Feeling Lost

I’m glad to have found this postcard on the net. I have it somewhere in my possessions. I used to have it up in my study. The sheep says exactly what a lot of us are feeling at the moment. We know exactly where we are. We are right here. 

Today we begin our seventh week of lockdown. We are told there will be a huge announcement from the Prime Minister next Sunday how we might exit out of it slowly. As I’ve written before, some of us fear this will be too quick and we will face a second spike of the virus and a tighter lockdown as a result. 

This week we will continue to hear words about numbers of tests being done; how we need to keep the R down; how a tracing app is being tested on the Isle of Wight, how we might get schools open and people back to work safely with staggered shifts and only a few at a time allowed to get on a bus or on a tube train. How will that be policed? It’s clear decisions how to get us out of the lockdown are going to be more difficult and dangerous than those that were taken to enforce it.

 

Then there are those shielding with major health issues, all those over 75, and those like me who are deemed vulnerable. What happens to us? Without a vaccine, can I really get on with life outside or will I need to lockdown for many months yet? 

We were due to move next week. We now cannot. No removal firms are working and the house we were moving to has people shielding in it who cannot move. So we are stuck here in this lovely holiday let. But we only have it until the 3 July. We may need to book it for longer, but if this lockdown being eased includes permission to book a holiday this place may be booked for the summer. And most probably we shouldn’t really be moving anywhere. The huge question for me is will I start my new appointment in September? I honestly can’t see churches being open by then. I am desperate to get back to work... even if it might be only caring for folk on the phone and virtually. I joked with my doctor last week he gave me a fit for work note then along came a global

pandemic! 

Throughout these past six weeks most of us have tried to have a rhythm to the day or at least something to do each day. But today I feel lifeless and lost and overwhelmed. I’m tired of hearing about coronavirus. Now I’m feeling better, despite asthma and high blood pressure at the moment, I’m very sad the plans we had for the next few months have had to be cancelled. Today, like the sheep in the rain, we feel stuck. 

 

A lot has been written about mental health during this crisis. I’m glad people reading these blogs and following my weekly plodges down the road appreciate my honesty. We won’t get through this however long it lasts, unless we are honest with each other. If you are like me, you have good days and bad ones, and it’s quite okay to have a bad one. But we need help to get through the bad ones... 

Three small things then that might help us all find a way out when we feel hopelessly lost where we are today.

First, accept we are living with loss. Some people have lost loved ones, some have lost jobs, many fear their businesses will go under, we have all lost our social life, and “going to church.” 

Someone sent me this extract from a blog the other day. 

“Life is waves — and there is no controlling these waves. Grief comes in waves. Suffering comes in waves. There is no controlling life’s storms, there is only learning to live with waves.

The real work of being human is mastering how to process losses while being in the process of moving forward.

And right now? Now isn’t the time to be up on the deck drinking Tequilas while the Titanic sinks. Now is the time to wake up to the waves, get all hands on deck, and call on the One who doesn’t just calm one storm, but calms all our storms. 

Now is when we realise: Losses are a given, but what you do with what’s still been given, is what will take you where you want to go.

Loss may be a four letter word — but it’s a word that you don’t read to understand, but rather one you feel in your gut and hold on to Jesus to keep standing.”

We need to give our losses to God. It’s okay to be angry or upset or disappointed. Prayer, whatever form that takes for us in this time, is vital. Remember the verse “cast all your worries on God because he cares for you.” 

Then we need to try and find peace. That isn’t easy when you cannot let the big questions you’ve got that can’t be answered, go. I’m trying to read Julian of Norwich’s Revelation of Divine Love over the next week. The cathedral at Peterborough had a service reflecting on her yesterday. I found what Canon Ian Black had to say about her. 

“It is almost unthinkable for us to imagine being sealed into a single room for 26 years. We are struggling with six weeks. She would never leave it and is probably buried under the floor. Once she entered, food was passed through to her. She could see and receive communion through a window into the church and there was a window the other side onto the street where people called to consult her wisdom and insight. Not quite as isolated as it might seem, but it was confined.

Julian lived in the shadow of the Black Death and would hear the carts trundling past her window taking the dead for burial. Having nearly died, she had a strong concept of being mortal and fragile, of life being subject to the will of God and could be taken, surrendered at any moment. It is a context that focussed her mind of the love of God in Jesus Christ, on his passion and on the hope we have in him and through him. This mattered above all else.”

It is often when we feel we have no peace that we find peace. It is often when we are at our lowest that God comes. At times when I’ve been lost on my journey like the sheep, pastoral care has come, often not from who should have given it, but from what an e mail from a retreat house I got recently called “the divine spark in humankind.” Those who are prepared to sit with us in the dark, put up with our minds fizzing, wipe up our tears and go the extra mile give us that peace we so urgently yearn for. We can also find it by being calm in the storm, being still for a while each day. It is my belief that God makes a way out of no way. But today I’m struggling to find a way...

Then finally, we need to lament and then hold on to hope. This crisis is unprecedented. There is much to weep about. We were watching back to back Beat The Chasers last night as we’d missed them last week. Then Lis fell asleep with the remote control tightly in her hand so I couldn’t take it off her. The tv turned itself off recordings and back onto rolling news.

There came on a story of a man in Iraq who has died from Covid 19. The usual rituals done to a deceased person by their family gently could not be done. He was wrapped in what looked like a bin bag and buried by anonymous men shrouded in PPE in a five foot grave and then they showed a JCB filling the grave with dirt and soil. It was horrific to watch. Likewise closer to home we hear of people dying in hospitals and care homes, away from wives and husbands and family. At least in those places nurses and care workers are staying with the dying to their last breath. 

But it all feels too much and we wonder if there is a way out of it all. It’s interesting that a survey done a day or two ago says that people who don’t go to church are turning to on line worship and seeking prayer. The survey asked for a clergy role model who might get us through this mess. The Vicar of Dibley came top. For the next few years I think the priority of the Church, however it looks, has to be honesty, allowing people to find a God who is real for them, through genuine pastoral encounters and relevant earthy accessible worship in different forms. I think Zoom is here to stay. 

For now, we need to know as Mother Julian said “all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well.” How? How can our tomorrow be better even if this crisis rolls on? 

I recommend Nadia Bolz-Weber to you. She is a deeply honest American writer. She’s not everybody’s cup of tea. She has sermons with titles like “Forgive Arseholes!” But she has this way of saying yes we might be lost, and yes, it might be awful today, and yes, we have no answers but there is hope. Where? In the faith we have... so if you are feeling as stuck and as lost and anxious about your future as I am today, let Nadia speak to us all.

“Death might be the enemy but it cannot defeat the story of the Gospel. In other words, the resistance is winning my friends. Nothing can stop it. There are still prophets in our midst. And while it may still be dark, the light is breaking through. And the darkness can not, will not, shall not overcome it.”

In the end, when we are lost, we will be found. Like we found three lost rescue cats last summer. It’s so sad they along with the other three have been in the cattery since the beginning of February. Sue, who runs the cattery, sent some photos of them today. Velvet looks okay doesn’t she?