Remembering Jackie
Ever since my dear Jackie passed away last year, friends in DGV have been asking me how we met. Well, here is the story.
It happened in a furniture shop on Abids Road, Hyderabad, India. I was looking for a bookshelf. So was she, but on a grander scale: to line the walls of a study room in the large girls school she was headmistress of.
We laughed and joked together. I remember her pointing at a statue of ‘Happy Jo’, a squatting buddhist monk with hands folded on his fat belly and a smile across his face. He is the Indian symbol of good fortune. “You’ll have to eat a lot more, to become like him!”, she said to me.
I still miss Jackie a lot and so do others. She possessed many talents and skills. She made life-long friends wherever she went. She wrote poetry. As an artist she created memorable images with a unique style of her own. Every year she sent out all over the world hundreds of Christmas cards designed by herself. She loved taking intriguing photographs of nature.
To record some of all this I have put together a Memorial Archive for her on our common website. If you have access to the internet, you will find the archive here: http://www.wijngaards-clackson.com/jackie-clackson/ . I will briefly sketch the contents of this archive.
Even among the people who knew her, few are aware of her interesting past. In the archive I outline her life story in six chapters. Jackie only found her belief in God and her acceptance of the Catholic faith as a college student. She herself describes the process in some detail. Then, after serving as an art teacher for some time, she joined the Franciscan Missionaries of Mary and was sent to India. In Hyderabad and Kazipet, Andhra Pradesh, she became headmistress of major girl schools. When she returned to England in 1982, she joined me in establishing Housetop Centre for Faith Formation which has now grown out into the Wijngaards Institute for Catholic Research.
It is difficult to do justice to Jackie’s art. In the paragraphs that follow I print out one of her poems which she called ‘Celebrating shared living’. Notice how she avoided using capital letters. Also: no commas, no fullstops.
“new life
becomes mine in the Lord
mine,
in the measured dancing of a new day
this life burns within
as a conscious wondering
which cannot be burnt out
by the death of destruction
I live with you
my friends –
of the same earth
and the same air –
may I come to know you
if I reach out with care
to share with you
the wealth of our becoming?
awakening together to the
everlasting smile
of the days for meaning
to all our belonging”
In her drawings Jackie did not use the technique of filling patches on the screen. Instead, she constructed images by just a few powerful strokes of her brush. This is quite difficult to do. If one stroke goes wrong, the whole image is spoiled.
Jackie used this technique to paint elaborate images of Gospel scenes for our Walking on Water educational videos. I provide samples in the Archive.
This was a truly international production. The videos were translated into 14 world languages and distributed in more than 40 countries. Because of this international character, Jackie was careful to avoid the one-sided ‘European’ presentation of Gospel personalities that was still common at the time.
I have also posted many photographs on Jackie’s Memorial Archive. Some depict the many fascinating scenes of nature Jackie photographed: plants, insects, skies, you name it. Others show her together with me and in the company of friends on many different occasions. Allow me to conclude with one that was taken on her eightieth birthday three years ago.
Hans Wijngaards