The keys

EDITORIAL CARTOON

Mother had a trunk, a large wooden box, in which she stored old clothes and other articles of account to her coverture. I made it a point to be standing by everytime she opened it. As soon as the lid was lifted, the scent of naphthalene would rise and put me in a state of gentle stupor. My eyes would follow Mother’s hands as they searched around the suits and gowns for a box or folder, whatever might be the object of the search, and would latch onto the items that caught my fancy, usually a silver-plated money box and a bronze pocket watch. The watch I would wind upon sight, but frequently this happened when it was time to close the trunk, and Mother would get the watch from my hands and put it back still ticking among the clothes.

The trunk had a big key. More than the pocket watch and the piggy bank I coveted this. Lately I asked Mother, now in her eighties, about the trunk. She remembered it but did not know where it was. I no longer asked her about the key.

I am what you might call an amateur key collector. This happened quite by accident. In time, the wife and I accumulated all manner of keys, and when we no longer remembered which doors or drawers they unlocked, I slipped them all into a ring. When they looked good together, I decided to add more of the same and thought of Mother’s antique key and wondered if for the sake of her troublesome third child she could get it off her chest.

To be honest, it was a fresco by Pietro Perugino, an Italian Renaissance painter, that reminded me of the key to the trunk. The work, “Christ Handing the Keys to St. Peter,” is found in the Sistine Chapel, one of a series of frescoes depicting the life of Christ, which Pope Sixtus IV commissioned.

Obviously, “Christ Handing the Keys to St. Peter” has as provenance Matthew’s account of the election of Peter as head of the Church.

At Caesarea Philippi, Jesus asked his disciples, “Who do people say that the Son of Man is?” They gave various answers—John the Baptist, Elijah, Jeremiah, one of the prophets. But when Jesus asked them directly, on their own account, who they said he was, it was Simon Peter who stepped up to exclaim, “You are the Christ, the Son of the living God.”

For this declaration, Jesus called Peter blessed, his statement being a revelation from no less the heavenly Father himself. And then Jesus said, “You are Peter, and upon this rock I will build my church, and the gates of the netherworld shall not prevail against it. I will give you the keys to the kingdom of heaven. Whatever you bind on earth shall be bound in heaven; and whatever you loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven.”

Perugino presented the incident in a stylized manner. The figures form two rows. The row of the main characters—refined in features and in clothes hanging loosely in folds—occupies the foreground, at the center of which Christ delivers two large keys, silver and gold, to a kneeling Peter.

The magnificent Jerusalem Temple serves as backdrop, as well as the ethereal trees and the blue hills against a bright sky with clouds that speak of an infinite summer.

In the midst of this the two keys get the viewer’s focus. The same keys appear in the Coat of Arms of the Vatican, no doubt because they represent the authority of the pope as successor of Peter.

It was Peter’s acknowledgment of Jesus as the Messiah, the Son of the living God, that earned him the keys. In Perugino’s fresco, there are actual keys, which Jesus gives to Peter. But the keys in the Gospels are metaphorical keys that stand for Peter’s and his successor’s authority as head of the Christian Church.

The key to the trunk may never be found. Nonetheless, it remains, and every item of the past remains, as a metaphor for time. As now, whenever I ask her about the trunk, Mother is likely to open it up again—with her stories.