If I Must Boast

If I Must Boast Commentary by Matthew R. Anderson Bible Passage Although he became one of England’s foremost abstract artists, Sir Terry Frost’s early life was neither easy nor glamorous. He left school at fourteen for factory employment. As a British commando in the Second World War, he was captured in Greece and spent four years in a German prisoner of war (POW) camp where hunger was constant. It was during his time as a POW that he learned to explore his artistic calling. His first portraits were of his fellow prisoners. He painted using horsehair pinched from the ankles of work horses, while his canvasses were prison pillowcases, and his ‘ink’ made from the meagre portions of barley soup the POWs were served. Paul makes it clear that his life in service to the gospel hasn’t been easy. In 2 Corinthians 11, he lists a string of hardships, including the imprisonment and hunger Frost also endured. Paul goes on to describe floggings, stonings, whippings, exposure to harsh conditions, and shipwreck. In a 1998 episode of the BBC radio series Desert Island Discs, Frost chose as a favourite track the 1932 depression-era song ‘Life is Just a Bowl of Cherries’, written by Lew Brown and Ray Henderson. Frost commented on his choice: ‘because life is [a bowl of cherries]—and they are nearly always good’. He gave the same title to one of his most famous compositions. There is both an irony, and an artful hopefulness, in Frost’s comment, in this artwork, and in the piece of music that inspired its creation. The expression ‘life is just a bowl of cherries’ means that life is easy and, like a bowl of fruit, simply available to be enjoyed. Clearly this wasn’t true for Frost, for Paul, or for most people in 1932 in the early throes of the Great Depression. Decades later, the elderly Frost’s comment that ‘nearly all’ cherries are good admits the mixed fortunes of life, represented visually in his painting in the mixed colours of fruit. And yet the dark fruit of the painting may turn out to be the most important. In a world of surprises good and bad, Frost and Paul both chose to emphasize the good—the joy that underlies the sometimes-arduous lives to which they were called. Frost looks back on a life well lived and remembers the sweetness. Paul ‘boasts of weakness’ (v.30) because the sweetness he found in Christ represented the fruit he most treasured.