Surely the most bizarre moments of this past week have come from the unpredictable mouth of the most powerful man on the planet.
At his press conference the other day thinking out loud he said what if maybe if we injected people with disinfectant - ooh, we might find a cure for Covid-19. The doctor to whom he said this looked aghast at him! Companies like Dettol found themselves having to put out statements quickly to say please don’t inject yourself with or swallow disinfectant unless you want to die.
Then later, the President said he was asking a sarcastic question to the press to see how they reacted!
I love the picture above which someone posted on Friday evening!
We all want to know how we get out of this crisis we find ourselves in. We want to know an exit strategy. Not for now, but to have some signs we might see one day to give us some hope we might get out of lockdown.
Two of the devolved nations have produced documents to have a conversation what the “new normal” might slowly look like. The UK government is still staying just stay at home. I hope and pray no one in America went out to bulk buy Dettol after they listened to their President. But you never know... people are listening for a way out. Some of my friends are now focussing on 2021. We cannot see things we want to do being safe this year.
How does it feel to not be able to find a way out?
When I first visited Shetland on a college placement in the summer of 1996, I remember going walking on my own one Saturday morning on Muckle Roe. It was pre google maps and I didn’t even have a mobile phone. To cut a frightening long story short, I got lost. The sea fret came in. Everywhere looked the same. I lost my bearings. I ended up clambering up hills and wading through bits of water. After what felt for ever, I found the place I began the walk from, but for a while I thought I’d be stuck on the island forever never to be seen again.
I’ve just searched for “Townsend School pool” in images and it makes me feel sick just seeing the picture above! I was the bane of the swimming instructor’s life. I remember in my first year at Townsend School, our PE teacher was Mr Workman. He loved a warm up. 100 widths of the pool! Well, he never bothered with me pathetically in the shallow end. I was last to finish. It takes ages to walk 100 widths!!!
But then it got more serious. Timothy Whiting came into my life. There was a wonderful ITV series years ago called The Grimleys. Brian Conley played the sadistic PE teacher with the catchphrase “I am fit, you are weak!” They’d clearly based the character on my new PE teacher. He started a “Weak Swimmers Group” which he made me attend. Why on earth did I need to put pyjamas on and pick up a brick from the bottom of the pool? He got exasperated with me. So one day, he got all the others round the pool and pushed me in. I went down then up then down again. I thought there was no way out. I’ve not been in a swimming pool since.
Sometimes in life you find yourself in a situation and you have no idea how to get out of it. When like you park your car in a field at a festival and at the end of the day you can’t remember which field you parked it in, you panic.
Our home in the Fens for my recuperative year looked like it would be wonderful but it’s been anything but. We’ve spent most of the year wondering how we might get out. We’ve found a lovely holiday let until we can move to where we will be living long term, whenever we can move, which is uncertain.
There are many people struggling with the future as this coronavirus pandemic goes on. One news bulletin can make us weep:
A sister grieving her twin sisters, both nurses in Southampton, who died aged 37, a few days apart.
A pub in Norwich pouring gallons of beer down the drain. The landlord made a film of it going to the soundtrack of “Nearer my God to Thee”, the hymn the band played as the Titanic went down.
Victims of domestic abuse wanting to get out now.
People worrying about where their next meal will come from while others fill their trolleys to the brim. This is a real article from the Daily Telegraph from April 18: some parts of our society have to make their own beds!!
How do we see an exit from all of this? I’m glad this isn’t happening in November. The spring colours emerging in our gardens point me to the certainty that this soon will pass. The suffering we face at the moment will one way be followed by joy. We have to believe that.
Kevin Bridges in a gig on BBC One as I write this has just said “if you believe in God you have to accept the guy is in over his head at the moment.”
Is he? Our belief is that God, in his own time, will show us an exit plan...
What is God’s exit plan? The Old Testament passage for Sunday is from the prophet Zephaniah:
Sing aloud, O daughter Zion;
shout, O Israel!Rejoice and exult with all your heart,
O daughter Jerusalem!
The Lord has taken away the judgements against you,
he has turned away your enemies.
The king of Israel, the Lord, is in your midst;
you shall fear disaster no more.
On that day it shall be said to Jerusalem:
Do not fear, O Zion;
do not let your hands grow weak.
The Lord, your God, is in your midst,
a warrior who gives victory;
he will rejoice over you with gladness,
he will renew you in his love; he will be exulted over you with loud singing as on a day of festival.
I don’t know what the exit plan is to get us out of this unprecedented crisis. The government says we must rely on the science, that we need to flatten the curve and get past the peak. And now isn’t the time to think about anything but keeping the current restrictions in place.
My faith though says there is in God, an exit plan. It is a new world, a new community, a dwelling with him that sustains us through the darkness and gives us hope even IN the darkness. There is a lot of trite stuff out there at the moment suggesting we must pray harder and that God has a plan. He might have. But for now we need a God who just helps us hold on and promises us there is a different existence ahead. A better translation of one of the verses in the Zephaniah passage is “ he will quiet you in his love.”
A little book called “Where is God in a coronavirus world?” by Professor John Lennox, has just been published. It’s sold out on Amazon! In the introduction he quotes the Italian journalist Mattia Ferraresi who wrote this in a New York Times article in March:
“Holy water is not a hand sanitiser, and prayer is not a vaccine. But for believers, religion is a fundamental source of spiritual healing and hope. It’s a remedy against despair, providing psychological and mental support that is an integral part to well being.”
Those of us in Christian pastoral work are ministering to people who want to see a way out. They want their fears listened to, they need support and to know they are held in the in the uncertainty of now, and they need to be reminded of the hope we have that the future will not be like today.
I think when we come back as church as we knew it (if we ever do) our priority will not be strategies how to grow but basic, loving, crying, patient, incarnational pastoral care. All of us will need tune and travelling companions to get past this. We need a way out and it will take time to see it.
My friend Paula sent me this quote from Pope Francis the other day. We may not have an exit strategy but we live believing a new future will come. We live in the Kingdom of God which is now and not yet. We hold each other in the uncertainty. We live for others. As we love, we never know what being there for others may mean for them - being at peace rather than lost and perpetually anxious.
I don’t know when and how this pandemic will end. For now we hold on. We give our worries to God, believing that he cares. That’s all we can do at the moment. Dettol is not the answer!
I have a pile of books next to me at the moment. One is “A Pilgrim in Durham Cathedral” by Michael Sadgrove. With few answers, he offers us a prayer adapted from the Mozarabic Sacramentary in the 7th century: how do we get out of this? We aren’t sure. But we give the question to God and ask to be held...
I’m glad people are finding my blogs and my new vlog while rambling helpful. I am pleased I can encourage you in this time, and we can share when we struggle. I’ll do two blogs a week now, one midweek and another before each Sunday. I’ll also do a vlog now once a week. The last one will be from the inside of one of my churches to be, whenever I can do that. For now, here’s that prayer and one of my favourite quotes from the fabulous “Coming of God” by Maria Boulding - a book everyone should have on their shelves.
Lord Jesus our Master, go with us while we travel to the heavenly country; that, following your light, we may not wander in the darkness of this world’s night, while you, who are our way and truth and life, shine within us to our journey’s end; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.
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