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Good morning. Edvard Munch’s composition The Scream is one of the best-known icons of our contemporary world. You’ll know it – a bald, skull like female figure holding her hands over her ears as her body sways and shrinks from an unbearable soundless sound. Orange and blood-red swirls threaten to engulf her. Munch himself made several versions of it, it was a theme he went back to. Now a black and white lithograph form of it is on display at an exhibition of Munch’s prints at the British Museum. The opening of the exhibition has stimulated cartoonists to play with the image in relation to Brexit and the angst around that, and this is only the latest attempt to play with and parody the original. It’s been widely used in advertising, it’s had Homer Simpson as the central figure, it’s appeared on mugs and T-shirts. It remains a very disturbing image, the artist’s vision of insanity. He originally called it The Scream of Nature and traced it back to a real experience that he recorded in his diary for January 2nd 1892. ‘I was walking along the road with two friends – the sun was setting – suddenly the sky turned blood red – there was blood and tongues of fire above the blue-black fiord….I stood trembling with anxiety – and I sensed an infinite scream passing through nature.’ I don’t know about you but I shudder at the thought of that infinite scream and the terrible mental pain that Munch experienced and bore witness to. Because the image has been recognised so widely critics have compared Munch’s work to the Mona Lisa, but while Leonardo da Vinci’s portrait evoked serenity and mystery, Munch’s Scream speaks of unbearable and unrelieved anxiety. Is this really what it is like to be a person in the 21st century? In the Christian calendar we are in Passiontide, on the threshold of Holy Week. The ancient hymns of the Church speak of Christ’s death as a cosmic event; that Christ’s blood was shed not only for sinful human beings but to cleanse and renew the whole of nature. Since everyone has had a go at interpreting The Scream let me offer one of my own. There is a detail which is quite obscure in the coloured original but very clear in the black and white print. In the fiord behind the screaming figure are two boats. One has two masts, the other one. Together they form three crosses and reflect ancient Christian imagery linking the boat to salvation. Munch’s father was a religious fanatic but Munch himself was a humanist. Lost in the distant fiord there are those three crosses, a reference probably unintentional, to the hope that suffering is not infinite, that suffering itself can bring redemption.