random references, the internet, and on the wall of my mother’s bedroom, and (trite to say about an image though it is) I have yet to look at it and not find something.

How much is there to that phrase? Would that my heart would say nothing but Me non praetermisso, Domine. It’s the cry of saints through the ages, the mourning of those who are to be comforted, the very song of the beloved in the Song of Songs.

So let us keep this image burned in our mind: let us not keep Christ out in the cold, or, rather, let us not keep the doors to our bitter-cold houses closed when so warm a love is waiting outside.