Growing up only a short journey from Glasgow and Edinburgh, I was blessed far more than I realized at the time. Though I came from a council estate, I was given a cultural inheritance that money could never buy. Glasgow, in its generosity, opened the doors of its museums for free, and for a young man with time on his hands and a thirst for truth beyond what the classroom offered, those places became a sanctuary of learning.
At Kelvingrove Gallery, I often found myself standing for hours before Salvador Dalí’s painting of Christ on the Cross. I could not fully explain it then—and perhaps I still cannot now—but it stirred something deep within me. It reminds me of the old saying: “A rich man who never reads his library is no better than the pauper who cannot read at all.” I may not have had wealth, but in that painting I discovered a treasure beyond measure.
What struck me most was the perspective. Unlike countless portrayals of Jesus viewed from below—man looking up at the crucified Savior—Dalí presented something different. It was as though I was being invited into heaven’s perspective, to glimpse through the eyes of the Father who sent His beloved Son for the sins of the world.
This was not just the story of nails and thorns, of physical agony on a Roman cross. This was the weight of spiritual anguish, the cosmic burden carried in love for all humanity. And in that, I saw something divine—an expression of love so vast that words falter to capture it.
For me, that painting was more than art. It was a sermon without words, a reminder that God meets us where we are—even a boy from a council estate wandering the galleries of Glasgow—and He reveals truth in ways that pierce deeper than lectures or textbooks ever could.
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