Monday 16 March (4:30am)

Scrolling through Facebook and the flood of Corona-related posts, I read one that made me particularly sad. Someone, somewhere in the world of ‘Christian missionaries,’ was wondering out loud how best to respond to having to stay at home, to avoiding others for the sake of slowing the contagion. So far, so normal. The sad part, the part that revealed a breathtakingly disintegrated view of the world, was the part that bemoaned the way that ‘the Devil would be winning’ so long as we can’t get out there and share the Gospel with people for a few weeks.

Please just give me a moment while I hold my head in my hands and rock gently with my eyes closed.

I won’t even bother to get into the obvious, that we are not engaged in a battle where ‘the Devil wins’ if, at times, we are compelled to live into the reality of our faith without simultaneously delivering a four-point message of salvation. We might want to remember that we do, in fact, know who’s won this cosmic and unevenly weighted tug-of-war between good and evil. And while we’re at it, we could take a moment to reflect on the rather exquisite fact that, while we all grumble about being confined to our homes, and face some very real fears about the shaking of the world as we know it, the people of God are marking the season of Lent. We are rehearsing the story of Jesus reconciling both us and all creation to his Father (and ours). This year, as every year, we are intended to get in touch with our need for salvation. Do you feel it?

Anyhow, all this came back to me at 2 o’clock in the morning and got me thinking about being Christian at a time like this, of all the invitations that will come to us in these days. It reminded me of something Zadie Smith wrote, describing the time she visited Tintern Abbey in Wales, that beautiful wreck of a place of worship originally built in the 1100s.

We parked, I opened a car door on to the vast silence of a valley. I may not have had ears but I had eyes. I wandered inside, which is outside, which is inside. I stood at the east window, feet on the green grass, eyes to the green hills, not contained by a non-building that has lost all its carved defences. Reduced to a Gothic skeleton, the abbey is penetrated by beauty from above and below, open to precisely those elements it had once hoped to frame for pious young men, as an object for their patient contemplation. It was already an ancient memory two hundred years ago, when Wordsworth came by. Thistles sprout between the stones. The rain comes in. Roofless, floorless, glassless, ‘green to the very door’ - now Tintern is forced to accept that holiness is everywhere in everything.

I wonder at this opening out of religious defences, this emptying from the containment of our small ways of thinking and speaking, so that everything is a lived experience of the life of God. Are we willing for our lives to be greened from the outside in? For the terrible beauty of this hauntingly messy world to be owned as part of who we are - it is, whether we see it or not. Could it be that something of who we are, these living epistles, will be more effectively incorporated into the world that surrounds us when our windows fall out and our doors fall off?

Zadie Smith turns our attention to Wordsworth, who wrote of his sensation on visiting Tintern: ‘That in this moment there is life and food/ For future years.’ Could it be that in our confinement during these days, in our inability to be anything but identified with our neighbours as we queue for food staples, or wait outside the pharmacy, there is something happening that can nourish both us and them? Are we willing to become broken bread, in our prayers, in our identification, in our inarticulate groaning for the redemption of all things?

I was listening recently to the wonderful podcast of Ruth Haley Barton. In her latest episode she had a conversation with Father Ronald Rolheiser, who spoke of the struggle to give away our moments of dying. That is, not only our physical deaths which can become sacred gifts to those we love, but also those moments of dying to our own ability to drive and control our lives.

Could it be that when we are least able to be our usual, action-oriented selves, we are able to be a gift in ways that we are not during those periods that seem to be the most productive? And could it be that we make room for a profound work of God when we enter into the surrender of letting go, relinquishing our usual efforts to ‘make something happen?’

In these uncommon days when we are more aware than usual of being limited, while also being so very connected with those around us, sharing this experience of disequilibrium, may we know the life of God’s Spirit at work in and through us like never before. Perhaps he will work to bring quiet confidence to our waiting, perhaps to help us enter into the groaning of creation, perhaps through acts of selfless kindness that surpass our own fears.

Yes, we need the merciful salvation of God. And no, it does not depend on us.